Movies: Dirk de Bruyn

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 relationsh...

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 li...

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 con...

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

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....

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

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 soundtra...

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

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

This film re-animates stereoscopic images of Melbourne from the 1920s. Technically the film makes a statement about how each new iteration of moving image technology reclaims artifacts and gestures from the past. Such an archeology enables the viewer...

"'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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 Austral...

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...

An experimental film showing various record covers. (AFW program notes)...

film by Dirk de Bruyn & Glenn D’Cruz...

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....