My name is Marc
Geerards and I am a filmmaker currently preparing a photo-film
made in collaboration with filmmaker Jaap Pieters.This
film, Paradiso Stillives (working title) is based on
the photobook Paradiso Stills by Max Natkiel,
that came out in 1986. In this book some 300 people, all visitors of Paradiso,
have been portrayed by Max betwee 1980 and 1985.
I have been searching continuously for almost half a year now to find
all the people in the book and I am still searching. I have already found
some hundred people, but I still need to find more people for our film
to be completed. Their photographs have been put on this website.
Max photographed them in a uniform style, in black and white 6 x 6 pictures
made with a Rolleiflex camera with a flashlight. People were posing in
front of the camera and looking into the lens. Max captured the end of
the first punk wave and the transition into the nineteeneighties, with
its diversity of skins, rude boys, rasta's, rockers, moluccans, teds,
mods, autonomists, heavy metal hardrockers and of course punks in their
international subcultural meeting-centre.
In our film, an independent production supported by the photographer,
the people portayed in the book will appear before the camera again, now,
some twenty years later, to be portrayed on colour film instead of on
a black and white photograph. There will not be any movement of the lens,
or camera, nor will there be any focuspulls. There will be no interviews.
They will simply be asked to pose in front of the filmcamera and looking
into the lens again and Max' photos will be imitated on film. The people
will be arranged before the camera in the same line-up as when Max made
his photos and the framing of the photograph for the film will correspond
to the framing of the filmic image. So in the film the frozen black and
white photographs of Max, shown in silence, will come to life by a dissolve
into the colour film images shown with ambient sound present at the time
of shooting. There will be no dialogue or musical sound-track put over
the images, which will speak for themselves.
If you think you can help me, (for instance if you can give me useful
information about where I can go or whom I should meet to track down these
people; or, better, if you know people in the book (remember the photos
are taken about twenty years ago -these people are now in their thirties
or forties!); or, better still, if you are in the book and I haven't been
able to contact you); or if you are in the book and you do not agree to
have your portrait made, please send me an e-mail: marc.geerards@wanadoo.nl
and I will reply. Thank you very much!
Click on the thumbnails to enlarge images |
