Albie Thoms

Sunshine City

Albie Thoms

Jim Anderson, Cynthia Dyer-Bennet

SUNSHINE CITY is Albie Thom’s sprawling, protoplasmic experimental portrait of his hometown of Sydney. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia call it “a structured diary film which investigates the process of living in Sydney, which uses a repeating light modulation to intensify experiences of light, heat, colour”.

Marinetti

Albie Thoms

Deborah Allard, Charlie Brown

Albie Thoms' Marinetti was the culmination of the synthetic environments that the UBU group had pioneered in Australia; festive public 'happenings' that combined the energy and volume of creative rock and jazz with the mesmeric effect of multi-dimensional lightshows. Another kind of culmination: Marinetti records most of the principal collaborators in the UBU film group, like Aggy Read and the Perrys. Uniquely valuable as a document of Australia's late 1960s counter-culture, the soundtrack provides the best indication of the unrestrained liberty that bands like Tully and the John Sangster Underground band some of whose members perform on this recording were famously achieving in their improvisations of the period.

Bolero

Albie Thoms

Bronwyn Steven-Jones

A minimalist exercise described by Thoms as ‘observing the effect of movement on perception within the framework of Ravel’s music’.

Blunderball, or from Dr. Nofinger with Hate

Albie Thoms

A spoof of the early James Bond films and Ian Fleming universe from Australia. Bumbling overweight Aussie secret service agent Jim Bond alias Agent Minus 007 blunders his way against arch rival villains Ernest Stavro Blowfly and Dr. Yes down under in Sydney, Australia.

Bluto

Albie Thoms

Thoms dedicated three months and a toolkit of pins, razor blades and scalpels to create the rich, abstract surface texture in Bluto. The result, according to the filmmaker, ‘was something like thunder and rain, interspersed with burps, belches and farts, which added an urgency that seemed to express the anxieties of the time’.

Rita and Dundi

Albie Thoms

Dundi Lasclo, Rita Georgin

This experimental documentary about two young Paddington dress-makers was banned for nudity, but was screened widely in Australia without complaint.

Palm Beach

Albie Thoms

Kenneth Brown, Nat Young

The stories involving surfing and drugs are followed in Sydney over two days.

David Perry

Albie Thoms

David E. Perry

In this kinetic tribute to his Ubu Films collaborator Perry, Thoms combined tests and offcuts from early films with film fragments found on Perry’s editing room at ABC-TV. The Textacolour marks were intended as homage to Perry’s pioneering handmade films.

Moon Virility

Albie Thoms

In Moon virility, Thoms drew on clear stock and added a ‘found’ soundtrack.

The Film

Roger Whittaker, Albie Thoms

“The film was made spontaneously one afternoon in 1966. When a few friends got together... We were all in love with the film medium...” (Garry Shead)

Man and His World

Albie Thoms

A one-second explosion of a plastic head filled with milk is reversed, stretched to 50 seconds in length and overlaid with a split screen superimposition of a modernising Sydney: skyscrapers, cranes, trains and planes.

The Spurt of Blood

Albie Thoms

Made for inclusion in a student theatrical production at the University of Sydney, this film was based on an allegorical play by Antonin Artaud.

Poem 25

Albie Thoms

In this film, David Perry scratched onto celluloid the numbers of a poem by Kurt Schwitters, which were projected beside the actor reciting it.