Retinex reflux

Over the last 30 years Melbourne-based film-maker, writer and academic Dirk de Bruyn has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and videos. In his first visit to Wellington he presents Retinex Reflux; a live film performance that uses multiple 16mm film projectors in an explosion of light, colour and sound. Described as "explosively anarchic" De Bruyns films are cut-up collages that draw on animation, found footage and fragments of dialogue.

Untitled : live cinema performance

Over the last 30 years Melbourne-based film-maker, writer and academic Dirk de Bruyn has made numerous experimental, documentary and animation films and videos, continuing to maintain a no-budget, independent, self-funded focus for much of his work. De Bruyns distinctive style entails cut-up collages that draw on animation, found footage and fragments of dialogue - dyeing, painting, incising and stencilling the film strip. Live De Bruyn’s anarchic multi projection performances can involve performance, freeform vocal workouts and De Bruyn, ‘bent over and mouthing into a microphone like a demented seagull, totally involved in the relentlessly unravelling collage of home-processed footage’.Penny Webb. Ian Helliwell provided a live electronic soundtrack.

Performing the 1950s New Australian

As a tentative beginning to locating a particularly local Australian brand of a post-colonial materialist (formalist) cinema this paper contextualises the recycling and re-samplings of mainstream industrial cinema that I have recently undertaken. I aim to place this practice within emerging discourses of hybridity, crossing-borders and a Global Cinema. This research speaks to my earliest experiences of migration into Australia, of becoming Australian, unfolding in my 50s childhood and enunciates the pressures my parents’ migration placed on them. The focus of this work articulates the somewhat emptied and gutted voice of the New Australian, a 50s term for the assimilated migrant (CAB 1948) of which the Dutch were considered exemplar performers, good white New Australians, who neatly left their Dutch identity at the door but who never-the-less witnessed the ambiguities of the ideologies they implicitly embraced.

No photography please

Rather than represent the world merely by photographic means, handmade moving-image artists seek to create new ways of seeing by staging a variety of interventions into the material makeup of celluloid. Handmade artists tattoo film’s skin not only with scratches and paint, but also with blood, dirt, paper, candy, sand, nail polish remover, and seawater. Seeking media not normally found in a filmmaker or artist’s studio, they mine their own bodies and backyards for things to make into moving images.

This program highlights rarely-seen works of artisanal film production from the Coop’s collection. Some of the works are wonderfully constructive, building up the visual surface of the film by combining found footage with painterly abstraction. Others are destructive, subjecting film to a variety of elemental and material stresses. Taken together, these films not only exhibit the diversity of handmade practices and concerns, they also provide a framework for rethinking how cinema can be made through its unmaking.

In other words, handmade cinema—in concept, material, and execution—is counter-cinema.

Knights moves

This essay examines how the found footage films of Martin Arnold (Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998) and Peter Tscherkassky (Outer Space, 1999 and Dream Work, 2002) can be read as a belated response to Peter Wollen’s 1970s splitting of the avant-garde. Wollen’s tactical move, his article The Two Avant-gardes (Wollen, 1975 and revised in 1982) marked a historic moment when both critics and artists gained easy access to the film editing-machine for both film analysis and reflexive film production respectively. Wollen’s text asserted differences between a political and formalist avant-garde, opening up a space between structuralist/materialist film and feminist film theory and its counter-cinema. This move enabled Laura Mulvey and other Cine-Feminists to eschew formalism in favor of a political feminist counter–cinema and further, as part of its move into the academy, to develop and enlist Textual Analysis as a tool for uncovering the patriarchal ideologies at the heart of Hollywood melodrama.

2nd hand cinema

Image of scratched frames from 16mm film, reframed and published as stand-alone image

Head, tail, rail: imagens periféricas ou o obtuso das imagens fílmicas

Tendo como ponto de partida um conjunto de trailers cinematográficos, provenientes de salas de cinemas em declínio, este trabalho de investigação artística explora uma série de códigos, imagens gráficas e informações industriais, encontradas na periferia dessas bobinas fílmicas, que servem de orientação aos técnicos laboratoriais e aos projeccionistas. Sustentado nos conceitos de esconderijo (Bazin), intervalo (Vertov) e obtuso (Barthes), Head, Tail, Rail procura reflectir sobre o que está para além daquilo que os filmes, normalmente, mostram. Com recurso ao found footage e a várias técnicas de montagem, este trabalho pretende transformar as matérias fílmicas (película, imagem e som) em novas e regeneradas composições audiovisuais, sem qualquer referencial, extraindo daí o obtuso das imagens fílmicas.

Vidding Grrls. Pratiche di remix audiovisivo nella cultura digitale contemporanea

