Movies: Dirk de Bruyn

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 ...

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...

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....

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 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 pr...

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

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

"'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 ...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

"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...

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...

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...