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Frans Zwartjes
Experimental Dutch film-maker that creates abstract, artistic cinematic expressions of physical concepts such as eating, sex, desire, the act of spectating, loneliness, the anxiety of a new home, a wife, walls, rooms and companionship, etc. The silent characters expressing ideas are often painted white or employ gothic makeup, they make use of body language and bodily functions, nudity, facial expressions, and various camera movements and editing tricks are used, all suggesting pure and primitive instincts or passions. Made a few silent shorts (some of which were collected on the DVD collection "The Great Cinema Magician" together with Pentimento), and some very rare full-length movies including It's Me, an experimental Warholian 1-hour movie that just depicts a woman at home preening and emoting while thinking about a phone call. Died in 2017. A longer 40-minute experimental short by Zwartjes with the usual people in goth makeup physically acting out as the camera jumps, zooms, rolls and turns. Women act out, flirt, sing, perform, and pose while people watch and the frantic camera interacts with their weird and melodramatic performances. In between, the actress is lewdly fondled by a man with one glove. Not as interesting as his other shorts which usually feel more focused, but this one obviously conveys the exhibitionist, emotive and exploitative aspects of an actress's audition. Unusually weird short even for Zwartjes. Strange characters in sunglasses or masks run around on a landing and stairs of a house like explorers in a strange landscape, opening doors, doing strange things in the bathroom, attempting to enter closets and peek into doors. The camera twists and turns, converting the house into an impossibility. I have no idea what this one is supposed to represent but it was intriguingly warped. An unusual experiment for Zwartjes, in the form of a satire on the art world and performance-art. A couple are constructing a bizarre artistic performance for friends and fellow art colleagues. Each character gets an introductory scene, most of which are hopelessly mired in pretentious drama, whether it is infantile bouts of jealousy, secret affairs, or one woman who is partaking in a documentary or vlog about her art world and ranting about everything and anything, including the fact that our protagonist dumped her for a blonde. In one flashback, she demonstrates her body being used as a phone. The central performance itself is the only bizarre aspects of this movie, involving a strange sci-fi scenario involving polluted flowers, bio-hazard procedures and a parachute jump involving 'artistic' costumes, all performed in their living room. In this scenario, the drama and hard work literally leads to artists dying for their work. A bizarre full-length by Zwartjes with almost no dialogue. People being kidnapped by people in a black car. Women being processed, stripped, experimented on and tortured in an empty warehouse by lab scientists in a kind of concentration camp, but the nature of the experiments is never clear. Scenes of a man hunting for fish is spliced with a rape and an oriental doctor hitting a woman's shoe with a hockey stick. People eating, and people having an orgy with food and urine. Woman bathing and having sex which turns to S&M. Man with gun and woman in chains. I guess it all adds up to an artsy experiment on power-relationships, violence and a Feminist statement, but it has nothing interesting to say or show, only to shock. |
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