"TWO FILMS, THEN AND NOW" ... notes from Dirk

 Two Films, Then and Now.

Here are some notes, reactions to my experimental moving image work being exhibited in a group show at Brighton Gallery, in Brighton until 18 December this year, highlighting its photographic materialist experimentation.

https://www.bayside.vic.gov.au/threshold

It’s been a while since my obsessions have gone public, especially in Melbourne. I have come to terms with why I gravitated to such a discounted local practice in the 70s when the co-op movement reared its ugly head. In a lot of ways this experimental thread even became incidental to that movement, and how that history has been remembered. it was certainly there at the start through artists like James Clayden, Michael Lee and Albie Thoms, for example, but drifted to its margins and outside its focus as documentarist and feminist waves took hold, with a last unfortunate gasp for experimentation at MIMA in 1992. And there was Cantrills Filmnotes. I was attracted to these margins, re-enacting the dislocation of my migrant background. Underneath lay a survival impulse to understand my parent’s experience of migration from the old world to the new.

They were not Australians but were cloaked in the erased migrant identity of the “New Australian.”  The chameleon-like Dutch were good at that, that’s how they survived European nationalist tugs-of- war for centuries. It all left an ambiguous gap in my identity that I filled with moments of erasure and denial, a dissociative outside the outside mentality that stumbled through my abstractions. 223 (1985, 5 minutes) is the short film in the exhibition that most clearly plays with this tension. In the exhibition interview with Paul Carter I note the impact of my mother’s dressmaking on my arts and crafts approach to assemblage, but after the interview my bricklaying father’s impact also came back to me. Behind the film’s childhood photographs of me playing with forms are images of the houses Piet built before he left Dordrecht to take his family to Australia. 223’s instability, flicker and its ensuing hypervigilance relate back to his psychotic episodes. One where he came at my mother and me with a knife, the other an episode of moaning where he turned the lights on and off at breakneck speed.

https://vimeo.com/139100396

The other film I want to mention is the continually growing Covid-initiated Looking For Birrarung (2020-2022 60 minutes) which records the changes of light on Port Phillip Bay near where I live, a sea-shore I was able to access during lockdown. This is the slither of native park Sanctuary encasing Melbourne suburbia in the arc between Brighton and Beaumaris, that includes Ricketts Point Marine Park, Clarice Beckett’s old stomping ground, 100 years on. That fact that Melbourne has four seasons in one day is a real asset in filming the bay in time-lapse a couple of days a week for one to two hours each time. A relentless record of tonal change and fog gathers the momentum of a trance-like state. This is projected in the Gallery on a large screen and benefits from the dwarfing of the human body. Looking at the horizon line, I have been told is a resting place for the eyes. This provided a therapy for my screen obsessions and helped me stay balanced during those lock-downs.

The covid crisis atrophied any travel for us all. It brought me back to the local. I had to make creative use of my immobility and this project inserted a productive contemplative Everyday into my straight-jacketed daily grind. Because of its length, in the gallery there is a QR code that accesses Looking For Birrarung online while in Brighton Gallery or when you leave the Gallery. The link below does the same. Every week I add what I have shot the week before onto this compendium. Vimeo is very handy for that.

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/759833070/b9a96c1784

Dirk de Bruyn, November 2022