ФЕСТИВАЛ АУТОРСКОГ ФИЛМА У ДКСГ

DIRK DE BRUYN - GOST AFC DKSG

Dirk de Bruyn, filmski autor, pedagog i kritičar iz Australije, gost je Akademskog filmskog centra Doma kulture Studentski grad gde će predstaviti svoj rad u sredu 3. juna i u četvrtak 4. juna 2015. Program počinje od 20 časova u Maloj sali.

U protekle četiri decenije, Dirk de Bruyn, je realizovao veliki broj eksperimentalnih, dokumentarnih i animiranih filmova, uglavnom u okvirima  nezavisnog i no-budget filma. Trenutno radi kao profesor animacije i digitalne kulture na Univerzitetu Dikin (Deakin University) u Melburnu u Australiji. Osnivač je i član više filmskih udruženja, a pored filmske prakse i pedagogije bavi se i multimedijalnim performansima, instalacijama kao i filmskom kritikom.

U toku dve večeri, publika će imati prilike da pogleda izbor filmova iz autorovog bogatog opusa uz razgovor sa njim koji će voditi Greg De Cuir, Jr.

THE HOUSE THAT WE LIVE IN: FILMS AND VIDEOS BY DIRK DE BRUYN

Dirk de Bruyn’s career as an alternative filmmaker stretches back to the 1970s when he made his first 16 mm experiments. His work continues into the 21st century, often incorporating the language of new media into his cinema while still being committed to working with analog forms. De Bruyn is a versatile, prolific artist, one who still has probably not been given the attention he deserves in international (read: Western European and North American) conceptions of the history of alternative film and video.

Maybe part of the reason for this oversight is that de Bruyn’s family left their native Holland when he was a child and relocated to Australia. De Bruyn got involved as a member of the Melbourne Super 8 Film Group as a young man and he still lives in Melbourne today, working as a senior lecturer at Deakin University. Australian alternative cinema has flown under the radar outside of the country, though it seems de Bruyn would make an excellent candidate for its ambassador. In the early 1990s he lived in Canada where he taught at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver and worked alongside such luminaries of Canadian alternative cinema as Mike Hoolboom, who he counts among his good friends. It has been ten years since de Bruyn’s last European retrospective – the program Ancient Damage at LUX Salon in London. That program presented one film from each decade of his activity, including the world premiere of his newest at the time (Analog Stress [2004], a channel-surfing mélange of found footage overlaid with hand-drawn animation). This Belgrade program will also present at least one film from each decade he has produced work in, with a heavier emphasis on his 21st century creations, including at least two world premieres as well as a biographical documentary on de Bruyn directed by Steven McIntyre.

One notices a strong diversity of forms and content when surveying the cinema of de Bruyn. Feyers (1979) employs mysterious and ephemeral images through a masking effect that is akin to video interference. Boerdery (1985) assumes the voice of an abstract domestic ethnography, presenting time-lapse footage of a house, the family that lives in it, and the neighbors surrounding it. This is a gentle, suburban environmental study. Understanding Science (1992) was made during de Bruyn’s Canadian stay. It is a rapid and chaotic compendium of his aesthetics, utilizing found footage and sound fragments with animation in an intricate layered montage. WAP (2012) reveals de Bruyn’s socially-critical side. He sources segments from fiction films and archival actualities that narrate a racist White Australian Policy, intervening in these clips to retrieve their latent satirical content and also a subversive political commentary.

In the past few years de Bruyn has been active in Belgrade at the festival Alternative Film/Video. He delivered a presentation on early Australian film journals at the inaugural Alternative Film/Video Research Forum in 2012, which was an extension of his pedagogical concerns.

De Bruyn holds a PhD and recently published a book titled The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art (2014). In 2013 he returned to the festival where he curated a program on the history of alternative film and video in Australia. De Bruyn’s video piece Found Found Found (2014) documents this travel and activity in Belgrade, combining it with radio sound fragments and the iconography of online culture. This piece was selected for the inaugural audiovisual essay section of the online journal NECSUS, co-edited by de Bruyn’s countryman Adrian Martin. In his introductory essay for the section, Martin (with his co-editor Cristina Álvarez López) calls this video a ‘personal travel diary’ à la Jonas Mekas, but also a ‘trenchant critique of a particular cinematic tradition’. I like to think of it as a love letter to Belgrade, a city he has found repeatedly and been enamored with, its spell drawing him back again and again as it does so many who visit and discover its numerous charms.

