16 mm color print, sound, 9 minutes

Australia/Japan 2014

Richard Tuohy’s Ginza Strip is “a film where the long strip of film is made to figure the vertical lines of skyscrapers and the horizontal of the city road in the Ginza Strip in Tokyo, Japan. The film itself has been treated to a ‘Chromaflex’ technique of processing, a technique developed by Tuohy whereby colour-positive, colour-negative, and black-and-white are developed so as to be apparent within the same frame.

‘The way the procedure works is that you do an initial black and white process on a piece of print stock. It’s a very partial development that you’ve done, but it’s enough to lock down the pattern of the thing that was on the film. The images on the film are now safe. Once you’ve washed off all the chemistry you can handle the film in the light. Now you can do things to do it in the light, you can place material with your hands on the film surface which will block or will allow chemistry through in subsequent chemical processing.’

The effect is a kaleidoscopic vision of the Ginza Strip, where the material filmstrip that contains combinations of negative, positive, black and white, and colour, simulates the energy and vibrancy of the real Ginza strip – the colliding intersections coming to life through the intersection between viewer and screen. His harnessing of the processes of filmic technology, as the mechanical capturing of the image and sound of the world, provides new spaces in which the filmmaker can unveil how the medium captures alternate perspectives of the world:

‘Part of the point of something like Chromaflex is to help lay bare some of the chemistry involved in the apparatus of cinema. What does it do, how does it work? I’m interested in laying it bare not only for the audience but more particularly for the artists. Because I want them to continue their journey of stepping inside the apparatus, and I think the way to do that is to understand it. I like procedures, I like procedures that take people inside a medium. I like work that speaks of someone having made it from the perspective of someone being deep inside a medium. Really being inhabitants of that domain.’” (Bliss 2016)

Richard Tuohy, born 1969 in Melbourne, lives and works in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia.

Reference

Lauren Bliss, Second Nature: On the Experimental Work of Richard Tuohy, 2016, http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature-articles/richard-tuohy/.

Link

Richard Tuohy on Vimeo.