ECHTE CLICHÉS
F.: Stef Tijdink. M.: Ton de Graaff. Scgf.: Eric de Kuyper, Jan Klatter. Int.: Pauline Daniëls, Arnold Goores, Patrice Kennedy, Helga Langen, Angela Linssen, Margie Smit, Emile Poppe, Gérard Lemaitre, Henk van Dijk, Ruud Matthijssen. Prod.: Suzanne van Voorst. DCP. D.: 28’. Col e Bn.
Film Notes
In the early 90s, a Dutch dance company, ‘t Concern, asked me to join its members in devising a show. They came to me as a filmmaker, because the aim was to come up with a dance-performance that would include moving images.
The company consisted of five female dancers and one male dancer. This unusual combination led me to suggest basing the show on the archetypal 1950s housewife and her everyday chores. And setting this against the ballet music of Delibes, Čajkovskij and Glazunov. (I had an aunt who had never been a ballet dancer but who listened to ballet music as she went about doing her housework). The idea was to match each professional female dancer with a non-professional male dancer.
The only surviving trace of this show remains its 16mm entr’actes, shown here under the title Echte clichés. Does not every cliché contain a grain of truth to be rediscovered?
Eric de Kuyper
De Kuyper started making films in the 1980s with his students and friends; at the time he was teaching at Nijmegen University, and his newly established performing arts department became incredibly influential for a young generation. De Kuyper was deputy director of the Nederlands Filmmuseum from 1987 to 1992, and together with director Hoos Blotkamp he developed an archive policy that still serves as a basis for many activities of the EYE Filmmuseum today. His curatorial work and writings have been crucial for a new appraisal of silent cinema of the 1910s and of directors such as Léonce Perret, Alfred Machin and Evgenij Bauer. Now, De Kuyper is active as writer and director and especially as actor, most recently in Rain Anyway by Gust van den Berghe (2019).
His feature films were digitised and restored by EYE Filmmuseum in 2018 and 2019. During this project the film parts of Echte Clichés were ‘rediscovered’ and reconstructed as an autonomous work. The film parts were scanned 2K from 16mm colour and black and white negative elements, re-edited and completed with new credits. The sound was captured from the original magnetic mix tape.
Mark Paul Meyer