People Passing Through Me in an Endless Procession
An artist and engraver, Frans van de Staak (1943–2001) first encountered the power of cinema in a sequence from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. He went on to enrol in film school and founded CINEECRI, a journal he distributed himself. Using grant money earned through graphic design, he made a series of short films in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for his cinema: early attempts to transpose texts by writers such as Korneliszoon Poot and Spinoza to the screen. Rather than striving for faithful reproduction, he filmed amateur actors in their effort to give voice to the text, judging takes more by ear than by eye.