Home Movies
Emmett Aldred, Anindita Banerjee, Rowena Crowe, Sue Ford, Audrey Lam, Richard Tuohy
Join us in the home's backyard for movie night, showcasing a program of local, experimental films exploring the home as container.
Presenting historical and contemporary works, Home Movies promises a journey through time and domestic space. With a number of these experimental films created during Covid-19 lockdowns, the home becomes a frame for the filmmakers' experience of the world: windows become looking glasses and doors become portals to new and different worlds. Elsewhere, we are gifted with moments of surreal escape, adventure, and humour at its satirical and sardonic best.
Through their works, the artists reveal something both personal and universal, opening up reflections on the problematic ideal of the safe and stable suburban home.
Showing
Woman in a House, 1972
Sue Ford
One of Sue Ford’s earliest films, Woman in a House is a feminist critique of domestic female roles. In this short film, a young woman in a suburban house escapes the confinement of her life through surreal dream sequences created with experimental montage techniques. Made in 1972, the film was shown at screenings run by the Melbourne Filmmaker’s Co-op and was one of the most popular films available to rent from the feminist film collective Reel Women, of which Ford was a founding member, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Run time: 1m09s duration
Window, 2020
Rowena Crowe
Window was made as part of an Artist Film Workshop initiated project which invited artists to create films in response to the first Australia-wide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. The film is a record of light passing around the artist's house, shot on a Bolex camera. It was hand processed in Cafenol (at home of course) in a 'domestic' film developer made of coffee, washing powder and vitamin. Crowe lives alone and touch became a pronounced theme for her during this time. She says: "My hand performing a fade in front of the lens, and the hand candle, gently flickering, came to express my hope of future human touch with time opening and closing around me."
Run time: 5m09s duration
In and Out a Window, 2020
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barry
Made during a long Covid-19 lockdown, In and Out a Window is a product of the distraction and abstraction that resulted from a lot of staring at the same pieces of glass. The literal frame of a window overlooking a small garden becomes the scene through which Tuohy’s film exploits the myriad plastic potentialities of the cinematic frame. Immersive and stroboscopic, In and Out a Window offers its own variations on cinema’s mechanical segmentations of space and time, opening up a portal to undiscovered dimensions and new phenomenologies.
Visual warning: This film has a flickering effect.
Run time: 12m50s duration
Nest, 2020
Anindita Banerjee
An authentic home is a place that physically holds memories. When one moves several times, they have to negotiate the challenge of packing up memories to bring them along. This is particularly difficult for young people whose memories tend to be built over time on an assemblage of family stories, old objects, and photographs. Both under 12 years old, Ishaan had lived in eight homes and Jiya, in six.
Through the tactility of drawing, painting and intimate conversation, বাসা (Nest) is a literal and metaphorical stitching of collective memories of various physical spaces.
Run time: 2m53s duration
Is Anybody Coming Over to Dinner?, 2021
Audrey Lam
The adventures of Yokitom around the home and across the seasons, with a supporting cast of family and friends.
Run time: 9m09s duration
Display Suite, 2019
Emmett Aldred
A real estate marketing director employs the help of a videographer to record what should be a simple talk-to-camera about her current project.
Run time: 7m00s duration
Artists
Emmett Aldred
Dr Emmett Aldred (he/him, trans-masc identifying) is an artist and filmmaker. He previously worked as a real estate editor and videographer in 2016 for Real Estate Productions Pty Ltd, which notoriously exploited and undervalued the labour of young media graduates. Adred’s film Display Suite captures a distillation of what these workers routinely witnessed. Since then, Aldred has worked on various film and arts projects, such as the Dead End Film Festival, trans and gender-diverse film festival tilde, Documentary Meets, Too Much World rentals and Things Will Be Different (2023). Currently, he lectures into and subject coordinates two breadth courses for VCA’s School of Film and Television, University of Melbourne.
Anindita Banerjee
Anindita Banerjee, a twice-uprooted Indian, is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, based on Wadawurrung land. Her research interest includes cultural otherness, authentic identity and the sense of home. Memories and the reconstruction of ritualistic ceremonies and mark-making inform her practice. Using gestural portrayals of hybrid rituals, she wonders about her place as an immigrant to the unceded Indigenous lands of present-day Australia. She has exhibited widely, including at the Victoria Parliament Melbourne, Customs House Sydney, and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Rowena Crowe
Rowena Crowe is a time-based artist whose work involves analogue processes in the creation of films that often contain reflexive motives, juxtaposition of found objects and gestural movement. She is currently undertaking a Doctor of Creative Arts researching the embodied nature of analogue filmmaking at the University of Wollongong. Her films have screened in competition internationally at film festivals such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival and DOK Liepzig.
Sue Ford
Sue Ford is one of Australia’s most preeminent photographers and experimental filmmakers, establishing her photographic practice in the late-1960s. She was the first woman photographer to hold a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1974, and was a key figure in Melbourne’s art scene throughout the 1970s, where she was involved with the Women’s Art Group alongside artists such as Bonita Ely and Micky Allan.
Audrey Lam
Audrey Lam is an artist filmmaker. She is a member of AFW (Artist Film Workshop) in Brunswick.
Richard Tuohy
Richard Tuohy (b. 1969, Melbourne) began making works on Super 8 film in the late-1980s. His films have screened at venues including the Melbourne International Film Festival (IFF), EMAF (Osnabruck), Rotterdam IFF, New York FF, Ann Arbor and Media City, and he has toured Europe, the Americas and Asia presenting solo programs of his work. His works are firmly within the ‘hand-made’ film tradition. An advocate for the possibilities of hand made cinema, Tuohy has devoted much time and effort in sharing his knowledge through workshops and classes both in his native Australia and internationally.