Uncanny Suburbia, Hauntology and Post-Traumatic Poetics: Conversations with Dirk de Bruyn’s Conversations With My Mother (1990).

Abstract >>

This reflective essay stages a conversation with Dirk de Bruyn’s autobiographical film, Conversations with my Mother’ (1990) in order to foreground the importance of Melbourne’s working class western suburbs in articulating the filmmaker’s migrant identity. The Melbourne suburbs, as de Bruyn’s film intimates, are uncanny in the Freudian sense — spaces of dread haunted by a myriad of ghosts that generate a sense of anguish and foreboding. The essay also draws on Derrida’s concept of hauntology to situate the film within wider debates about experimental film practice, identity politics and the suburban spaces Robin Boyd once described as the ‘Australian Ugliness’.

From Perth to Melbourne is 58 hours on a bus. The journey covers over 3500 kilometres, and there’s very little to see on the way, save the relentless red desert of the treeless plain, and the bitumen road’s white lines flashing past. Despite the distance between them, there are many things that unite these Australian cities located at opposite ends of the continent. There’s AFL football and beer for starters. And then there are suburbs, especially the industrial, working-class areas located on the periphery of both metropolitan centres. I immediately perceived this particular affinity between Perth and Melbourne when I saw Dirk de Bruyn’s Conversations with My Mother (1990) for the first time. The connection had more do with what the film infers about the status of these suburban streetscapes than any architectural resemblance between their buildings. As a migrant to Australia, I felt a strong resonance between de Bruyn’s account of his traumatic experiences as a young migrant and my own.

In responding to the film, I want to preserve something of its personal, confessional tone, and use it as a touchstone for articulating my own experiences of racism, marginalisation and alienation. I want to converse with this film without wholly giving myself over to scholarly protocols. If there is a tension between the registers of writing I use, it is because of my desire to convey, or at least invoke the tone of de Bruyn’s film. I wrote an earlier draft of this paper as the voice-over component of an essay film, which, in keeping with the spirit of de Bruyn’s expanded cinema practice, I performed live at the Screening Melbourne symposium in February 2017. The essay film conveyed the commonalities and disparities between de Bruyn’s experience of migration and suburban life and my own by juxtaposing images of our respective suburban environments, and reinforcing the ways in which these locations continue to shape and inform our individual migrant identities. While the source and intensity of the traumatic experiences that continue to haunt our lives are of a different kind and order, we share a common experience as the victims of racist abuse, and this is one of the major reasons I find de Bruyn’s work so compelling. This essay hopes to accomplish a similar task.

‘Over East’

My first glimpse of Melbourne came in Black and White, accompanied by the ominous-sounding theme from Homicide, a pioneering television drama, which was still a ratings powerhouse in 1974. Seated in front of a 26inch Rank Arena television set, the streets of Melbourne seemed fuzzy, distorted by the rabbit-ear antenna’s tenuous grasp on the VHF signal. I still recall the way the actors always appeared with ghostly doppelgangers, another consequence of fragile VHF broadcast technology. Homicide gave me the impression that Melbourne was a dangerous, depraved place, overrun with ruthless criminals and teeming with all manner of unimaginable vices. Even then, I knew that it was a place I wanted to see, a place where I might also find a life one day. 

