Event

SUNSHINE CITY

dir. Albie Thoms, 1973
118 minutes. Australia.

SUNSHINE CITY is Albie Thoms 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.

It also probes the citys Yellow House art community and includes interviews with significant members thereof, including Mick Glasheen, Martin Sharp, Aggy Read, Brett Whiteley and Germaine Greer. Like the entirety of Thoms second film, the interviews are shot in an innovative and unconventional manner, shooting single continous takes and ending when the film in the camera runs out. With near-every other frame flash exposed, the film harkens to contemporaneous works by Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka

Before production began, Thoms wrote that SUNSHINE CITY will be a record of my responses to the people and places of the city of Sydney. It will show the visual environment and synthesize the sound environment. It will allow the people to speak, and will try and relate their lives to the environment, to try and express the way the environment, the light, the sunshine, the visual stimulation, the cultural history of the city, conditions the lives of people and creates their character. It will be an analytic film, determining its own aesthetic, forcing attention to the filming process, to the materials of the film experience.