Homecomings

Homecomings (Dirk De Bruyn, 1988) is a deeply hybrid work, drawing on every part of the artist’s expansive repertoire of film encounters. It blends direct cinema documentary scenes with a flurry of timelapse perspectives. The artist arrived with several cameras that are stationed throughout the houses the family stays in, and in nearby fields and waterways, to receive the passing of days and onlookers, boats and skies. Camera eyes gather perspectives the artist can’t; Dirk won’t see these images until they’ve been processed, weeks or months later. 

This film is dedicated to my darkness. My Dirkness. Dutchness. It all seems to rhyme. One of the reasons it’s taken so long to finish this film is losing contact with that Dutchness. And that brings out a certain darkness… 

– Voice-over from Homecomings 

As the film’s title announces, this is a home movie that sees the Australian artist and his young family visit Dirk’s former home in Holland. He left as a boy of eight a quarter-century earlier, now he’s returned with his partner Alison (who shares writing/voice-over duties) and their two sons Kees and baby Abram. In 1982, they alight on the village of Poederoijen where the artist takes stock, uncovering how near and far he remains from what used to be home.

The “homecoming” of the film’s title is both physical and artistic, as the artist deploys a series of animation techniques from earlier films, even lifting entire scenes from past work. These frame-by-frame reworkings lend even the most conventionally wrought domestic scenes – Kees playing with toy cars or watching TV, family dinners and playing in the yard – a distinctly painterly feel. Dirk turns family life into explosive bursts of flickering colour shapes. He spent five years patiently reworking original material, drawing directly onto film with markers one frame at a time, and then printing those passages (to create negatives) which were then intercut. What is central throughout is the body: the bodies of his family, of animals, and of course the body of the film material. On 20 September 1984, Dirk wrote in his diary:

Did a lot of rotoscoping directly on film. Still so much to do. It’s funny how memory affects the film, and feelings I have from just listening to the radio as I work become embedded in images. Continuous handling makes the environment rub off on the images and this happens on the social level too. It becomes a build up of our traditions, idols, sayings, mythology. This is probably more exactly happening to the living body and family, but I continually will it to be externalized on the film—its surface and its chronology. My hands must touch the surface. My hands ‘do.’ Is that why there is so much ritual of drawing on the film?¹

An expansive and ambitious work, Homecomings combines the two most traditional subjects of the home movie: the travelogue and family life. These stagings of the family are fuelled by the artist’s ambition to make a feature-length work in 16mm. “I get jealous of others’ success. It is a horrible thing, this jealousy.”² To hunger for success and attention, to create a landmark film, something that tries to synthesise and summarise lessons of the past – but now to step into a new form, not knowing how it might all come together, but attempting to create a work that might be more accessible than the abstract, hand-painted shorts of his earliest years. The prospect of an audience outside the clubhouse, a job outside the social service sphere, international peer recognitions and invitations – all of this was also part of the weight Dirk carried while making this movie. 

In 1988, Dirk published Homecomings: Some Diary Notes in the magazine Cantrills Filmnotes, the self-appointed voice for the Australian avant-garde movie scene. It opens with a quote from J.M. Barrie: “The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story and writes another…” It made me wonder not so much what Dirk intended, but what other story was told, what here is unintentional, what unspoken darkness has emerged to tell another unwanted tale?

Holland was a key country in the lucrative transatlantic slave trade, and the economic exploitation of Black and Brown peoples remained an economic cornerstone for centuries. These brutal transactions created the foundation for a deeply racist society, as evidenced in laws, public rituals, even comic books. Midway through the film, there is a scene of the Dutch comic Sjors & Sjimmie. As the pages flutter past at high speed, Dirk notes in voice-over:

Sjors was a white Caucasian, Sjimmie a dark Negro figure who acted pretty dumb. Sjimmie was always following Sjors around. But in later books, the ones out in Holland now, Sjimmie looks more Indonesian. And he seems to have more to say about what went on in the stories. Still, Sjors was the leader, but he had to exercise his power in more subtle ways. I enjoyed them in my youth, they were fascinating. They taught me to read.

An ominous closing note: white supremacy is naturalised. It teaches children how to read others, even as it weaves racist hierarchies into the body of language itself.

