Analogue stress

Made from reworked and reanimated found industrial and discarded personal footage. The main focus is the soundtrack which has been reconstructed from scratches, pen marks, Letraset strips and the music and phrases of found films.

Published versions: #1, #2, #3 are all slightly different to each other.

Folding history back onto itself

The history of artists working with the moving image constitutes a substantial dialogue with technology. The ability to construct a complex visual narrative from disparate visual material is a developed skill that is the product of such an evolving dialogue with technique. The use of found and stolen images and their re-processing within such an ‘experimental’ practice can be experienced as transforming the originating material and emphasizing aspects previously hidden. Such ‘shock tactics’ performed on historic material will be examined in the film work of Peter Tscherkassky (Dreamwork Austria 10 minutes 2001) and Martin Arnold (Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy Austria 15 minutes 1998). The traumatic effect of these films will be examined in relation to Maya Deren’s ideas of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ editing and Chris Brewin’s neurological research into traumatic remembering which proposes the interaction between two types of memory systems: SAM (Situational Accessible Memory) and VAM (Verbally Accessible Memory).

Communicating the 'unspeakability' of violent acts in cinema

This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning‟s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker‟s „Trauma Cinema‟, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper‟s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein‟s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify „unspeakable‟ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein‟s violent acts, rather than Protti‟s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film‟s structure and content.

Byron Bay hysteria

"This time lapse video work of De Bruyn's evidences the bold rythmic structures found in his nahd-painted 16 mm film work. A prolific fimmaler, de Bruyn is a master of his craft and shows in this work that that mastery knows no bounds in this format."  Fractured Light exhibition catalogue

H2

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 negative in a kind of psycho-dramatic abstraction, all the more unsettling than Gordon Parks's originating gangster populated dystopia. It is a reminder of how, by simply repositioning the frame, extant material can be transformed.

The unwanted land

The exhibition/art project will consisted of work by artists who have been through migration and who, in their work, reflect upon issues of relocation/resettlement. The artworks were in the form of spatial (multi/mixed media) installations (and performances) aiming at visualizing migration experience and identification to achieve (new) contexts (and perspectives).

The performance of trauma in moving image art

This thesis argues that the perceptual apparatus required to view abstract and graphic films can illuminate our understanding of trauma as a social/medical concept. such 'materialist' films predict the new contemporary 'Gestalt of the senses' ushered in by digital media.