Frans van de Staak

A portrait of a woman and 26 witnesses who appear to be accusing her of something but we'll never know what. We'll never even know who she is and who the witnesses are. A complex experiment about space, voice and speech.

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Poet Hans Faverey reads from his own work.

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Frans van de Staak, Holland's most prominent avant-garde director, made this film "...about people who want to get something done. I leave out the why as well as the results. What's left is the moment of endeavour. There are two couples. The four characters are played by eight actors. There is little dialogue. Sometimes a couple does not seem to live together, just to be alive together in the same room. Each one of them at one time walks through an anymous part of Amsterdam. They put their feet down with a will, clicking their way through town. We do not know where or why they are going. To a meeting, to get some exercise, nowhere? They have difficulty in communicating. They leave notes to each other on the table rather than talk. The film sometimes mocks their intensity. It is surprising that such a strange film can keep the viewer's attention for an hour and a quarter. But it certainly does. (Dutch Fim 1988-89)

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Constructed around two poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar, who reads his own verse off- screen. The film focuses on a man and woman packing, going away, arriving at their destination, packing again, and going back to square one. This avant-garde film is a curious melding of poetry and visual narration. Director Frans van de Staak coordinates the reading of two poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar, a well-known Dutch poet, with visual sequences of a couple going off on vacation. The vacation idyll is interspersed with nature shots and minimal, barely-present dialogue. Soon the couple is packing up and heading back to their daily routine -- accompanied by poetry that reinforces the image of unsatisfactory lives, adrift and floating with the current, no destination in sight. [Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide]

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Jacq Vogelaar and Frans van de Staak cooperated in a sort of struggle between language and film: their perspectives are different, even exclusive. For Vogelaar his primary preoccupation with language as a novelist is anger, and rebuilding its expression as an individual fixation of the embodied space, whereas for Van de Staak as a filmmaker language is embedded in the activity of making film, which goes beyond any linguistic fixation... "The actor's unintended gestures, manner of moving or change of bodily position, is as important as the text he speaks -all that has to be on the same level of significance, and by doing so it becomes meaningless, because only then it dissolves." No one scene [except the first] 'exists' in advance, fixed in a script, but each scene was created and realized in reaction to a previous scene, which was then screened after its recording. As a result of this 'domino-method' the scenario was written after the making of the film, which took one year.

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The film consists of 43 scenes which are fragments and do not tell a story but may be compared to musical intermezzi - they give the impression that they have been slotted in between other scenes, but the nature of these other scenes is not made clear. (Wim Schlebaum)

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The film consists of 25 scenes. Each scene is performed by eight actors [out of a group of nine]; the ninth actor continually changing places with another actor who appears in only one or two scenes. The music plays a role like an actor: as soon as the music speaks the actors are silent. The writing of the scenario and making of the film were mainly a question of searching for a 'theme', and the film itself is also concerned with 'what it's about'. This 'unstated' aspect is approached from all its related facets. Scenes were made on the themes of anger, love of pleasure, refusal, disintegration, fear. Both the images, and the texts rise above the everyday level and are no longer narrative. (Wim Schlebaum)

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This film is Frans van de Staak's first full feature, for which he wrote 28 scenes and worked with a cast of 29 actors and 29 actresses. Each scene is performed by a male and a female; some scenes are repeated by different actors. Once again he financed this production from his own savings. (Wim Schlebaum)

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Four persons travel by rail to visit a city. On arrival they take a bicycle to continue their tour and join occasionally a passing protest manifestation. The camera is never far off their trail.

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Political texts from the journal In Search, edited by M.S. Arnoni (Wim Schlebaum)

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A story by Alphonse Daudet about a hunting-scene seen through the eyes of a partridge. (Wim Schlebaum)

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Seven persons, who didn't go to work, stayed together all day long while looking for a gift to surprise their boss. (Wim Schlebaum)

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Talk to the landscape; texts from Friedrich Griese (Wim Schlebaum)

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A film poem in which the words, spoken by an actor, do not refer to concrete objects or "reveal their meaning" but function like notes in a musical score.