I remember as a child I went with my grandfather and father onto a Belgian Congo ship in Antwerp moored next to my grandfather’s barge and we toured the boat. I was scared I was going to be put in a pot and eaten! The positive thing about leaving Holland was that this racism was cut short and it was easier to undo these “ideas” through experiences in a place removed from Holland’s political unconscious.³

The notion of the author remains central to contemporary art. Media art emphasises and celebrates hyper subjectivity, the lonely refusenik, the genius outcast, the cowboy. But in this movie Dirk works against the grain: he shows us bodies that are always in relationship to each other, to neighbours and other school kids, to plants, animals and skies, and also to larger frames of nations and histories. In two key scenes that foreground race he shows us how subjects are spoken by their culture. The dominant habit patterns of our culture provide a frame for race, intelligence, what is beautiful, what is the future, what is a self, what a life is for. Living inside this frame (or frames) the subject “learns to read” in a naturalised “atmosphere of opinions” (ideology) that they are encouraged to perceive as their own. To learn to read or speak means first of all speaking the truth of the state. Resistance to these teachings is a painful path that breaks from “common sense,” a shared consensus, the unseen struggles that make the world of empire possible. 

Little wonder then that Dirk is forever at work re-viewing, remaking, overturning and transforming everyday scenes of the family. He is trying to unpack the invisible world, turning received opinions into questions, into a mysterious playground where objects and words and figures can be recombined – just as his son Kees shows him, furiously works away at his toy doll, twisting and turning its parts towards new and temporary identities. These material interventions are about an unmaking. As Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”⁴ How to encounter a chair as if you’ve never encountered one before? How to walk by the water as if you’ve never heard the word “river”? 

Dirk returns to animated forms again and again – sometimes rearranging objects or photographs a frame at a time – at other moments drawing directly on the film’s surface. In the fall of 1983, five years before he finished the film, he wrote in his diary: “Have started cutting ‘Letters to Australia.’ Sometimes feel like crying with the wealth of film. Sometimes I feel it’s all so amateurish. Then there’s the creative pulse of three generations: Kees and his drawings, me and my film, Arie and his sketches, Dit and her work…”⁵

He draws a line here between the art of his kids, the sketches of his uncle Arie and the embroidery of his sinister aunt Dit. To make art is also to make a family. Dirk reimagines domestic life from a child’s perspective, scenes are filled with frenetically changing colour fields, pulsing striations of overwhelming sensation. Sometimes he draws over an image, or juxtaposes an image with its marked-up accompaniment, playfully rephrasing a gesture of eating, sitting or walking. The act of cooking a meal turns into an analogy for making a film. These reveries of abstractions admit figures that might emerge again transformed, granted a temporary freedom that must be realised again and again, frame by frame, breath by breath.

Using indoor film stock outdoors produces a bluish winter scene on the snow-covered front lawn. Pixilation shows the family creating a figure out of snow while curious horses gather. The kneeling or bent-over figures of the family reappear as painted silhouettes, flickering in darkness, as if a script were being created out of the gestures of everyday life. The paintings make a frieze of these figures, like the illustrations in a book of yoga, offering a textbook of gestures and poses. Though they also offer startling re-combinations of these poses, in shuddering, quickly alternating moments that sometimes flash by too quickly to be seen. What the artist creates is not a grammar to be followed, but a new playground of possibilities. It offers a way of undoing the physical vocabulary of family, of making the body strange again, so that it can find alternatives to itself. What he is fighting for is freedom. And he learns from his kids that the best way to fight is through play, turning the certainties of adulthood into the forever transformations of childhood.

The family photo album is restaged in scenes sprinkled throughout the film, showing the artist’s grandparents, or his moody handsome father, or his own family, dressed up and down. He returns to the small town of Dordrecht using photos as his map, revisiting childhood haunts, filming the differences that decades have carved into the landscape. The most difficult moment is saved for last, revisiting his childhood home on Prinses Margrietstraat, where he smeared shit on the window as the neighbourhood boys looked on and laughed. He names it, “My first film.” Dirk wrote to me: “The dread of returning to Margrietstraat was where physically my memories of Holland lay. That little boy still resided there.”⁶

A quick cutting epiphanic collage closes Homecomings, with instants of the movie recollecting itself appearing alongside blizzards of family snaps flickering across the frame. They appear too quickly to be seen, their screen moment fractions of a second long, leaving only an impression of an impression. The collection of bodies named tribe or family. What does it mean to show pictures that can’t be seen? What is seeing when images pass this quickly? Dirk posts his images directly into my unconscious, deep inside the body, where they will slowly digest, secrete, fall apart, recombine, become part of this thing I call myself. Here, the artist works both to connect with and to undo the ideologies that framed him as a child, and reframed him in his new country of Australia, haunted by his father’s mental illness and abandonment – two fatherlands but no father. He steps away even from the fatherland of experimental cinema, with its heroic avatars of freedom, in order to create a hybrid work of interbeing and entanglement, where the bodies of his sons and partner and countries become each other, turning and transforming. Touching. 

Homecomings (1987 Australia 98 mins)

Prod, Dir, Scr, Ed, Phot: Dirk De Bruyn Mus: Michael Luck 

Endnotes