The body keeps the score

American animator Robert Breer has been credited in introducing the first visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (1954), Two abstract animated films by Robert Breer are examined: 69 (1968 5 minutes) and Fuji (1974 10 minutes). Using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological perspective, though these films are not representational or photographic in the traditional sense it is argued that they are still able to talk to us about real experiences because ‘the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one.’(Merleau-Ponty, 1964b: 14) 69 provides a metaphor for a system that collapses and Fuji as an articulation of that embodied seeing required for train travel. It is argued that Breer’s work in its explorations of style ahead of content is research into an act of viewing that offers a contemporary simulation of the impact of a traumatic experience on the body. Just as one cannot grab each object in the landscape at the speed of train travel nor can one grab or understand each frame that is presented to the retina of a Robert Breer film. What is required to attain “stillness” is a more dissociated way of looking that allows the images to wash over you. Such a “stillness” may be more about suppression than contemplation and could involve a process of metamorphosis.

Traum a dream

"Traum A Dream ... can be designated as activating object, with all lines of thought and action leading through it. Traum A Dream is a film that comes out of a life-long experimental animation practice; a body of work that has been evolving over 35 years. This is now more than half the time I have carried a trace of the trauma in my real and lived-in body, some of the personal events, which I reveal here.
This film was produced at a time when I was coming to terms in my personal life, remembering abuse from childhood. Traum A Dream emerged after an unsuccessful attempt to lay bare that abuse in a previous project, which co-incided with the conclusion of my CD-Rom Diary V 3.2 production."

"A representaion of traumatised space depicting a person who is consumed by a body of pain, consumed by fire. Slowly something is remembered." www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html

Rote movie

"On the voice over de Bruyn places himself behind the wheel of a car, an appropriate metaphor for his expatriate driven reflections on his feelings of exile, distance and loneliness. Necessarily unintelligent memories highlight habitual subjectivity of "walking through a landscape alone", "gypsy", "victim". Images of roadsigns, cars, billboards, the passing landscape; elegantly simple rotoscope (by rote?) drawings, recopied and texturally manipulated filmic images; the inevitability of the repetition of leader. A tired, yearning, moving film." http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html

Boerdery

"A time-lapse document of a farm house in the Netherlands mapping the changing seasons, the light and shadows." http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html

Understanding science

"Understanding Science is about breakdown of meaning, breakdown of relationship, trying to exist in that space between meaninglessness and understanding, at its cusp, its node, its no-man’s land.. It is a melting pot of more than just fragments of images, there are clusters of things, ideas, sounds, words, that swim in and out of your attention. I wanted this film to be a dense multidimensional collage of automatic writing, sound poetry and abstracting strings of images." http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html

2nd Hand Cinema

A celebration of the offal of cinema, old films, old soundtracks, drawing directly on the film, using stamps and food-dyes to create discarded imagery. To chew film up and spit it out as painting direct.