About

Please note this session will be followed by a live In Conversation with the animator, Dennis Tupicoff and the Director of the animation program at the Griffith Film School, Dr Peter Moyes.

'The Mirror with a Memory' includes a selection of short documentary and animated films by Dennis Tupicoff that highlight the animator's on-going interest in the relationship between the photographic and the imagined image.

This session will include the films The First Interview 2011, A Photo of Me 2017, Still Alive 2018 and The Only Photograph of Emily Dickinson, American Poet 2023.

The First Interview 2011

Narrated by the late pioneering French director Agnes Varda, The First Interview is a short-form documentary about the world’s first interview between photographer Nadar and scientist Chevreul in 1886. Originally published as images and text, the interview comes to life through this playful and insightful documentary.

15 minutes | All Ages

A Photo of Me 2017

Referencing one of the few photographs of the animator as a child in the Brisbane suburb of Darra, A Photo of Me moves between photography and rotoscoped animation to create a hybrid of documentary and fiction that brings together the factual nature of photography and the more unreliable narratives of memory.

This film contains flashing images.

11 minutes | All Ages

Still Alive 2018

Featuring scenes and characters from Tupicoff’s previous animations in addition to live-action footage of the animator himself, Still Alive uses visual depictions of death in the form of skeletal and stick figures to present an ironic and irreverent ‘theological’ view of animation with the song 'God’s Not Dead'.

6 minutes | Ages 15+ | Contains mature themes

The Only Photograph of Emily Dickinson, American Poet 2023

Dennis Tupicoff’s latest animation The Only Photograph of Emily Dickinson, American Poet takes a photographic portrait of the poet Emily Dickinson as its starting point to imagine the small, everyday exchanges that happen in and around the photographic image. Travelling in time, with Emily meeting the 17th century English poet Andrew Marvell, the film makes broad commentary on the relationship between the photographic image and the imagination.

8 minutes | All Ages