Dirk de Bruyn

WAP stands for White Australia Policy, a racist policy which limited migration into Australia into the nineteen fifties. This policy can be read as a marker of the guilt surrounding the Aboriginal genocide that had blotted white settlement of Australia since its inception. This film re-frames historic material to allow the voices of the deferred and dispossessed to speak their trauma, speaking often through the bodies and voices of the oppressor to reveal the unspoken truth.

The story of Rick, a washing-machine serviceman, and his relationships with two very different women.

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.

"'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 diary film, chronicling six days in the life of a woman in her early 30's. A portrait of isolation, striving, rejection and hope.

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.

A fusion of abstract optical soundtracks from analogue 16mm and 35mm film expanding on the 1930’s Russian experiments of Nikolai Voinov which impacted electronic music.

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.

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.

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

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

"...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)

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

"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)

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?

A timelapse record of Flinders Street Station over a period of 24 hours combining the contemporary affordances of digital video with the chiming bells of St Paul’s Cathedral.

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

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.

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.