I was 12 years old when I first heard the deeply resonant baritone of Leonard Teale voicing the character of Snr. Sgt. David “Mac” MacKay. I was still coming to terms with the broad empty streets of Bedford Park, a suburb that was the antithesis of the ‘big smoke’ cities ‘over east’. In those days Bedford was a nascent northern suburb of Perth. Located 5km from the city centre, Bedford was a desolate place. Devoid of significant foliage, the summer sun scorched its bitumen roads, and made its pavements hot enough to fry an egg. Walking barefoot on those concrete paths was akin to walking on red-hot coals. Alone and forsaken, miles away from friends and family in the east end of London, Perth was hell. I missed the buzz of what I then considered to be my home city: London. But my parents were adamant that they had made the right decision in moving to the Perth suburbs. Here they acquired a double-brick house on a quarter acre block with a front and rear lawn. A lone gum tree grew in the backyard, which was populated by a vast array of plants, native and exotic. If you looked closely, you could see strange black insects crawl in the soil that nourished the thick blades of parched buffalo grass. All manner of winged pests buzzed and droned through the long summer months. I recall sitting on the back veranda of this newly acquired ‘dream’ home in an odd state of reverie, mesmerised by the croak of frogs and the rhythmic whine of locusts, which ramped up as the sun went down. This suburban house was my father’s pride and joy. For me, it never quite felt like home, although I still look up in wonder at the big, bright blue sky that envelops Perth and its surrounding suburbs every time I visit. I never fully embraced Bedford’s semi-rustic ambience, and consequently heard Leonard Teale’s three-ball baritone as a siren song, luring me towards the eastern shore.

I have a different view of Bedford today. It’s not quite true to say that the place feels like home, but I feel an odd, unsettling nostalgia for my adolescence as I float through its streets like a ghost, recalling random events and people from my past; these memories are often tinged with the trauma of experiencing racial abuse, both physical and verbal. I also see my long-dead father as I gaze on these suburban vistas, and recall the ‘ordinary trauma’ of his life (primarily the ritual humiliations he experienced as a brown-skinned migrant). Don’t be fooled by the blinding sunshine, and the wide-open thoroughfares, the streets of Bedford are mean streets. For many migrants, the whole question of what constitutes home is a complex one. This is especially so if you are what Sara Ahmad calls a melancholy migrant. That is, a figure whose “fixation with injury is read not only as an obstacle to his or her happiness, but also to the happiness of the generation to come, and to national happiness.”¹

Cool Melbourne

I was happy to leave the suburbs of Perth for the city of Melbourne, which in my youth became all the more alluring because of the almost mythical status of its underground music scene, perhaps most vividly portrayed in Dogs in Space (Richard Lowenstein,1986). Here was an even more mysterious world than the one I encountered through Homicide. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were obviously not unknown practices in Perth, but the Melbourne scene as depicted in Lowenstein’s film made Melbourne the epicentre of the Australian post-punk culture.

There was something exuberant and energising about the inner city’s sticky carpet pubs and dilapidated terraces that appealed to my youthful desire to exit suburbia for the low road glamour of inner-city Melbourne. So, at the ripe old age of 25 I finally headed east, and Melbourne, for a short time at least, lived up to its imaginary cinematic rendering in Lowenstein’s film. You didn’t need a car to traverse inner city Melbourne. Every possible social vice was easily accessible by tram or foot if you lived in St Kilda, Richmond or Fitzroy. The Sarah Sands Hotel marked the limits of my world in a northerly direction. Who knew what lay beyond Brunswick Street or the St Kilda Esplanade? Of course, I knew Melbourne had suburbs as drab as Perth’s, but they remained beyond my sphere of experience for many years. Cast out of my inner city Eden by the cold and abrupt termination of my employment at the fin de siècle; I eventually found myself working, if not living, in the Melbourne suburb of Burwood – a wasteland every bit as unsettling as Perth’s Bedford Park. The sun didn’t shine as often here, and there were fewer quarter acre blocks, but I immediately apprehended the unsettling ambience that connected both places. Not all suburbs are the same, however. In Australia, the further out you travel from the city centre, the more menacing the suburbs become, generally speaking.

Uncanny Suburbia

There is something disquieting about Australian suburbia. Don’t be fooled by the Kookaburras and rainbow coloured parrots flitting between banksia blossoms and Eucalypt branches, merrily chirping and squawking above the distant drone of traffic. Suburban tranquillity in Australia is superficial, in spite of its semi-rustic sights and sounds. Beware, for here be dragons! During springtime in Melbourne, menacing magpies perched on telephone wires often swoop on unsuspecting pedestrians, but malevolent birds are not the most significant source of danger in these parts. It’s the boredom that kills. It’s the boredom that provokes frustration. It’s the boredom that eats the soul and possesses the capacity to traumatise and alienate new arrivals from more populous locations. Here, the pace and rhythm of everyday life can be unnervingly slow.

