Nurşen Bakır & Frans van de Staak

Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise

I was editing my short film Thrift which I shot in New York, in the editing room of an artist collective in Amsterdam. In those days, Amsterdam was a paradise for artists on a budget, especially for collectives.

I had just moved to Amsterdam and and I didn’t know where to find the necessary film materials. We were still working with analog. A friend from the collective told me I could find magnetic film for sound at Frans van de Staak’s. His film studio was very close.

On the day of our appointment, I went to his studio. The door was open. When I entered, I found him at his desk, smoking a small cigar and drinking his coffee. There was every kind of film equipment inside. It was a fairly large studio. A Steenbeck stood in the corner. We talked a bit about what I was doing. I told him I was editing a film I had shot in New York, that the editing wasn’t going well, that the editor I was working with had a sick young child so we couldn’t continue working together, and that I was very demoralized – I almost didn’t want to finish the film. Frans listened quietly. He didn’t comment. He gave me the magnetic tape I wanted. As I was leaving, he said, “If you like, let me have a look at the film too.” And so began the beautiful, creative friendship that would always be an inspiration to me. He sat modestly at the the editing table as an operator and we finished Thrift together. Maybe the film wasn’t great, but, perhaps for the first time, I understood through Frans how making a film can be an incredible act in itself. We had made a film together, on equal footing, in harmony, rediscovering the spirit of the material in front of us. I learned so much from him during this process. In fact, I learned from Frans how important just a single frame too little or a single frame too much could be in editing.

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Frans’s studio was an open place to filmmakers, where all kinds of exchanges about editing, sound, and image took place, and where films were produced. After Thrift we wanted to continue working together. While editing Thrift we would have conversations about art, poetry, cinema, and philosophy. We would talk about poets and poems we both liked. From these conversations, the text for Sepio began to take shape. Our conversations would often revolve around topics like memories and belonging. We talked a lot about the differences and similarities in this respect between me – I left my country at 18 and tried to build a life again and again in distant, different cities and countries – and Frans, who had lived all his life in Amsterdam; and about the possible traces this contrast left on our memories and our lives. The effort to understand and evaluate all this in a film workshop forced us to grapple with the question of the essence of human life.

When we always live in one place, do we belong there? How do we construct our sense of belonging? Finding approval by the environment we live in can feel urgent, but for an artist the journey of discovering the essence of things is much more fundamental. Unfortunately, the pressure of belonging and approval can keep us from undertaking this journey. I can say that Frans’ films are among the best examples of how to resist the song of the sirens. Yes, Frans had always lived in Amsterdam, but he too didn’t feel he belonged in the existing social and artistic climate – primarily through his personality, his outlook on life, and of course, his films. There was no other filmmaker like him in the Netherlands. I even think he holds a special place in world cinema. I realized this already when I first saw his films. He was an artist pur sang. I admired his perseverance in doing what he believed in. He made film as he believed, felt, and thought, without seeking approval. For him, this was the only way. From him, I learned not only how to make films but also how to be determined in doing so. He was open, unassuming, modest, but very strong. He was one of those rare people whose life and art matched perfectly. He spoke very little. He would laugh and say, “I started talking very late; my mother took me to the doctor for that.” Yes, his films tend to be modestly silent, but they could delve deeply into what he was telling, reaching the very essence of the subject, without any bombast. You can see this in the compositions, colors, and mise-en-scène of his films. When we talked about the mise-en-scène, he would tease me, saying, “Let’s plan everything so there’s room for improvisation.”

So, Sepio is a product of these conversations and feelings. We selected the poems that would form the soul of the film. Based on these, we created the storyboard for the film. Frans was a good director – he knew very well and felt deeply the art of reflecting the thought or emotion he wanted to convey into camera movements, and of making the camera an extension of that thought or emotion. Working with him on the set of Sepio was an important experience for me. We wrote the script together, but it was very instructive to me to observe his ability to reflect thoughts and emotions, far beyond what was put on paper, through his mise-en-scène and camera language. Frans had taken the script to another level with his cinematic language. When we sat at the editing table this time, I was the one operating the Steenbeck. I made a few sudden interventions into his calm, quiet cuts. Perhaps my insistence on improvisation came into play here, or maybe I felt an intervention was needed. Although Sepio is a very meditative film, it was an analysis of a period following a turmoil. The editing of Sepio felt like a continuation of this entire process. Therefore, the editing was done from a place that was more internal, more identified with the feeling and thought of the film.

I don’t know if it was because he used few words, but he loved poetry as much as I did. I found his filmmaking also to be very poetic. We used to talk about the poets and poems we loved. Dichtweefsel also originated from our readings of poems, poems by Wallace Stevens. We would have made that film together too, but at the time I had just been accepted into a master of fine arts program in San Francisco and returned to America. So I couldn’t be there during the filming. We had read and discussed the text together, which was adapted from Wallace Stevens’s play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. Interpreting the text as it was in the film was Frans’ idea. I found it interesting, but I had no contribution there. Perhaps this was also reflected in the editing of the work. As was the case with Sepio, it allowed me to look not from within, but from a place even further outside. In fact, the film being in Dutch underscored this feeling of being an outsider. At the time, it gave me the opportunity to look at the film more graphically. I found the chance to concentrate more on the spatial relationships between the film’s characters, the definition of the space through camera movements, and of course the camera movements themselves. In terms of editing, Dichtweefsel was a more distant film. I sometimes think that my own physical distance from the film and from Frans during its production may have been reflected in the film’s mood. It is a very beautiful film

Event on 5 November introduced in English by Nurşen Bakır, filmmaker.