Michael Hollander, room with movable levels, New York, c. 1970.
From: 'Design and architecture for flexible dwelling'
Vitra Design Museum, 2002 ©
isbn 3-931936-35-X
This picture associates with the story of Kinokast.
It is in 1993 that I created Kinokast, my long-cherished home documentary film making 'studio'. The name came to me as the definition for a new enterprise: mixing the audiovisual and installations art.
One catchphrase conveniently summed up and sharpened up the idea at the time: 'timebased documentary-arts in a box'. Let me explain.
I'd figured out that 'Kino' stood for Motion, or Movement (from the Greek root), and 'Kast' for closet or cabinet (for the Dutch). The name had altogether a nice catch. I was on the move!
In fact the home of my new studio venture was 90 cm wide, 110 cm deep and 230 cm high and was formerly inhabited by a the girls double bed-frame. How I got the creatures out? Let's pass on that one. Eventually I did. At last I had a space of my own! Breathing again.. The only thing I needed now was time on my hand.
I actually could not close the door because it held the table in place.. It looked a bit like this room with movable levels (picture above), except all levels were far from being movable and space was about a fifth of this size.
But the place did the job at the time and I started writing and preparing the film direction and editing for 3 documentary projects which all got the suitable Producer's firm signature and logo: Kinokast Productions!
The three first Kinokast projects (in order of appearance):
1993
'City Pulse', a documentary installation for a traveling exhibition called "Chandigarh, 40 years after Le Corbusier. The design introduced 11 monitors in a row (set in dark boxes and facing up), showing asynchronous video footage of vernacular street life in the north Indian city of Chandigarh. This Travel ling exhibition was first sponsored and opened at the Philips Competence Center, Eindhoven, Netherlands 1993.
1993
"Chandigarh VI par Lucien Herve" (Chandigarh seen by Lucien Herve's) The second project I frenziedly started in my newly owned territory was a video installation portering the french-Hungarian photographer Lucien Herve, presenting the photos he took in Chandigarh some 40 years ago of his life-long friend Le Corbusier. I had met Lucien at an exhibition in Rotterdam a few months earlier called "The essence of the fragment"/ "Essentie van het fragment"(dutch). This installation was added up to the total exhibition concept in the next venues where it traveled: Fondation Le Corbusier in Tokyo (1994), Arc et Senans, Musée Ledoux, Besançon in France (1993), and the freshly build Koolhaas's Kunsthal in Rotterdam(1993).
1994- ..
"Le Dom Juan de Molière, vu par un photographe du XXe siècle" ('Molière's Dom Juan, seen by a 20th century photographer'). This third project was a documentary film portraying life and work of the photographer Lucien Herve.
Writing and filming 20 hours+ of preliminary video-8 footage at his Paris home, and writing again, and again. I also wrote a concept version for an viviwall-like installation for the Hague's newly build Kijkhuis (on the Spui). The idea was to use the abundant trans lucid windows screens toward the street side and project the images for the inside and outside audience as a citation of Le Corbusier's notorious saying: "L'intérieur et l'extérieur ne sont qu'un", in very raw English: 'The inside and the outside are but one thing'.
From these three projects, the two first were completed and found an audience. The third project lays still uncompleted in some magic card box, somewhere in my attic.
Acknowledgments are in place for my friend and partner-in-motion, Martin van den Oever, who helped me with the directing, editing and producing from the early days of Kinokast productions on.
In fact we practically invented the term of 'interpassivity' together. It suited very well the kind of installations in which we were hoping to prosper. We used and over-used the term accordingly, well before one could read the hype in scientific papers, books, cinema or art reviews.
Of course we found out later on that the term had already existed for millions of years..