On ground level, carefully manicured lawns and native foliage frame bland brick veneer dwellings with anonymous light tan exteriors and sloping roofs. Some of these homes have bay windows, porticos and verandas, token decorations that fail to conceal the dismal conformity that marks the architecture of the ugly suburbs, places where the working class and newly arrived immigrants, or ‘New’ Australians, as they were called in the 1950s and 60s, can be put in their proper place, on the fringes of Australian society. Of course, I am not the first person to draw attention to the disquieting quality of Australian suburbia. Chris Healy points out that “there is a relatively long history of intellectuals and others seeking to delineate the suburb. The positions and orientations of these commentaries range from pure hatred to mad love.” ²

Perhaps the most famous expression of contempt for Australian suburbia came from the playwright Louis Esson who declared that

The suburban home must be destroyed. It stands for all that is dull and depressing in modern life. It endeavours to eliminate the element of danger in human affairs. But without dangers, there can be no joy, no ecstasy, no spirited adventures. The suburban home is blasphemy. It denies life. ³

Experimental filmmaker, Dirk de Bruyn was a ‘New Australian’ who over the course of a long career has produced a singular cinematic perspective of suburban Melbourne. An immigrant from the Netherlands, de Bruyn arrived in Australia as an eight-year-old child with his mother and father in 1958.  His autobiographical film, Conversations with my Mother (de Bruyn, 1990), wanders through the suburban spaces that Robin Boyd famously called the “Australian Ugliness”. ⁴ Dirk de Bruyn is best known for his animated films and his expanded cinema performances, which Steven McIntyre describes with reference to what he calls the “aesthetics of process”.⁵ That is, a form of experimental cinema that resists closure through embracing the ephemeral qualities of live performance. Typically, de Bruyn simultaneously screens two or three abstract films “which comment upon and echo each other in a constant interplay of flicker-like positive and negative imagery.”⁶ McIntyre notes that de Bruyn’s soundtracks mirror this process, and are often complemented with the amplified sounds of his inarticulate grunts moans, and shrieks, which, according to McIntyre, resonate with Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, and the anti-aesthetics of punk that value noise over the purity of an easily apprehended signal.⁷

Conversations with My Mother (Dirk de Bruyn, 1990)

Conversations With My Mother, then, is an unusual work for de Bruyn. It’s suburban setting, and dialogic form set it apart from most of his work, at least in formal terms. However, as the filmmaker and his mother traverse the suburban spaces that trigger traumatic recollections, it becomes evident that the film goes some way towards providing an autobiographical perspective of the rest of de Bruyn’s oeuvre. This is not to say that this work offers a hermeneutic key that unlocks the meaning of the artist’s other films – they are too complex and elusive for such a reductive reading. Nevertheless, in explicitly confronting his suburban past, de Bruyn’s film contributes to our understanding of the migrant’s anxious and sometimes paradoxical relationship with Australian suburbia. Ghassan Hage was written eloquently about the home as an affective construct that, ideally generates “four key feelings: security, familiarity, community and a sense of possibility or hope. They are the feelings that the aim of home-building is to foster and maximise, to put together into a liveable structure.”⁸.