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Amsterdam 1975. Images of "Keizerrijk", a narrow passage [alley] in the center of the city, nearby the Bungehuis. (Wim Schlebaum)

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Ten poems from Hubert Korneliszoon Poot from the Dutch farmer and poet Hubert Poot, who lived in the 18th century -declared by Donald de Marcas [actor]. (Wim Schlebaum)

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The Dutch writer Hendrik Cramer (1844-1944) lived and worked in Paris when he published (1933) a screenplay for a documentary Un pied cassé, Documentaire in Les Cahiers Jaunes. (Wim Schlebaum)

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From Spinoza's Ethica 82 sentences were selected without a strict coherence and re-assembled in seven components. Each component was filmed four times at least, in a different setting with different actors. Spinoza's sentences are taken as dialogues 'tout court', and not as a collection of opinions. Spinoza's style of philosophical thinking is presented as an activity in the first place, which is then revealed by each individual actor in his own way.

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A girl visits a place where a boy and another girl stay for a while. Afterwards they all leave. The film was shot in a period of two weeks, with one week of rest in between. Each scheduled day the complete script was played several times again. Such a 'take of the whole script' was only partially shot. [Actually no one of the actors was rehearsed: one learns the text by reading it in action.] This repetition stands in sharp contrast with the fact that the actors and members of the crew create an ad hoc context that never became final. For example: 'this is a visit'. There is an essential correspondence between the situation on the set and the spectator's observation of what happens on the screen later, which is nevertheless also its most distinctive characteristic.

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Application of double frame technics with two synchronized 16mm projectors. Each frame functions alternately as the [abstract] painter's canvas and as a 'concrete' filmscreen itself.

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The painter Frank Lodeizen filmed at work and in his surroundings.

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Like in his short Ten poems of Hubert Kzn Poot (1975) there is just one protagonist in Sepio. A woman is immersed within a landscape in summertime and she adores her beloved one in everything that emerges from her surroundings.—atelierfransvandestaak.nl

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The film is adapted from a play by Cyrille Offermans Lichtenberg, scenes at the dawn of a new era". Although the protagonist shares some features with the experimental physicist and writer George Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), who wrote the famous Sudelbücher and numerous letters, the film does not pretend any historical accuracy with respect to the real Lichtenberg, but focuses on Offermans' hybrid [partial fictitious] personage. The result is not an interplay between fact and fiction, but a sort of view of Lichtenberg, mouthing some 19th- and 20th- century authors he couldn't have known, strictly speaking, but whose alleged fantastic formulations seem to follow from his own writings in a natural way.

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A portrait of a woman and 26 witnesses who appear to be accusing her of something but we'll never know what. We'll never even know who she is and who the witnesses are. A complex experiment about space, voice and speech.

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Masquerade by mother and daughter as Salomé and Herod.

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A bus driver on a regular route in the 'polder' moves into a new house with his wife. They are the first inhabitants of a new estate. At the same time, a homeless man and an woman movie into the driver's bus.

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Documentary about the work of Venetian painter Carpaccio.

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Frans van de Staak, Holland's most prominent avant-garde director, made this film "...about people who want to get something done. I leave out the why as well as the results. What's left is the moment of endeavour. There are two couples. The four characters are played by eight actors. There is little dialogue. Sometimes a couple does not seem to live together, just to be alive together in the same room. Each one of them at one time walks through an anymous part of Amsterdam. They put their feet down with a will, clicking their way through town. We do not know where or why they are going. To a meeting, to get some exercise, nowhere? They have difficulty in communicating. They leave notes to each other on the table rather than talk. The film sometimes mocks their intensity. It is surprising that such a strange film can keep the viewer's attention for an hour and a quarter. But it certainly does. (Dutch Fim 1988-89)

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La terra in due means the earth of the landlords versus that of the peasants who actually cultivate it. This film uses evocative photogrphy and a dignified rhythm to depict the death of peasant culture. This fact is brought home by the super 8 footage shot ten years earlier. Blank's familiarity with the villagers and their unsselfconsciousness in front of the camera produce a high degree of authenticity in this account of culture of the 'mezzadria'.

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