Behind Your Walls

Praised as “the great magician” or on one occasion even as “the most important experimental filmmaker of his time” (Susan Sontag), Frans Zwartjes produced, directed and edited his own films; but more importantly, he created and improvised the soundtracks too. When my former housemate showed me Zwartjes’ Living (1971) many decades ago, I was immediately entranced by the combination of the visual bravura of a fantastically mobile camera, swooping and swirling with extraordinary elegance, and the sonic delicacy of an electronic organ generating drifting and oscillating chordal tones. The soundtrack, it turned out, was the result of an omprovisation by Zwartjes himself along with Michel Waisvisz (a great pioneering inventor of experimental electronic musical instruments). The soundtrack of Behind Your Walls was made in collaboration with his brother Rudolf and features a collage-like assembly of processed sound textures and bruised melodic figures, adding a hypnotic layer to a hallucinatory kammerspiel of feminine estrangement and isolation. In 2013, a few years before he sadly passed away, Stanley Schtinter located Zwartjes and uncovered a rich archive of unheard music. To release a selection of this collection, Schtinter founded purge.xxx, which is surely today’s best soundtrack label. Let’s hope we get to hear more of Zwartjes sonic treasure trove!