Frans van de Staak: A Shoemaker’s Son in Amsterdam
October 22, 2024, 7pm & 9pm at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Hailed by Jean-Marie Straub as the “only true heir to Dziga Vertov,” filmmaker and painter Frans van de Staak (1943-2001) was a prolific underground figure who held a special place in Dutch cinema. His films investigate space-time and language with a mixture of anarchy and rigor—wild intuitions fixed on film with extreme clarity. Whether stripping works of literature for parts or working from his own deconstructed scenarios, Van de Staak filmed the alchemical meeting of fiction and actuality, of a text and its surroundings, working somewhere at the crossroads of poetry, theater, and essay, always with a liberating sense of play and sly, almost slapstick humor. While a consummate avant-gardist, he never rejected the elements of a traditional film: actors (and non-actors), camera movements, staging, dialogue, scenes, incident, gestures. Instead, he alienated these ingredients through off-kilter repetitions and dislocations, scattering narrative to the wind to see what tension and energy was left behind. Often collaborating with experimental writers such as Gerrit Kouwenaar (Deed Undone) and Lidy van Marissing (People Passing Through Me in an Endless Procession), Van de Staak was particularly invested in everyday speech and routine endeavors: activities like walking in the street or mending an old pair of shoes. He set his eyes squarely on these ordinary things to make them strange again—suddenly, they appear brand new to us.
A filmmaker who “rarely [gave] any sign of caring whether or not people came to see his films,” Van de Staak pursued a deliberately marginal cinema. He made his films on a small scale and in a collectivist spirit, focusing his energy on creating underground networks of solidarity among independent directors. Originally housed above his father’s cobbling workshop, Van de Staak’s film studio was an important meeting place and production facility within Amsterdam’s experimental film community. He helped nurture a vibrant cadre of young and beginning filmmakers, and developed close ties with other eminent Dutch experimentalists, like Johann van der Keuken. When asked about the driving force of his work, he said, “Desire, I’m driven by desire, not by anger, yet a very strong emotion indeed. This desire arises from the tension between being alone and being together in society.” In much the same spirit, we are proud to inaugurate our first ‘Theater of the Matters’ program, presenting two key works by Van de Staak from the 1980s on imported 16mm prints, plus a rare 35mm screening of Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice, which Straub-Huillet dedicated to Van de Staak and “a few others.” This series will be among the first and only of its kind to be organized in the United States.
Related texts
The Fight is Worth It: An Interview with Frans van de Staak
‘A Crumbled Man Counts for Ten’: An Essay on People Passing Through me in an Endless Procession
Frans van de Staak on Antonioni, Murnau, Van der Keuken
Screening 1
Ongedaan gedaan
(Deed Undone)
Dir. Frans van de Staak
1989. 73 min. 16mm.
In Dutch with live English subtitles.
Courtesy EYE Filmmuseum.
Two couples. Four people portrayed by eight actors. They come and go in the street. We don’t know where or what for. Always alone, terribly busy. And we see them together at home: they laugh, quarrel, write notes, fuss around, make love, speak. Nothing connects. But there are patterns, and ruptures. Poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar appear as intertitles, giving a strange unease to these workaday scenes—a poet who tried to “cut the throat of a word.” Per the director, it’s “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 endeavor.” As lucid as it is hypnotic—a Van de Staak classic.
Preceded by:
Toute révolution est un coup de dés
(Every Revolution Is a Throw of the Dice)
Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
1977. 10 min. 35mm.
In French.
Courtesy Belva Film.
In Père Lachaise cemetery, by the wall where the last men and women of the Paris Commune were executed in 1871, nine speakers recite Stéphane Mallarmé’s elusive free verse poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.” Straub and Huillet displace Mallarmé’s text to a dense and mysterious film-construction. Each speaker is assigned one of the alternating typefaces of the poem, their pauses commemorating the ‘silence’ of the page's blank spaces. Dedicated to “Frans van de Staak, Jean Narboni, Jacques Rivette, and a few others,” the film was released in 1977 on a double bill with Jean-Claude Biette’s The Theater of the Matters.
Screening 2
Er gaat een eindeloze stoet mensen door mij heen
(People Passing Through Me in an Endless Procession)
Dir. Frans van de Staak
1981. 86 min. 16mm.
In Dutch with English subtitles.
Courtesy EYE Filmmuseum.
Written with poet-playwright Lidy van Marissing, the film consists of a string of scenes featuring the same eight actors, with one unfamiliar face in every set-up. They speak lines while sitting in a church, strolling along a dyke, or playing cards, the text not acted out as such, but declaimed: the performers become corridors for speech. Their sentences—by turns commonplace and cryptic—take on the air of an incantation. And the meaning of the words comes undone. A revolt against the enchantment of movies, Van de Staak guides us to a liberated zone where the codes of everyday talk and behavior are estranged and upturned.
Special thanks to Jesse Trussell (BAM); Marjolein Bakker & Olivia Buning (EYE Filmmuseum); Rieks Hadder (Mokum Filmdistributie); Katherine Pickard (Miguel Abreu Gallery); Barbara Ulrich Straub & Christophe Clavert (Belva Film); Noah Waxman (Consulate General of the Netherlands); Veva Leye; Jaime Levinas; Inge de Leeuw.
