"Play with it a little bit and let yourself go completely a couple of times." "That's the Amer power plant." "That was my view for fifteen years." "I usually say I make experimental films." "It's a term that's used quite a lot... but its meaning is clear and it does describe what I do." "I do feel like someone who does experiments in a laboratory." "My first films were runaway films." "They were simple." "I'd turn on the camera and run away into a landscape." "I shot them in different landscapes like cityscapes and forests." "And I ended up using three of the runaway films." "The first was made on the roof of the Citty Theater." "They are films that perhaps... have more to do with a dream world." "Sometimes they tend to lean towards surrealism." "But they always start out from reality." "My parents lived in the country." "I shot the film of the car there... because the car wasn't registered and I couldn't drive it." "And as a backdrop, the countryside is much more abstract than a city." "It makes the film timeless." "Keep going straight and you'll probably run into us." "A red car." "We'll be right there." "Yes, bye." "My first films were performances." "They weren't intended as films." "I wanted to portray specific actions and images." "But because I did them in the country and couldn't attract an audience... I would videotape them or film them as proof." "It was more like a lab experiment... and I wanted to hold people's interest for the whole three minutes of the film." "But the moment the car would run over me, there would be a message." "I don't like films with a message." "It's the idea that counts." "So you need something to hold people's interest, but definitely not a message." "In the dark, you want to have fun and to see something unusual... or things presented in a different way." "Hence all my films include my penchant for violence and shootings." "Even if it's hidden, it's always present." "It's a nice idiom." "I like the idiom of action films." "In Hong Kong, violence is embodied by the airplanes." "They're phenomenal, enormous and that sound... I decided to shoot Hong Kong on orthochromatic film." "It's not very sensitive and it's high-contrast." "It resembles the stock early films were shot with." "And I liked the idea... of the city and the planes looking like they were filmed in 1900." "Before you wake up you see things, only you don't know what." "This is a merry parade." "It could be early morning... but it could also be evening." "As the sun goes down." "They're vehicles, all of them." "They look like objects, but they're not." "I have made documentary films." "But in them, I would hunt down the past... as it is manifested... in weathered walls, cities and ancient places." "This collage was made with Nepalese paper." "After many baths and color additions, it turns out to be finished." "is this too wide?" "This one was also made with Nepalese paper." "Because the text shines through the surface... it resembles an old wall." "That was the idea." "The last device I made I used to film Book of Mirrors." "And I'll be making more films with it." "What it does is..." "ActualIly, what it does, is make images directly with light." "The device consists of three parts." "It has a lamp, a light source." ", Then there's a film camera but without a lens." "I dismantled everything except the mechanism that transports the film." "And the shutter, so that the emulsion is completely exposed." "I built a black box in between and in the box... I can place devices that let light seep through." "In fact, they're little black discs with slits in them." "The slits force the light to unravel... and so you get interference patterns of the light itself." "It hits the emulsion, so what you see are images that the light itself makes." "As a film or video student at the art acaderrmy... we were always involved in discussions on the moving image." "I wanted to translate the moving image into a physical and heroic act." "I came up with the statue of Hermes, the protector of travelers." "And I wanted to translate that image into movement." "After having saved the statue, it was very difficult for me... to store the statue in a closet and just forget about it." "So I really felt I had to find a way... to say farewell to the statue." "So that was my next project." "That became the film Route Sédentaire." "It's a long walk from Amsterdam to Lascaux... where l drag the statue along with me and the statue slowly wears away." "Lascaux is where they found man's earliest drawings." "They're chalk drawings of animals found in the caves there." "It's a very symbolic place." "It's where image originated." "Here it is." "This is his head." "The back is worn away a bit." "He broke his neck." "And this is part of the torso." "Here you can see his neck and part of his arm." "I still have a piece in here as well." "This was his testicle." "It fell off in northern France." "Right after we crossed the border, really." "It was so sad, I took it with me." "I wear a wet suit." "There are wet and dry suits." "That's a dry suit." "So you can keep your clothes on." "What they're wearing are dry suits." "I'm filming underwater now." "When fish aren't feeding, they're slower than humans." "Being lively in the water doesn't work, because of its viscosity." "It alters your perception of time." "So time is a factor if you ask yourself.." "How long do I look at things?" "Or, why do I look at something?" "I feel that has to do with time." "The canoe film is about looking back and rocking the boat." "What inspired it is that a canoe is an image as well." "The shape of a canoe projects speed." "It's about going places, going from A to B. I wanted to show the opposite." "Nothing happens." "It's more like a universal memory." "It's about time, film is about time." "If you look back, you look back in time." "There's a theater between her legs and Merijntje dreams of performing there." "The camera goes down." "This is the theater curtain and her legs are the wings." "The camera moves forward into black... and at that moment a play with Merijntje Gijzen begins." "She wears a pannier dress from 1770." "Some time ago, movie theaters were using this slogan.." "'You forget that it's a film. ' l found