For many people, especially those immigrants from war-ravaged Europe, the suburban home provided sanctuary from a traumatic past. Moreover, many ‘New Australians’ – especially those accustomed to the confines of European domestic spaces – viewed the wide Australian streetscapes, with houses built on quarter-acre blocks, with a sense of optimism since these suburban dwellings provided them with the possibility of fostering the affects that Ghassan identifies as preconditions for creating a “liveable structure”. However, not every family managed to “feel at home” in the Australian suburbs. For some migrants, these spaces felt familiar in some ways, but disorienting in others, as de Bruyn’s film intimates, for the Australian suburbs can be uncanny in the Freudian sense – spaces of dread haunted by a myriad of ghosts. In psychoanalysis, the uncanny experience is marked by a sense of anguish and foreboding. People, places and things become strange, or, conversely, unfamiliar locations may contain traces of the familiar. Either way, the uncanny is perhaps best described as a kind of unsettling affect, a disquieting structure of feeling that can manifest in various ways – my sense of suburban disquiet, for example, is different from de Bruyn’s in form and intensity. While our respective experiences of migration involve unsettling affects, de Bruyn’s encounter with Melbourne’s suburbs, at least in its filmic articulation, is suffused with a spectral quality.

Conversations with My Mother and Uncanny Suburbia

For me, de Bruyn’s film is a suburban ghost story: it summons the spectre of de Bruyn’s deceased father and resonates with the psychoanalytic formulation of the uncanny. It also echoes my personal experience of suburbia on the other side of the country. In short, Conversations with my Mother presents a trans-generational dialogue between de Bruyn and his mother, Hillegonda, which interrogates the relations between the living and the dead with particular reference to de Bruyn’s father, Piet, a literal absence that nevertheless dominates the work. On a descriptive level, the filmmaker revisits various familial dwellings with his mother, engaging her in sometimes truculent conversations about a variety of topics. They discuss the trauma of migration (from the Netherlands to Australia), the alienation that comes from having to learn a new language and customs, domestic violence and the mental illness of de Bruyn’s father (which had tragic repercussions for the family). Both the filmmaker and his mother approach these topics with candour and raw honesty. The film is marked by its sincerity – that is, its unflinching treatment of personal trauma and anguish, of which I will say more at a later point in this paper. 

The film also resonates with Derrida’s observation, made in Ken McMullen’s film, Ghost Dance (Ken McMullen, 1983), that “Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the science of ghosts.”⁹ In what follows I will use Derrida’s formulation as a guiding thread to read de Bruyn’s film as a testimony about personal trauma and the nature of cinema as a spectral medium (if it is even possible to talk about distinctive mediums in the present culture). In his paper ‘Derrida on Film: Staging Spectral Sincerity’, Michael Bachmann takes each element in Derrida’s formula and spells out the relationships between them – with regard to the relationship between psychoanalysis and spectrality, he notes that psychoanalysis possesses a spectral dimension.¹⁰ In broad terms, spectral truth keeps returning from the unconscious without becoming manifest, or present in a direct form.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and the cinema goes beyond the appropriation and deployment of psychoanalytic concepts in film theory. Bachmann notes that both psychoanalysis and the cinema emerge at approximately the same time.¹¹ This coincidence is not lost on Walter Benjamin, who, in his seminal essay, ‘Art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, observed that the cinema develops an ‘optical unconscious’ –  that is, it enables viewers to perceive things that are beyond the threshold of human sight through various optical technologies and operations. Thus, the camera’s

lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions, introduce us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. ¹²

So, whereas psychoanalysis reveals unconscious drives, energies and impulses, the cinema shows hitherto concealed aspects of the visible world. Moreover, the cinema possesses the ability to make spectators view phenomena below their threshold of conscious cognition – an insight related to the ideological analysis of narrative cinema by the Screen theorists in the 1970s, but also to the anti-illusionist structural/materialist aesthetics of Peter Gidal, which resonates more explicitly with Derridean ontology (see Gidal’s introductory essay in his Structural Film Anthology). However, it is the relationship between spectrality and cinema that is arguably the most suggestive in terms of reading de Bruyn’s film.¹³ The cinema is a kind of ghost machine since it can make absent bodies visible, bodies that are not present in the flesh. Derrida calls this ability “intrinsic virtualisation”: that is, the medium’s ability to record, reproduce and archive images.¹⁴

Of course, the cinema is not the only technology with this capacity. All tele-technologies are capable of multiplying ghosts. Derrida makes this clear in his appearance in the film, Ghost Dance. Devices that can bring distant beings close through telecasting, technologies that can record, store and retrieve images are ubiquitous and capable of multiplying ghosts, which Derrida sees as a good thing, ‘long live ghosts,’ he enthusiastically proclaims to McMullen’s camera.

