An artist and engraver, Frans van de Staak (1943-2001) first discovered the power of cinema in a sequence from Antonioni’s Red Desert. He enrolled in film school and created CINEECRI, a journal that he distributed himself.
By saving up the grant money he received for his graphic design work, his short films from the 1970s – early attempts to transpose texts by established writers such as Korneliszoon Poot and Spinoza to the screen – laid the groundwork for his cinema. Rather than aiming for perfect reproduction, he filmed his amateur actors in their very effort to give voice to the text. Frans van de Staak judged whether a take was successful more by ear than by eye.
At the end of the decade, he began a collaboration with filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, his partner, who would edit four of his films, including his first feature, De onvoltooide tulp. By then teaming up with the poet Lidy van Marissing to write the screenplay for two films, he delved into the everyday use of language, exploring idioms and the interplay between the editing of poetry and film. According to Jean-Marie Straub, Frans van de Staak was the only worthy heir of Dziga Vertov. He sought to make the world a better place by inviting the viewer to observe it rather than by telling them stories.
In his workshop, he gathered, restored, and built all the necessary equipment for editing – sound and image – and for voice recording (he sometimes preferred to re-record a text). This studio, where he spent a large part of his life, provided him with the necessary autonomy to make films on a tight budget. He also welcomed many beginners, sometimes even producing their films.
With the unclassifiable poet Gerrit Kouwenaar – first as a reader of his own poems (Windschaduw) and a second time as the inspiration for a film (Ongedaan gedaan) – his attention to gesture (the sensory, the manual) met the attention he already gave to speech. Music, regularly composed by Bernard Hunnekink (trombonist for Willem Breuker), was also a key material. Similarly, everyday objects, gestures, and elements of nature were filmed and used in recurring cutaway shots, giving this very concrete cinema a strange, meditative quality.
In the 1990s, with full mastery of his craft, Frans van de Staak began using professional actors. His films, however, were still rarely seen outside of the Rotterdam Film Festival, where Huub Bals was a great admirer. Before his final film, the clownish Lastpak, he returned to two short forms, including Dichtweefsel, based on the work of Wallace Stevens, the poet for whom the aesthetic experience provides the key to a fundamental reality through the vital role of imagination.
In his expressed desire to make things tangible when the temporality of our own lives escapes us, Frans van de Staak certainly succeeded in setting our imaginations in motion, and he did so far beyond the time of the screening itself.
Image: Schijnsel (Frans van de Staak, 1996)