Dirk de Bruyn

Could not find a full copy of Schist so I uploaded this, an extended and manipulated version to celebrate the beginning of a 2023 full of holes and gaps. I put this copy through the optical printer and then insert bits and pieces of film and detritus in front of the camera on the run to add another layer of material, cut up slides, letraset, plastic etc, additional activity to the moving image.

An experimental animation that draws the micro and macro into stark relation, "White Bat" occupies a no-zone that separates you from your own body. "White Bat" is a virus dripping from the roof of your skull. Its violence and racism peppers your body with denial, numbness and avoidance, and festers.

"This annotated version Death of Place is about something that has died but is continually re-gurgitated into something else, that expands into a stupefied academic rattle, referencing and word play. I must say that having to stand in front of a group of students to explain what I do has been a welcome challenge that has found its way into my work. There is always an element of probable rejection in that dialogue."

Channelling Lye and McLaren, de Bruyn continues his explorations of ‘direct-to-film’ inspired artwork barely contained within the frame.

An intriguing exploration of the changing impact of speed on our ability to view an image and construct meaning and narrative.

A caravan of experimental imagery created from reaching deep in the soundtrack area of analog film stock.

Dirk de Bruyn explores the history of Australian storytelling; the unknown, the forgotten and the lies we tell ourselves.

Re-vue is a mutilated love-letter to the film’s form in address to the the act of seeing itself. It is shaped as a response to, and in dialogue with, Mike Hoolboom’s Color My World ( 3 minutes, 2017, Canada) A flicker-fest lamenting a lost relationship with narrative cinema, by which it is forever marked. Yet there are hints for a way back in this age of surveillance.

Dissociation is an abstract materialist film that has migrated from 16mm film to the digital. It is made up of scratches, half-baked images and flicker. The film explores the tension between the image, the written text and the spoken word and the consequent struggle for meaning. A report on the anti-social nature of corporate space inspired by the first non-sense poem “The Great Lalula” by Christian Morgenstern.

East Meets West is an abstract flickering animation that sits precariously between the digital and the analog. The film highlights the luminous scratches, dust and Letraset materially present and placed on the original film, all to the layered beat of Viola Smith's drumming.

Migrating by sea from Holland as an eight-year-old, Dirk de Bruyn went on to be a doyen of Australian experimental cinema. But as this intimate film reveals, his work is suffused with the trauma of migration, and the struggle to recognise himself as a ‘new Australian'. In conversation with documentarian Steven McIntyre, Dirk guides us through more than 40 years of his filmmaking: the early years exploring technique and technology, a subsequent phase of unflinching self-examination brought on by upheaval and overseas travel, and more recent projects where he attempts a fusion of personal, cultural, and historical identity. What emerges is an inspiring, rugged, and at times poignant portrait of an artist committed to self-expression and self-discovery through the medium of film.

Groundbreaking experimental/avant garde travel diary essay film. A reflection on communication.

The subject of Death of Place is 16mm film's direct on film techniques, migrated into the digital realm. Its story catches half articulated childhood memories of reading and writing, the visceral material traces and gestures of a lost practice and life.

Dirk De Bruyn’s eleven-minute RemmbrME (2007) is a visually engaging film that documents in a painterly fashion the numerous gaps and intersections between analogue and digital moving image manipulation. RemmbrME is a work that critically focuses on the re-shaping of the lost material that is germane to a basic cameraless direct-on-film practice and resonates important ideas concerning the increasing fusion between analogue and digital image-making in our everyday culture.

A celebration of the offal of cinema, old films, old soundtracks, drawing directly on the film, using stamps and food-dyes to create discarded imagery. To chew film up and spit it out as painting direct.

Consists of scratched and reanimated found industrial and discarded personal footage. The sonic soundtrack is similarly reconstructed from scratches, pen marks, Letraset strips and the music and phrases of found films.

Cut down to 16mm from a 35mm trailer for the movie Shaft, the slowed down voice, gunshot explosions and lsaac Hayes' iconic music become barely recognisable and monstrous. The arbitrary framing provides glimpses of the edges of faces, fleeting urban scenes, partial text, all rendered in cyan negative in a kind of psycho-dramatic abstraction, all the more unsettling than Gordon Parks's originating gangster populated dystopia. It is a reminder of how, by simply repositioning the frame, extant material can be transformed.

By Traum a Dream (2002) the unintelligent memories have become distinctly more sinister. Samples of found footage suggesting memory and repression vie chaotically for attention with Dirk’s voice reciting repeated words and phrases, punctuated by splutters and coughs, as though attempting to wrest some meaning. This meaning comes at last with the final sentence dragged out phrase by phrase in the third person: “he began to remember what he didn’t want to remember, what had been taken from when before he knew a secret of before he knew himself”. Steven Ball

Silent, but often paired with Burt & Chabade's Four Possible Soundtracks for Dirk De Bruyn's "Schist" (1999).

"'Rote Movie' is part of a series of works examining aspects of the traumatic experience. It is an examination of decay and forgetting, where what both distance and time can bring to one's private feelings of belonging and home. Highly immersed in a fragmented and disjointed haptic space of its own materiality, this film stutters out its thoughts frame by frame" - Steven Ball, 'Mesh' 3, Autumn 1994.

