The Word as Archipelago
Frans van de Staak Retrospective at Punto de Vista Film Festival
For its 2025 edition, running from 24 February to 1 March, the Spanish film festival Punto de Vista will present a retrospective dedicated to the cinema of Dutch filmmaker Frans van de Staak. Titled The Word as Archipelago, it marks the first international retrospective of his work, showcasing eleven of his twenty-five films and accompanied by the publication of the first monograph on his cinema.
“Frans van de Staak was born into a working family in Amsterdam in 1943. He began working as a self-taught painter and engraver in the early 1960s, an occupation he maintained until the end of his life. Thanks to the public system of support for visual artists that existed at the time in the Netherlands, he regularly managed to set aside most of the subsidy he received as an artist for the production of his films. The work of Frans van de Staak would always remain traditional in terms of production – filmed on 16mm with small cameras, his own material and, for a good part of his career, non-professional actors – but radically speculative in its form.
His cinema explores forms of horizontal collaboration that blend his work with ensemble performers and casts and, on occasions, with such experimental writers as Lidy van Marissing and Jacq Firmin Vogelaar, but also with camera operators, sound engineers and assembly technicians or with such musicians as Bernard Hunnekink, Leo Cuypers and Ton Bruynèl. Each one of his films defines a generative structure that precipitates a process somewhere between the regulated – the text, the performers, the ‘rules’ of filming – and acracy – the eruption of the unexpected. His poetry emerges from a studied disorder between the spontaneous and the predetermined.”
Programme and texts by Carlos Saldaña and Manuel Asín, more information on the website of Punto de Vista.
On the occasion of the Milestones screening of Frans van de Staak’s Windschaduw (1986), Sabzian published a short text (in Dutch) by Johan van der Keuken about the film. You can read it here. More texts are also available on the website of The Theater of the Matters, translated and presented for a screening of van de Staak’s work in New York last year.
Front Image: Sepio (Frans van de Staak, 1996), courtesy of Punto de Vista festival
Image: Frans van de Staak, courtesy of Punto de Vista festival
