✸ Refle-x-périmental #21 ✸
Corps Obscurs / Dark bodies : The cinema of Frans Zwartjes

► Refle-x-périmental #21 presents a dive into the universe of the Dutch experimental master Frans Zwartjes. Rarely seen in France and now distributed by Cinédoc Paris Films Coop, Zwartjes’ films, “the great wizard,” transform the screen into a field where tension, desire, obsession, and derision are embodied in the bodies, objects, and confined spaces they animate. With Zwartjes, since the late 1960s, the underground is redefined.

In the presence of Reyke Zwartjes (Frans Zwartjes Foundation).
Thanks to: The Frans Zwartjes Foundation, Simona Monizza & Eye Filmmuseum.

► Frans Zwartjes (1927-2017) dedicated his artistic practice to cinema, photography, music, and the visual arts, while also working as a luthier, nurse, and teacher. In 1968, while teaching at the Eindhoven Academy of Industrial Design and influenced by the New American Cinema, Zwartjes acquired a camera. Connected to the radical and artisanal filmmaking practice he developed, Zwartjes taught a generation of experimental filmmakers in Eindhoven, The Hague — notably at the Vrije Academie (Free Academy), which he directed between 1983 and 1988 — and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Considered by Susan Sontag as “the most important experimental filmmaker of his generation”, Zwartjes made over 50 films. Within spaces permeated by a poetics of disturbance and eroticism, between chance and performativity, characters appear played by Zwartjes himself, his friends, his wife Trix Zwartjes, or the artist and actress Moniek Toebosch. His work has been digitized and restored by the Eye Filmmuseum.

► Screening :