The cinema of Dirk de Bruyn offers this possibility of discovery, of finding what has been lost and transforming it. Whether in 2nd Hand Cinema (2004), with its celebration of an archaic cinema marquee and an earlier form of cinephilia that he preserves in a hand-painted film strip; or ThreshHold (2014), a biographical study of the Greek migrant Jim Demetrious and the neighborhood of his youth, animated by Google Maps and archival photos; or East Meets West (2015), which seems to comment obliquely on the travels that have altered de Bruyn’s personal and professional life. As Mike Hoolboom wrote in the journal Synoptique, ‘Dirk never used his movies to shrink himself from the world, to cover himself over with the absolute so that life couldn’t touch him.’ De Bruyn invites us into the house that he lives in, like the title of his first film from 1974. This is an international house that lovers of moving image art everywhere share and dwell in.

Greg de Cuir, Jr

Curator      

ŽIVOT U CELULOIDU - filmovi Dirk(a) De Bruyn(a)

 U danima, tokom kojih se Pobesneli Maks sa (blagajničkim) uspehom vratio na velike ekrane u svetskim, ali i srpskim bioskopima, Akademski filmski centar DKSG će imati čast i zadovoljstvo da ugosti jednog drugačijeg i neobičnog filmskog junaka iz daleke Australije u toku dve junske večeri. Dirk De Bruyn je započeo svoju filmsku praksu još početkom 70-ih godina prošlog veka u trenutku kada je australijska kinematografija doživela svoj preporod, svoj Novi talas, i postala svetski priznata i popularna, zahvaljujući delima Pitera Vira, Kena Hanama i Brusa Beresforda. De Bruyn započinje svoj celuloidni put fasciniran istraživanjem krajnjih granica korišćenja filmske trake i ljudske percepcije, nadovezujući se na zapadnu, tačnije američku, tradiciju filmske avangarde i eksperimenta.

U svojim ranim radovima poput filma Feyers (1979), koji će biti prikazan u prvom od dva programa, autor dekonstruiše filmsku sliku dodajući nove slojeve i rešenja direktnim zapisima/crtežima na celuloidnoj traci, menjajući joj strukturu. Takođe koristi stop motion animaciju ali i izobličava zvučnu sliku filma, čime uspeva da stvori autentičan filmski zapis.

Shvatajući tranziciono stanje filmske tehnologije i njene promene i razvoja, De Bruyn i u novim radovima traži načina da utiče na samu strukturu slike, ponekad puštajući da ivice frejmova celuloida budu viđene unutar digitalne slike, odnosno da filmski projektor bude neposredni učesnik u digitalnom delu.

Ono što De Bruyn(a) izdvaja od drugih autora eksperimentalnog filma je serijal dugometražnih radova (Experiments, Homecomings i Conversations with my Mother) u kojima je odvažno postavio sebe i svoju porodicu kao glavne protagoniste i na taj način utkao personalni svet u celuloidne frejmove, otkrivajući i suočajavući se sa ozbiljnim socijalnim problemima i ličnim traumama.

Druge večeri programa biće prikazan dokumentarni film o autoru The House That Eye Live In, u kojem De Bruyn govori o svom filmskom opusu. Poslednjih decenija, uglavnom više zahvaljujući lakoj dostupnosti filmskih i video zapisa u digitalnom obliku, nego otkrivanju novih estetika i mogućnosti filmskog jezika, svedoci smo česte “zloupotrebe” pronađenih, tzv. found footage materijala. De Bruyn, zahvaljujući svom širokom delovanju i obrazovanju u oblasti kinematografije (od prakse, preko teorije, pedagogije, instalacija i performansa do filmske kritike) uspeva da na najjednostavniji i najbolji način izađe na kraj sa pronađenim materijalima, pogotovo u delu WAP (White Australia Policy) u kojem je prikazan odnos australijskog društva (“pridošlica”) prema starosedeocima ovog kontineta, Aboridžinima. Prikazujući banalne gestove protagonista i njihovu mimiku (učesnici skupa, govor premijera, odlomci iz igranih filmova), autor ne zauzima poziciju glavnog kritizera već nam putem repeticije šalje znake da se istorija ipak ponavlja.

Od Holandije, u kojoj je rođen, preko Kanade, u kojoj je proveo nekoliko godina, do Australije u kojoj živi i stvara, De Bruyn nam prezentuje svoj pogled na stvarnost sa jednog udaljenog i neobičnog mesta. Ukoliko ste zaboravili zbog čega ste voleli starog/prvog Pobesnelog Maksa, ovi programi su odlična prilika da se podsetite da je (ne samo taj) film, neraskidivo vezan za tlo na kojem je nastao i da će kao takav zauvek ostati da živi u celuloidnom svetu.

 Milan Milosavljević