Dirk de Bruyn

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.

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.

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.

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.

"'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.

Empire re-animates found historic stereographic photographs predominantly of Melbourne’s city centre between 1927 and 1940 when the colonial trace was slowly receding to produce a stereoscopic effect. Melbourne’s main Flinder’s Street Intersection is unsettlingly transformed into a Cubist perceptual maelstrom through repetition and flicker.

We are told at the beginning that “this film is dedicated to Len Lye” and indeed the camera-less techniques used here – various combinations of dyeing, cutting, scratching and painting the film strip – as well as much of the imagery in Migraine Particles are strongly reminiscent of Lye’s work, with certain key differences. The organic shapes resembling indigenous figuration of sea creatures, the intersecting vertical lines, the animation of forms which appear to interact and the moments of striking three dimensionality all recall Lye’s Tusalava (1929), Free Radicals (1958) and Color Box (1935). De Bruyn’s film seems somewhat free-form at first but in ways that also nod to Lye’s work, a structure of developing sections and a layered repetition of shapes in a loose fugal pattern becomes clearer as the film progresses. -Steven McIntyre

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.

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

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.

Poetry video bridging the gap between analog and digital media, enunciating a trace-less trauma embedded in the surface of materialist film. Created by drawing and dying directly on the emulsion surface of acetate film.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Initiated in 1996 and completed in 2026, this home-processed 16mm film was inspired by Marc Adrian’s Total (1968) and incorporates the voices of Moucle Blackout and László Dudás. Partially shot at Hearst’s San Simeon Castle, in Canada, and at the Royal Melbourne Show, the work explores the possibility of overcoming traumatic thought through material actions on the film surface. The temporal gap of its completion registers both the persistence of and resistance to traumatic experience.

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

The film follows walking feet and progresses to a preoccupation with the dancing shadow of the camera and the filmmaker. Much of the footage was home-processed to obtain the golden colours and solarization effects. In part the film documents the marking out of suburban space. By that I mean, that in suburban property the front and back yards form a private domain. This film tries to illuminate that space.

An experimental film dedicated to the "blink". Dynamic abstractions (created through the use of prodigious optical printing and directly working the film frame) investigate the nature of human optics. Music by Maurizio Kagel.

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

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

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

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)

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.

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.

When the British flag was first planted on Australian soil with the words "there is nothing here" the colonisers set up a tradition of denial. This still plagues us as a founding principle. What is festering in Australian backyards are generational denials and erasures brought out in the soundtrack, that plays like a meandering radio through a lazy Sunday afternoon. This hum offers stories of absence, of occupation and nostalgia: an unlocated site of layered Trauma.

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.