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!




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