Author: Dean Kyte

Dean Kyte is a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker and flâneur. The author of “The Melbourne Flâneur” and “The Spleen of Melbourne”, he is a craftsman of fine literature who writes prose poetry and literary noir fiction about contemporary Melburnian life. Dean is also a translator of French literature, specializing in the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire. His new book of translations, “Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from ‘Toxic Blossoms’ and ‘Parisian Spleen’”, will be published by Dean Kyte Press in June 2025. In addition to publishing his own work, Dean provides Bespoke Document Tailoring and Artisanal Desktop Publishing services to Australian and international clients via his website, https://deankyte.com.

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‘From this epoch derive the arcades and intérieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas. They are residues of a dream world.’

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (p. 13)

Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building is a bizarre Byzantine bazaar, a constantinopolean cathedral consecrated to commerce in the grand nineteenth century tradition.  Through the great rounded arches of its windows at dusk, it gives the flâneur a fortuitous glimpse of a world of light and colour, like a movie painted in the monochromatic darkness of a cinema…

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Nearly five years in the making, the third instalment in a very irregular series of video essays examines Luis Buñuel’s controversial Spanish film Viridiana. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1961 Festival de Cannes, it would become a massive international hit—and a massive embarrassment to the Franco régime which commissioned it…

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‘… [T]he writer-dandy and by extension the director-dandy are arguably in a privileged position as they can apply their ideals to the limitless realm of fiction. The latter even has the potential to fulfil the depressive’s ultimate dream, the creation of a hermetic, artificial and complete world in accordance with his own highly individual ideal of beauty, his specific tastes.’ — Philip Mann, The Dandy at Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century.