La pratica del remix è al giorno d’oggi sempre più diffusa e un numero sempre più vasto di persone ha ora le competenze e gli strumenti tecnologici adeguati per eseguire operazioni un tempo riservate a nicchie ristrette. Tuttavia, nella sua forma audiovisiva, il remix ha ottenuto scarsa attenzione a livello accademico. Questo lavoro esplora la pratica del remix intesa al contempo come declinazione contemporanea di una pratica di lungo corso all’interno della storia della produzione audiovisiva – ovvero il riuso di immagini – sia come forma caratteristica della contemporaneità mediale, atto di appropriazione grassroots dei contenuti mainstream da parte degli utenti. La tesi si articola in due sezioni. Nella prima, l’analisi di tipo teorico e storico-critico è suddivisa in due macro-aree di intervento: da una parte il remix inteso come pratica, atto di appropriazione, gesto di riciclo, decontestualizzazione e risemantizzazione delle immagini mediali che ha attraversato la storia dei media audiovisivi [primo capitolo]. Dall’altra, la remix culture, ovvero il contesto culturale e sociale che informa l’ambiente mediale entro il quale la pratica del remix ha conosciuto, nell’ultimo decennio, la diffusione capillare che lo caratterizza oggi [secondo capitolo]. La seconda, che corrisponde al terzo capitolo, fornisce una dettagliata panoramica su un caso di studio, la pratica del fan vidding. Forma di remix praticata quasi esclusivamente da donne, il vidding consiste nel creare fan video a partire da un montaggio d’immagini tratte da film o serie televisive che utilizza come accompagnamento musicale una canzone. Le vidders, usando specifiche tecniche di montaggio, realizzano delle letture critiche dei prodotti mediali di cui si appropriano, per commentare, criticare o celebrare gli oggetti di loro interesse. Attraverso il vidding il presente lavoro indaga le tattiche di rielaborazione e riscrittura dell’immaginario mediale attraverso il riuso di immagini, con particolare attenzione al remix inteso come pratica di genere.

Conservar, catalogar, mostrar : um olhar sobre o Arquivo da Cinemateca Portuguesa – Centro de Conservação (ANIM)

O presente relatório pretende ilustrar os resultados do estágio desenvolvido no Arquivo Nacional de Imagens em Movimento (ANIM) da Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema e ainda refletir sobre qual o seu papel na nossa memória. Apresenta-se uma reflexão crítica e teórica sobre o conceito de arquivo, sobre qual o seu poder e a sua relação com o cinema, nomeadamente com as práticas arquivísticas do cinema contemporâneo e com a criação das cinematecas. O relatório articula-se em três partes. Uma primeira, sobre as questões inerentes ao conceito de arquivo – memória, identidade, história, poder – e sobre qual a sua relação com a sétima arte. Seguidamente, uma parte mais descritiva, onde se encontra a caracterização da instituição. E por fim, fruto da observação durante o estágio, expõem-se as lacunas internas e externas que afectam a instituição, apresentando-se também possíveis soluções, que podem permitir alterações positivas no desempenho do ANIM e da Cinemateca enquanto zeladora do património cinematográfico português, tornando esta reflexão um convite para reconsiderar a importância e poder deste arquivo particular, para nós, enquanto indivíduos e sociedade.

New Australian

Found Footage document that explores the implicit racism inside the 1950's term 'New Australian", used to describe migrants to Australia in the 1950s.

Material damage: 4 projector film performance

Dirk de Bruyn’s expanded cinema performances engage the æsthetics of process at a number of levels. At the core of these performances are several of three- or four-screen, essentially abstract films of the same duration which comment upon and echo each other in a constant interplay of flicker-like positive and negative imagery. The soundtrack of the films works in a related way: the same or similar words and sound fragments are overlayed, or are repeated in an absurd call-and-answer pattern running from one speaker to another. This overall design or formal system is then set into play and relativised in the live event through a number of treatment-techniques. Reels are placed out of order or interspliced with other short films or fragments of found footage or tests, the bulb of one or more projectors can be occasionally turned off while the soundtrack continues, or the projector can be stopped altogether, extending, stretching out or disrupting completely the apparent synchrony between each screen and soundtrack. The light beam of each projector is filtered, distorted, split and multiplied using hand-held colour gels, plastic bottles, prisms and mirrors, or else silhouetted or blocked completely with the artist’s own hands and body. The projectors themselves can be inverted, turned around or physically transported across the space, mixing and overlaying the imagery, animating different areas of the performance environment and transforming the body of the audience itself into a screen medium.

Archives et création : nouvelles perspectives sur l’archivistique. Cahier 3

Ce cahier de recherche fait état des travaux menés au cours de la troisième étape (2015-2016) du projet « Archives et création : nouvelles perspectives sur l’archivistique ». Les textes sont les suivants : Yvon Lemay et Anne Klein, « Introduction », p. 4-9 ; Ana Pato, « How to speak of trauma? », p. 10-34 ; Annaëlle Winand, « Matériau temporel et images tactiles : l’archive dans Western Sunburn de Karl Lemieux », p. 35-50 ; Anne Klein, « Des archives au théâtre : Sauvageau Sauvageau de Christian Lapointe », p. 51-77 ; Mattia Scarpulla, Les archivistes dansent. Description et analyse de Les gestes de nos mémoires, performance littéraire sur la gestion des archives, p. 78-130 ; Simon Côté-Lapointe, « Diffusion des archives et création : un bilan d’expérience », p. 131-161 ; Yvon Lemay et Anne Klein, « Archives et création : bilan et suites de la recherche », p. 162-200. De plus, le cahier comprend une « Bibliographie » des travaux effectués sur les archives et la création depuis 2007, p. 201-209, et des informations sur « Les auteurs », p.210.

Two films by Jean-Claude Bustros

Jean-Claude Bustros’ La queue tigrée d’un chat comme un pendentif de pare-brise (1983-1989) and Zéro Gravité (1990) mark an ethical endpoint of the scientific revolution so critical to growing up in the 60s and 70s, when the triumph of scientific thinking delivered both a trip to the moon and the atom bomb, all colonized and framed by an American voice and all part of the re-processed content available in these films.