Frans van de Staak

Programmed by The Theater of the Matters

Hailed by Jean-Marie Straub as the “only true heir to Dziga Vertov,” filmmaker and painter Frans van de Staak (1943—2001) was a prolific underground figure who held a special place in Dutch cinema. His films investigate space-time and language with a mixture of anarchy and rigor—wild intuitions fixed on film with extreme clarity. Invested in everyday speech and routine endeavors, like walking in the street or mending shoes, Van de Staak filmed the alchemical meeting of fiction and actuality, of a text and its surroundings, working somewhere at the crossroads of poetry, theater, and essay, with a liberating sense of play and sly, almost slapstick humor. BAM is thrilled to screen two of his subversive cinematic gems on 16mm for one night only, plus a rare 35mm print of a Straub-Huillet short dedicated to Van de Staak.