that shocking - and still do." "My theme, if anything, is to go in against that." "I think it's terrific to sit there and know you're seeing film." "Wow.." "It's film." "I think it's imporrtant to clearly show what I work with... and not try to hide things behind a curtain as in theater or the circus." "I want it to clearly be what it is." "If you see light projected in a theater, that's great in itself." "These are gradations of light." "All different sorts of filters." "I think this one's best." "This one." "I could take these small cameras with me and set them down... because I knew the approximate angle the lens reached." "Then I looked the other way so they didn't know I was filming." "As the back ofthe Bell and Howell is completely flat... it can also be placed upside down." "So I filmed a fan on the ceiling, a beautiful black and white image." "I found this one in Egypt... this one in New York... and this one's from Holland." "I took this camera with me to China." "This one I found in Argentina... I've never filmed anything with it, but I love its design." "And these two Bolex cameras went to South America with me." "This one too." "I travelled extensively in South America." "Maybe four or five times." "The first time I went there... the front pages were always filled with horrible accidents.." "heads cut off people hauled from graves... by the police." "I felt that it was part of that world." "That cruel absurditty." "It was about black and white blocks." "The zebra slowly had to sink toward the blocks and become a carpet." "A kind of optical effect." "In the art world there's so much faking and posing... that I often wonder.." "Why am I doing it?" "I'm living in a bubble." "Although it might be filthy, sometimes you have to do revolting things." "Like in Africa, when I was ripping out that zebra's intestines with a knife." "In the middle of Africa, surrounded by stench and who knows what else." "Yet it gave me a kick, because it was real." "You no longer have time to think.." "What am I doing?" "You have to work so hard to get it all done... that you go beyond a boundary you normally wouldn't cross." "I think that's special." "Those are the moments I seek out." "I never wanted to make a nature film." "I made a montage that put me to sleep after ten minutes." ", Beautiful fish, beautiful coral all so beautiful... but that's not the film I want to make." "So from the very start I wondered.." "Why do people... or why do I... go under water, look at another world?" "That's how I still see it.. a world we don't belong in, but can watch." "A world where other laws appIry." "I discovered that the motivation to go under water lies above water." "It lies in narrative elements." "When do you give up?" "How long can you cary on?" "When do you say.." "I can't any more, I'll let go, I'm drowning?" "I don't know if one is aware of that." "But for me that's the departure point of the film.." "When do you say.." "I can't keep it up any more, so I'll just let go?" "Then you either die or survive." "We should make it more intense." "Move back." "The sun's gone." "Yes, no more backlight." "However, it's raining." "We don't mind that." "is it wet?" "No." "Technical cameras are complicated." "One shot takes a long time." "Twenty minutes to adjust the camera, get a light reading." "That's what I like about it.." "it takes so long to make one photo." "Unlike film, where you turn on the camera and get lots of images... with a technical camera you in fact freeze time." "I liked the idea of recording the quays in that way." "Here they are." "Now I'll hang them up." "I studied electronic music composition." "It taught me to have the guts to set up my own 'bookkeeping'." "When you think of music, you think of emotion." "Music grabs your soul." "But composers write notes on paper." "They conceive a form and try to work it out so that at certain places... there is a climax, for instance... and that emotions are a consequence of the form they choose." "I make films in a similar way." "Often I put things down on paper first, work out the composition... like the precise length of each shot, because I shoot image by image." "The beginning and ending have lots of short shots in quick succession." "But not the middle." "Here I've calculated how long the beginning and ending shots are." "You get a long graph with all the lengths of the entire film." "In the middle everything is very slow, and at the end... I hope you can see it, all the short lines... are just a few frames, a few fractions of a second." "Maybe the next one." "It has to be tighter." "Now take this one here..." "Go ahead." "That's good." "Turn around, Christel." "And pick up your skirts." "Skirts up." "Hold on..." "Yes, and legs wide apart." "OK, lower that skirt." "Cut." "Here's the film in which I play a professor in pyjamas with the big book." "He reacts like a chicken with those quick movements of his." "It was so fascinating to do." "I believe there are 7 or 8 scenes like this." "That was a sort of try out to see if I should continue in that vein." "It's only a beginning." "But I have a few more rolls, so I hope to achieve perfection with those." "I want my films to be viewed like paintings." "Paintings are sequestered on the wall... and come to life only when the viewer actively looks at them." "A very clear example is Obstructs." "The film doesn't even have a subject, only the intersection itself." "The camera doesn't follow one person, but randomly scans the intersection... and the action is in every corner of the screen." "You can watch the man trying to catch the tram... or the woman whose buggy might get stuck in the mud." "I often went on vacation with my parents when I was young." "Almost every summer to England, and it would end in London... at the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park." "People stood there on an orange crate, having their say." "That was so powerful, I'll never forget it." "That's what I want.. an orange crate." "I can see my films on huge screens alongside the highway." "The composition might have to be adapted... but my goal is not to make films for a select incrowd that only knows Brakhage." "I think it's possible to make this sort of films for a wider audience."