In collaboration with the Punto de Vista Festival and the Embassy of the Netherlands, we present the first international retrospective of the work of Frans van de Staak (Amsterdam 1943-2001), which includes eleven of his twenty-five films, and is accompanied by the publication of the first monograph on his cinema.

Between satire and philosophy, van de Staak's films operate as language games that recompose the traditional elements of cinema and unravel our perception of the everyday. His cinema squeezes the symbolic potential of bodies, spaces, and all their possible interactions—actions, gestures, movements, and spoken words.

Starting from a radical approach to working with more or less anachronistic texts that Staak updates through readings in public spaces, his films explore orality as a material in humorous fictions marked by ambiguous narratives, repetitive structures, and linguistic realms that problematize the expression of human interiority. Each of his films defines a generative structure that precipitates a process between the regulated—the text, the performers, the filming norms—and anarchy—the irruption of the unexpected.

Admired by contemporary filmmakers such as Johan van der Keuken, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, who considered him a missing link in the history of cinema (“the only heir of Dziga Vertov”, in Straub’s words), Frans van de Staak received little international attention before or after his death in 2001. 

Organized by: Punto de Vista Festival, Embassy of the Netherlands and Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid.

In collaboration with: Eye Amsterdam