Jaap Pieters

A tree stands at the foot a towering wooden structure in Istanbul.

Kim, a dancer, gets a foot massage from Steven, a drummer.

At Michel's home in Zurich, the shade of flowers dance upon a window curtain.

A fearless young woman cleans the outer windows of an upper floor.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

A man stands on a sidewalk, holding a model airplane aloft...

High stacks of cups wobble unsteadily on a running washing machine.

A homeless man tries to keep his daily movements in line and order... The intimacy of a private life on the street, filmed from the inside of a third floor apartment.

A man stands in the middle of the market, playing a stringless ukulele.

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This silent film provokes the anger of the man in our heads, the anger we can see but can't hear & at the same time the man tries to acquire something from the passers-by that either seems to be ignored, not understood or not available... & again the anger bursts out....

A man is trying to put empty cans into his torn coat pockets. There appear to be more and more cans lying on the street.

The bottom of the river is dug up then dumped again.

From his bedroom window on the second floor, Pieters films the unloading of meat.

Jaap Pieters passionately takes photographs and films, mainly on Super8, of the world around him: vagabonds, drunkards, striking incidence of light, the beauty of decay. In this way he has built up an oeuvre that is appreciated by a small group of film lovers all over the world. In his house, he keeps thousands of negatives and films that have never been developed due to chronic lack of money. He also collects anything in which he sees a glimmer, such as bags of sugar from restaurants where he once had ice cream with his parents, books, records, CDs, vases, glasses, be they broken or not. His girlfriend, with whom he has tried in vain to live together for 26 years, comes to helping create some order in the chaos. With his favourite uncle, the poet H.H. ter Balkt, he reminisces. ‘Two autists together’, but above all Jaap continues to film: now elderly men with whom he feels some bond.

While filming a portrait of Dutch filmmaker Jaap Pieters, he evoked memories of a Lebanese friend who had disappeared, and his desire to trace his footsteps / to track him down. This project matched our own desire to learn about the state of Lebanese cinema today. We offered Jaap Pieters to travel together to Lebanon to seek out filmmakers doing research on the moving image. We met Mahmoud Hojeij, Nadim Tabet, Ghassan Salhab, Nesrine Khodr and Lamia Joreige.

Portrait of Dutch filmmaker Jaap Pieters, shot in Montreuil-sous-Bois (France) on March 22, 2006 at 3:52 PM.

A silver-coloured tarp undulates over a field.

A portrait of Jaap's good friend Willem.

A partly mirrored single shot of an early morning Toronto street scene on a single reel Tri-X Super 8mm. The film shows us a complex still life, absorbing all the details in its lightest as well as in its darkest parts of the image.