But what of the ghosts who haunt de Bruyn’s film? Let us focus on the father, Piet de Bruyn, the absent presence that haunts the film. Piet de Bruyn suffered from some psychosis, possibly schizophrenia – he heard voices in his head, and his mania drove him to commit acts of violence on both his wife and son. Perhaps the alienation he experienced as a new Australian in the disquieting suburbs of Melbourne contributed to his condition or the pressures associated with being the patriarch of the family and being compelled to perform the roles of husband and father in a new land. We can speculate about Piet’s condition from the testimonies articulated by the filmmaker and his mother, Hillegonda. Conversations with my Mother occupies a unique place in de Bruyn’s oeuvre. At 100 minutes, it is one of the artist’s longest films and one that is mostly confessional in tone and intent. As previously noted, this work seemed at odds with de Bruyn’s experimental animations and expanded cinema performances celebrated by Steven McIntyre. However, de Bruyn’s consistent interest in the relationship between film form and affect is evident in this work. From the outset, the spectator is confronted with the contrast between the bland streetscapes of the working-class western suburbs of Melbourne, and the impatient anxiety of de Bruyn, who repeatedly asks his mother to confess her feelings about past events. “What are you feeling,” he implores his mother time and time again as they move from one family home to another. Like dramatic literature’s most famous haunted son, Hamlet, de Bruyn conveys the sense that ‘time is out of joint’ and his film is an attempt to set things right by confronting the spectre of his father and making sense of the traumatic incidents that occurred in the places he revisits. The titular conversations are, in turn, measured, humorous and poignant, and they all appear to uncover hitherto concealed truths about the artist’s emotional life, and his traumatic childhood. The film functions as what we might call a therapeutic conversation for the director – it is a discussion that brings repressed emotions and memories to consciousness without the assistance of an analyst. Remarkably, de Bruyn plays analyst and analysand drawing on his experience as a social worker at the time. But he is also referencing experimental cinema in its diaristic confessional forms especially the work of James Benning and George Kuchar – Kuchar’s films, especially Cult of the Cubicles (1987) and Creeping Crimson (1987) share certain thematic and formal elements with de Bruyn’s aesthetic. This unflinching quest for sincerity and the truth makes for uncomfortable viewing, especially during those moments of intimate revelation, even as the contradictory recollections of mother and son demonstrate that truth and sincerity are always contaminated by their opposites – there can be no definitive account of trauma if one follows the logic of spectrality. The relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema is evident, but the film’s spectral qualities are not so easily apprehended.

The de Bruyns lived a somewhat itinerant life as a family, moving house regularly, and the film creates an opposition between the public spaces of Melbourne suburbia, the footpaths, roads and gardens, and the interiors of the homes they occupied. And it is within the intimate domestic areas that the traumatic drama of de Bruyn’s early life is played out. The bricks and mortar function as memory triggers for the protagonists – like an architectural analogue of Proust’s madeleine cake. The ghosts of memory and trauma (the past) reside within the walls of their old homes, and de Bruyn notices that his mother tends to speak English in the public spaces and Dutch within the confines of the various households that they visit. This dynamic is also about power – de Bruyn speaks in English when he seeks to take control of the conversation and narrative, as he knows he has his mother at a disadvantage.

