Palm Beach

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”.

1966 Australian experimental film

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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