extensions, flux & ruptures: early films of mattijn seip

Mattijn Seip (b. 1940) started making films in the 1960s, also being active as an artist, actor and organizer in Amsterdam’s experimental film scene. In 1968, Seip together with fellow filmmaker Niko Paape co-founded STOFF, an initiative intended to democratize filmmaking, and in this milleu we also found filmmakers such as Jos Schoffelen, Daniel Singelenberg and Seip’s then-partner Barbara Meter. These activities later continued with screenings at the underground film venue Electric Cinema (circa 1969-1973). This program looks at Seip's most formally exploratory period from 1969–1972, films employing, among other things, experimental animation, the use of extended camera- and shutter techniques and flicker effects. At the fore here is an interest in the structural and materialistic aspects of film, evident in After the Colours and Double Shutter, both from 1972; the former a study in colour and grid patternings, the later shot from a swing with a secondary shutter, inducing an heightened sense of flickering spacial perplexity, and which led filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice to acknowledge the establishment of a new, time based “cubist” space. In Retour d'enfance (1970), the film is painted and scratched, a procedure that recurs in Rubbish (1972), but where the first is without sound, the chaotically shifting sound here creates a tangible emphasis. In … And at the Table (1971), by Barbara Meter, Seip is sitting at a table with a women having breakfast, gestures and actions oscillating between repetition and spontaneity, while light, settings and depth of field is modulated, creating a sonically rich and stratified continuum between interior activity and exterior space. And finally, the light fluctuations that occurs in Positive Negative Light Vibration (1971), where windows in an Amsterdam apartment occurs both in positive and negative, is an elucidating manifestation of the formally inventive, intense, playful and sensuously challenging work Seip produced during these years.

( Martin Grennberger )

Curated and introduced by Martin Grennberger. Prints courtesy of EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), big thanks to Mattijn Seip and Barbara Meter.