Movies: Dirk de Bruyn

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...

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....

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

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....

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....

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...

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 ...

"'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 ...

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 pr...

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...

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...

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...

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 o...

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...

"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 grou...

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

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

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

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