Perhaps the film’s most confronting moment takes place in the claustrophobic bungalow that was once the de Bruyn family home. Mother and son attempt to recreate their former lounge room by recalling the position of various pieces. The filmmaker recalls the dual life he led as a boy, presenting a composed public persona at school to mask the traumatic dysfunction at home. He recounts, and physically maps out, a memory of his father attacking his mother with a kitchen knife. Even at this point, the conversation proceeds in a matter-of-fact tone until de Bruyn asks Hillegonda, “If he was standing here, what would you say to him?” Without missing a beat, she responds, “Nothing. I would be too scared.” She then turns the tables, as she does at various points during the film and asks, “What would you say?” At this point, there is a cathartic release as de Bruyn loses his composure and addresses his absent father, asking him to explain why he behaved as he did: “Why couldn’t you be normal?”, he cries. Sobs!

But this – this cathartic release – does little to quell de Bruyn’s restlessness. The documentary archive just multiplies the ghosts, turning both the artist and his mother into spectres, which can never be exorcised, for as Derrida says spectrality does not concern the ways that past shapes the present since these categories cannot be self-sufficient if we follow the logic of the trace. Instead, the Derridean conception of spectrality recognises that time will always be out of joint, and the struggle for resolution and justice can only ever be provisional. Derrida’s neologism, hauntology, unsettles any simple formulation of Being as presence – of course, Derrida developed this concept in his book Spectres of Marx, which identifies the ways that the heritage of Marxism disturbs both triumphal neo-liberalism and simplistic conceptions of dialectical materialism.¹⁵ Derrida’s ontology of différance always has a spectral dimension that disrupts absolute distinctions between past, present and future. Similarly, pure distinctions between the living and the dead, the virtual and the actual, the present and the absent, material flesh and immaterial spirit, are unsettled by the figure of the ghost, and the philosophical trepidations generated by de Bruyn’s film ultimately preclude any simple forms of closure. The film’s last scene sees de Bruyn and his mother sitting on the concrete veranda of one of their many previous suburban homes in Melbourne. The location for this final conversation is important – it takes place in a house once owned by de Bruyn’s mother, built on land bought by the filmmaker’s father in North Altona (it is worth noting that few woman during the 1970s and 80s managed to secure a home loan). Hillegonda and her son talk, exchange memories, and tell each other more ghost stories as birds chirp, and the off-screen music masks the sounds of the conversation that continues as the film fades to black. Yes, cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the science of ghosts, and this formula is as applicable to narrative film as it is to documentaries and more abstract, experimental film forms.

Altona today

Coda: Post-Traumatic Poetics

As I have already noted, Conversations with My Mother directly addresses some of the familial traumas that find expression in de Bruyn’s abstract animations – indeed, the disintegration of family life is a key theme in the artist’s oeuvre (see for example, Traum A Dream (Dirk de Bruyn, 2003) which records the disintegration of the filmmaker’s marriage through a collage of sound bites, and abstract images. Mike Hoolboom argues that the film is “not a story which can be told and revisited – instead, it is a mound of sensation, a blinding hurt.”¹⁶ Steven Ball provides a vivid account of de Bruyn’s aesthetic when he observes that de Bruyn’s

restless, home-made hybrid animations typically cut together a pixellation driven, fast-forward clash of graphical images, hand-drawn, direct-to-film text, erasure and manipulation of found footage; ideas are just grasped before successive fresh images and repetitions move through another set of visual experiments, leaving the signature movement trace of a gesture.¹⁷

Several critics, including de Bruyn himself, have argued that post-traumatic memories resist narrative representation, and the bulk of de Bruyn’s films testify to this claim.¹⁸

For example, Cathy Caruth contends that traumatic memories cannot be expressed in narrative form because they are not immediately “integrated into a completed story of the past.”¹⁹ Clearly, Conversations with My Mother provides a different approach to de Bruyn’s usual materialist approach to engaging with trauma; its significance, as this paper has hopefully demonstrated, lies not so much in providing a privileged key to understanding the artist’s experimental work, but in locating his creative practice within Melbourne suburbia – an uncanny space that provides an important, yet overlooked context for de Bruyn’s films.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Endnotes