A taxonomical crash course listing, ordering, classifying phrases, words, letter and numbers. A collision course of the domesic and fragments received from "out there." A visual assault course of home movie footage of the filmmaker's family, drawings and text repeated and reprocessed on film, video and computer. A correspondence course from expatriot Australian de Bryun. Can we ever truly understand science?

An intense and sometimes disturbing series of encounters between the filmmaker and his mother as they relive the traumatic years of his childhood and adolescence. Following the migration of the family to Australia from Holland in the difficult postwar years they had to grapple with problems of housing, social injustice and adjustment made more difficult by the father's mental illness. For the filmmaker 'the sentiment had to be uncompromisingly true' although he became aware that 'all film is fiction'. National Film and Video Lending Service Catalogue, ACMI.

An intense and sometimes disturbing series of encounters between the filmmaker and his mother as they relive the traumatic years of his childhood and adolescence. Following the migration of the family to Australia from Holland in the difficult postwar years they had to grapple with problems of housing, social injustice and adjustment made more difficult by the father's mental illness. For the filmmaker 'the sentiment had to be uncompromisingly true' although he became aware that 'all film is fiction'. National Film and Video Lending Service Catalogue, ACMI.

The roving eye in the crowd. Flickering sunlight. Fast forward. B4 it was seeing faint movement on the distant horizon. Now the skill is to see the rush from the passing car. We are on the run. Visual experiences that cement out daily lives, with an increasing uneasy disjointedness. Images like afterthoughts. Flows. Standing waves. Kill kill the eye. Fade the past. Fun the film like water through the eye. Rush ruse use muse. The language of the flash now. Curtains twisting and folding. Images tying around each other: distant memory.

De Bruyn combines his particular filmic effect/interest (rhythm) with the tangible reality around him. In Homecomings there is an incredible sense of the filmmaker living and breathing his practice. In what is essentially a diary film of a man going back to his homeland, strange things start to happen: photos are animated too quick to catch, actions are sped up through timelapse, and, most profoundly of all, certain shots get transformed into their drawn-on-film equivalents. When we see (from behind) Dirk's son Kees sitting at a table drawing and then the same scene/action but obviously hand-drawn onto the film, it speaks volumes about the filmmaker and his interaction with the world, and is also a sublimely new configuration (in cinema's history) of sight and sound, of signification if you like. Homecomings is a long auto-biographical/diary film that combines the filmmaker's life with the filmmaker's practice. -Bill Mousoulis

Frames like de Bruyn's other recent effort Cha-Hit (1986) is an overwhelming film constantly in motion, blitzing its audience with abstract visuals. The film is a mixture of flickery, Letraset, light, scratching and hand-drawn colours. So rapid is the movement that it makes you wonder at times if you are looking at an image or its afterimage. Could a film like Frames be damaging to your retina or neurological functions? If you sat in front of this type of film long enough, would it send you on a trip? Could it awaken a patient out of a coma? After a confronting seven minutes I felt exhausted and slightly frazzled, such is the power of the film. A Dirk de Bruyn retrospective would certainly kill me. -Glen Hannah

A time-lapse document of a farmhouse in the Netherlands mapping the changing seasons, the light and shadows. Made with an interval-meter fashioned out of a wind screen wiper motor.

"...No photographed images. All handmade. It's all these squares, lines. The main techniques were bleaching and dyeing and sticking letraset material to the film strip. The images don't rush: they much more fold over the top of one another. Palimpsest. Using the pos/neg flickering helps to sustain the images..." – D.B. from "Where's Our Satellite," Melbourne, Australia (1985)

"With 223 I used Photographs from my past as a base. It gives the eyes something to come back to from the faster abstract shapes. The Pos/Neg flickering gives a feeling of depth. Its called 223 because I had some letterset of the numbers 223. There is a layering of images and techniques." – D. bB. from "Where's Our Satellite," Melbourne, Australia (1985)

An abstract play of light, colour, geometric shapes and patterns synchronised with synthesised music. The image patterns have been created by scratching, drawing, painting and overlaying directly on clear and opaque film and fragments of photographed positive and negative images.

de Bruyn uses animation, optical illusions, time lapse, solarization, hand tinting, flash frames, refilming and flicker effects, accompanied by a dense atmosphere of word puns, dialogue, primal screams, music and even recycled and letraseted soundtracks. By setting experiments entirely within his Moonee Ponds house, de Bruyn creates such a complex sense of claustrophobia, the spectator, while recognising the staid, conservative trappings of urban Melbourne, is present with the sort of art neurosis more commonly found in megacities like New York. The principal actor in Experiments is the narrator, whose anarchistic mind ruminates, struggles and screams from relief from the ravages of suburban Moonee Ponds, and the psychological suburbia of his mind... Experiments, its cacophony of images flickering on two screens, throws up everything from schizophrenic madness to baby nappies, inviting you to participate in the cathartic recesses of a personal nightmare. (Steven McIntyre)

Feyers is Dirk de Bruyn's most complicated work employing the many techniques he has experimented with over the years. Appropriately subtitled 'a dance', this film's interweaving of various experimentations lends itself to a stunning, rhythmic effect.

The film tries to 'destroy time' by the cyclical reworking of a short period of time. Gradually the image becomes less discernible and the flashing positive and negative images force the viewer to stare rather than looking at the film. As the film progresses the viewer becomes trapped in a short period of time.

Filmed from a place behind the eye.

An experimental film dedicated to the Blind. A series of rapid images are created by various techniques such as the zoom.