Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention

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.

I voice my sampling and re-editing practices via a 1970s experimental filmmaking in which I initiated my filmmaking practice, an outsider move I now understand as a return, as re-performing my parent’s marginality in this culture. I particularly resource Peter Gidal’s 70s manifestation of materialist film (see Gidal 1989), subjugated and considered utopian and apolitical within Peter Wollen’s two avant-gardes (Wollen 1982 [1975]) but which I have argued elsewhere returns in the digital situation of information overload and image hyper-malleability to express the impact and structure of traumatic experience (de Bruyn 2012). Having finally arrived as an Australian, I reclaim my parent’s history by relating the history of my subjugated practice. I offer aspects of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) and Martin Arnold’s Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), as evidence of materialist film’s recall internationally, as examples of a dialogue and re-integration of the avant-garde split that Wollen imagined and facilitated, and a method for unpacking the traumatic register of the 1950s New Australian identity. In the last part of this paper Arnold’s method is used to reveal the ideologies impacting on the newly arrived migrant in the 50s. This textual analysis is performed in the re-editing of mainstream film material relating to this period of Australian history.

This paper tries to do too many things. It talks in different voices and perspectives at once around one topic: trauma. This text overpowers me. It slips between and through the personal, the practical and the theoretical yet in probability settles on none of these in the end. Since trauma itself is about splinters and fragments, this may be so much folly. Let us hope there is still a story , some kind of settlement. Then there exists the film Traum A Dream, which 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.

American animator Robert Breer’s playfully short, quickly moving
animations ‘research’ the perceptual experiences of cinematic reception that are generally ignored and buried by the industrial model of film production. They are rich in technical innovation and resist the narrative expectations of an audience weaned on entertainment films. Breer has been credited in introducing the first
visual bomb to cinema in his loop film Image by Images I (Paris 1954).

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.

Elements of New Media moving-image work can be traced back into the body of experimental film. This is a trace that has been erased under Australian conditions. It is argued that such an overwriting is a ‘traditional’ cultural response also evident in a marking of the migrant as ‘New Australian’. Such blindness is contrasted to the situation in Canada. There a tradition of reflexive dialogue between technology and identity has been maintained in the move from the old to the new. As a representative text, Canadian Mike Hoolboom’s personal digital-video work Tom (2002) effectively migrates old experimental filmmaking technique into the digital ‘new’.

Arthur Lipsett’s N-Zone is the longest, loosest and last of the collage films he produced at Canada’s National Film Board (NFB). It marks the end-point of his trajectory from feted young genius to discarded problem child/eccentric within the NFB. Lipsett’s N-Zone begs comparison as poor cousin to Chris Marker’s Zone in Sans Soleil (1982) and Tarkovsky’s in Stalker (1979).

Dirk de Bruyn has been involved with personal film making as a practitioner, curator and writer in Melbourne and overseas for 30 years. He is currently teaching Digital Filmmaking at Deakin University. Curators and organisers, Anna Abrahams and Erwin van't Hart, members of the Filmbank, were responsible, with a group of colleagues, for bringing together and making accessible the history of Dutch experimental film. Two of their recent projects appeared at the 2004 Rotterdam International Film Festival: the D-Light screening program and the book MM2: Experimental Film in the Netherlands since 1960.

This paper is the textual component of a dialogic, performative, multi-media lecture that rereads Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) with reference to the global Occupy movement, and the role social media, and the proliferation of digital images play in the facilitation and hindrance of this recent form of political activism. It explicitly addresses the connections between global capitalism, public space and digital technology by responding to selective quotations from Debord’s book in creative and anecdotal registers.