Frans Zwartjes

Birds (1968)

Frans Zwartjes (b. 1927) is a filmmaker, musician, violin-maker, painter and sculptor. In the late-60s he was one of the first Dutch visual artists to take up film, initially to document his performances and soon after as an independent medium perfectly suited to his way of creating visual art. His mind-bending works caused a furor, with psychological black-and-white imagery of heavily made-up and over-dressed actors from his circle of friends. Focused on sexually-loaded power games, hysteria, psychosis and cruelty, his films are largely edited 'in-camera'. The images are abstracted in ruthless black and white. The general idea of reality is broken down by brilliant camera work and neurotic editing to replace it with a personal and often disturbing reality. "My own motor system determined the film style", Zwartjes stated in an interview. Zwartjes's oeuvre includes over forty films and his style has left a strong stamp on at least two generations of experimental filmmakers in Holland. You've never seen anything quite like this. - Film Anthology Archive

Behind Your Walls (1970)

Sorbet III (1968)


Visual Training (1969)

Living (1971)
Zwartjes' masterpiece and his own favourite film. “Living has an uneasy, indefinable atmosphere. The camera’s strange swaying and the music that keeps going on and on…”Living demonstrates Zwartjes’ cinematographic mastery. He is the film’s main character and also does the camera work, pointing it at himself with his hand held outstretched. Zwartjes: “I was as strong as a bear back then.” The film is part of the ‘Home sweet home’ series, in which Zwartjes explored the house in The Hague he had just moved into. His wife and muse Trix plays the other role. The two characters move restlessly through the house. The film was made using an extremely wide angled lens (a 5.7), which makes the images very strange.


Speelt

Spectator (1970)
Manders and Toebosch play the artist and his model. Safely hidden behind his lens, the photographer can’t get enough of what the long lashed, glamorous model has to offer.

Some of these films are on UBUWEB