Writing of Joseph Cornell, Jonas Mekas remarked that his films “deal with things very close to us, every day and everywhere. Small things, not the big things…His works have the quality—be they boxes, collages, or movies—of being located in some suspended area of time.” One finds a similar sensibility in the films of Brian Frye, particularly so in a cluster of 16mm works completed around the turn of the 21st century, just as the end of small-gauge cinema seemed all too immanent. At once literal actualities and sphinx-like artifacts, Frye’s films might at first seem like outtakes from lost projects, or damaged archival isolates, bearing grainy images that beg for exegesis: Kennedy-era actors awkwardly intone lines from a portentous melodrama; a woman’s face flits in and out of legibility beneath a storm of visual debris; a old man points to a weathered gravesite, his lips mouthing silent words; Civil War soldiers maneuver at the edge of a forest. These moments play like misplaced bits of someone else’s memories, physical records of our world mysteriously unmoored from their origins.

Six musicians improvising live soundtracks to the films of Melbourne experimental guru Dirk de Bruyn.

Dirk de Bruyn has been creating film works for over 35 years; mostly in the hand-made, 'direct animation' mode. He also performs live with multiple projections of his films in a highly embodied mode of expanded cinema performance. His work is renowned for its intricate, suggestive layering of sound and image, and use of sumptuous, blooming fields of colour.

Featuring: Mark Pedersen, Brigid Burke, Nat Grant, David Kimball, Todd Anderson-Kunert & Leo Kavanagh.

With Scott Stark in Person!

White Light Cinema is excited to welcome Scott Stark, who will present a small sampling of his film and video work. Stark has selected four new and recent works—Bloom (2012), Speechless (2008), the double 16mm film Nocturnal symmetries (2014), and his amazing digital video The realist (2013)—along with an early film, Hotel Cartograph (1983).

Together, these five works are a mapping of many diverse aspects of Stark’s artistic practice. From his formal investigations into symmetry, patterning, abstraction, and mirroring that can be found in many of his works to inquiries into the perceptual and phenomenological nature of the media (film, video, digital) to the act of seeing, and questions of representation. They are also visually rich works, concerned as much about color and texture as they are with structure. They are about rhythm and movement, either on screen or in the editing. Sometimes they are humorous. Sometimes they are political (in the broadest sense). Sometimes they are provocative/provoking. Always they are stimulating—visually and intellectually.

Over the last 34 years Stark has created an uncompromised body of work that is remarkable in its complexity and simplicity, its rigor and playfulness, and its focus and openness.

Between 2004 and 2008, Richard Tuohy made around 30 short films on Super 8. This was a prolific (and unexpected) return to the small gauge after a protracted hiatus from film-making. 

'Landscape Dances' (a term coined by friend, painter and Melbourne Super 8 Group figure Maeve Woods to describe some of Tuohy's films from this period) is a representative selection of 9 short and rarely seen 'camera original' Super 8 works on Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Tri-X. 

These films portray a deep, if somewhat troubled, appreciation of the Australian nature-scape and a abiding fascination with the possibilities of the super 8 camera.