1964 FREEM (The PAINTING) 12' B/W 16mm [double frame] printed on 35mm
"The crystallized moment in which one can see the painter's reaction to his surroundings..."
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.
CO: K.G. Schmeink
1966 EEN PORTRET VAN (a PORTRAIT OF) 19' B/W 16mm
The painter Frank Lodeizen filmed at work and in his surroundings.
1970 HET BEZOEK (The VISIT) 20' B/W 16mm
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.
1973 UIT HET WERK VAN BARUCH d'ESPINOZA 1632-1677 32' C 16mm
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.
± 20 actors
1974 EEN GEBROKEN VOET (a BROKEN FOOT) 24' C 16mm
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.
1975 TIEN GEDICHTEN VAN HUBERT KORNELISZOON POOT 30' C 16mm
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].
SONATA 4' B/W 16mm
A concrete poem of words, sounds and images.
EEN GELOTE STRAAT [a STREET DRAWN LOTS] 13' B/W C 16mm
Amsterdam 1975. Images of "Keizerrijk", a narrow passage [alley] in the center of the city, nearby the Bungehuis.
screenplay: Frans van de Staak and Peter Piscaer
1976 MEINE HEIMAT MIJN VADERLAND 31' B/W 16mm
My Home Land my country
Talk to the landscape; texts from Friedrich Griese
1977 TERZAKE (To THE POINT) 44' C 16mm
Political texts from the journal In Search, edited by M.S. Arnoni
DE KORZELIGE KLANT (The CRUSTY CLIENT) 43' B/W 35mm
Seven persons, who didn't go to work, stayed together all day long while looking for a gift to surprise their boss.
DE GEVOELENS VAN EEN RODE PATRIJS DOOR HEMZELF VERTELD 16' B/W 16mm
The feelings of a red partridge told by himself
A story by Alphonse Daudet about a hunting-scene seen through the eyes of a partridge.
1978 OPTOCHT (PROCESSION) 28' B/W 16mm
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.
1980 De ONVOLTOOIDE TULP (The IMPERFECT TULIP) 77' C 16mm
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.
1981 ER GAAT EEN EINDELOZE STOET MENSEN DOOR MIJ HEEN 86' C 16mm
People Pass Through Me In Endless Procession
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.
1982 OP UW AKKERTJE (YOUR GARDEN PLOT) 91' C 16mm
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.
1983 Het VERTRAAGDE VERTREK (The DELAYED DEPARTURE) 107' C 16mm
For this film 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.
Texts by Jacq Firmin Vogelaar
1986 WINDSCHADUW (WINDSHADE) 71' C 16mm
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]
1989 ONGEDAAN GEDAAN (DEED UNDONE) 77' C 16mm
Two couples, four characters portrayed by eight actors, based on texts, some poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar.
The film follows four persons (each played by two different actors alternating in the roles) as they rush about the streets of Amsterdam, each of them extremely busy doing something. One highlight of the film is the reading of several of the poems of celebrated poet Gerrit Kouwenaar. Despite its severely experimental style and deliberate storylessness, this film was sufficiently inventive and rhythmically interesting to receive a warm reception from some critics. [Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide]
1990 Faverey
The poet Hans Faverey reads his own verse
1991 ROOKSPOREN (TRACES OF SMOKE) 105' C 35mm
The audience witnesses a woman being interrogated but they are not aware of what crime she is being accused of or whether she is guilty or innocent. Several witnesses are also questioned, individually as well as in groups.
The film is adapted from Lidy van Marissing's play De vrouw die een rookspoor achterliet ["The woman who leaves behind a trace of smoke"]. The protagonist in Traces of smoke is a woman interrogated by a man, whose identity and function remains obscure. Besides these interrogative scenes are scenes in which 26 witnesses [from A to Z] are introduced: in the first place in their own homes and after that in a big room next to the room of interrogation. Sometimes the interrogator addresses the woman directly, on other occasions he is just watching and listening to the witnesses, like a sounding-board. The witnesses too don't have an unequivocal identity, which remains as obscure as the interrogator's: their existence arises from the sensitivity and mysteriousness of their language.
1994 KLADBOEKSCÈNES (WASTEBOOK SCENES) 90' C 16mm
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.
1996 SCHIJNSEL (GLINT) 79' C 16mm
Every scene of the film comprises a dialogue between a man and a woman. The dialogues are fragmentary, in other words, the dialogue in one scene does not tie in with that of the next. In addition there is no development in the relationship between the actor and the actress towards a happy or unhappy ending. The dialogues are not only of substantial interest; it is above all material for the actors. The film balances on the boundary between portraying an intimate relationship between a woman and a man and the intimacy in the acting between the actor and actress. When an actor or actress hardly has any words in a scene, he or she portrays loneliness; when he/she has a monologue, then the attention is focused on speaking the text, on (the reflection about) being an actor.
SEPIO 31' C 16mm
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.
1998 DICHTWEEFSEL (VERSE TEXTURE) 20' C 16mm
An actress and an actor overhear parts of the play "Three Travelers Watch Sunrise" by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The dialogues of the three [Chinese] travelers and the girl [Anna] are spoken as a monologue by the actress. The actor just listens but occasionally he gives her instructions.
2001 LASTPAK (NUISANCE) 72' C 16mm
The protagonist is an actor, who views his own life like a play. He is a 'nuisance', but only to those who have lost interest in his performances, or are embarrassed by the company of a clown. His wife left him, because she can't stand him no more, which he accepted without protest. He leaves his home and city and chooses to stay for a while in a cottage at the country-side. Soon he gets a new audience, when he is visited by a neighbor-woman and her daughter: immediately they enjoy his performances, because of their simplicity and his improvisational talents. To them he is not an annoying nuisance, but on the contrary an unexpected relief from their daily routine...
* Look for titles by Frans van de Staak as (co)producer: Database IFFR