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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
"...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 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.
