As their 50-year collaboration draws to a close, join us for a master class session presented by Paul and Menno de Nooijer on the subject of the artists’ approach to independent filmmaking practice. With an oeuvre that includes over 130 films, ranging from music videos, to commercials, short-fiction, feature-length animation hybrids and documentaries, as well as a number of installations and participatory workshops,
Paul, Menno and Françoise de Nooijer have produced an audio-visual oeuvre unlike any other. Serving to bridge their praxis with the work of the Eye Filmmuseum’s most recent preservation pilot for research into best practices around the archiving of autonomous works made by artists (coordinated by Simona Monizza and Gerben Schermer), this session will look back on the radically diverse body of work they have created, reflecting upon its implications for both preservation and presentation practice. Between the incomplete, the alternative, the unexhibited and the undefined, Paul and Menno de Nooijer will bring to light areas of their filmography frequently overlooked, allowing rare insight into their idiosyncratic approach to making audio-visual work at the intersection of film, photography and visual art.
The session will commence with a screening of three of their works recently restored by the Eye Filmmuseum; Transformation by Holding Time (muse), At One View and Stop the Greenhouse Effect. Following a short introduction, Paul and Menno de Nooijer will then present their master class, showing a selection of their films as they discuss their practice. To conclude, there will be a q+a session chaired by Simona Monizza and Amber Mota. The audience will then also be invited to share further questions and reflections.

Works To Be Screened:

Recent Restorations:
TRANSFORMATION BY HOLDING TIME
(16 mm, colour, 1976, 4 min.)
Polaroid photos of naked woman are fixed in front of the camera, making the woman disappear gradually from sight.
New restoration version screened on DCP.
AT ONE VIEW
(16 mm/35 mm, colour, 1989, 7 min.)
Stills taken from At One View (1989)
Two men in chairs by the fireplace and photos moving in front of their heads
New restoration version screened on DCP.
STOP THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT
(16/35 mm, colour, 1992, 3 min. 44 sec.)
About the greenhouse effect, commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Environment
New restoration version screened on DCP.
Master Class Presentation:
TOURING HOLLAND BY BICYCLE
(16 mm, colour, 1981, 4 min.)
A group runs round the table faster and faster in a small room.
TARTING OVER
(16 mm, colour, 1981, 3 min.)
Two men at a table with two tarts.
PLUS MINUS
(16 mm, colour, 1991, 2 min. 20 sec.)
We always try to present ourselves and each other with a different exterior in combination with the anxious times we are currently in.
THE END
(16mm, colour, 1994, 2 min 30 sec.)
Four people with body paint.
THINK: MTV WORLD PROBLEMS WORLD SOLUTIONS
(16 mm, colour, 1992, 30 sec.)
About the solution of world problems.
STOP ACTION FACES
(16 mm, colour, 1993, 40 sec./ 15 sec.)
HIV/AIDS information commercial for the Texas Health Department.
IN HEAVEN EVERYTHING IS FINE
(video, colour, 2011, 1 min. 15 sec.)
In a tribute to David Lynch, 5 angels/devils sing that in heaven everything is fine.
FILMFEST DRESDEN
(video, colour, 2016, 1 min. 4 sec.)
Various ways to show the magic of film
BYE BYE
(video, colour, 2022, 4 min. 42 sec.)
Saying goodbye to life is not easy.
IS HEAVEN BLUE? #2 [official shorter version]
(video, colour, 2023, 16 min. 55 sec.)
Saying goodbye to a collaboration of 30 years, a wife, a son, a father, the studio, the garden and all other aspects of life.
Bios:
- Paul and Menno de Nooijer have consistently probed the visual possibilities of the photographic medium - analogue and digital - in relation to film, theatre and visual art. While digitalisation was rapidly gaining ground in the mid-1990s, Paul de Nooijer and Menno de Nooijer decided to focus their artistic efforts on photography and film in combination with theatre and performance. Their first joint performance had been in 1989 at the third Fotobienale in Enschede during a screening of the film Nobody had informed me. A sequel to this modest performance followed in 1995 with the premiere of Creation/Painting with light in Hildesheim, Germany. Paul and Menno pay tribute in their performance to the magic of the darkroom, here black changes to white and vice versa. The essence of the photographic process - writing with light - is performed here as an incantation ritual. Inspired by the novel multimedia possibilities of the computer, in the late 1990s Paul and Menno de Nooijer consciously opted for a blend of traditional disciplines based on the ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk Oscar Schlemmer's interdisciplinary Bauhaus theatre. In this concept photography and film - analogue and digital - formed part of a larger, total event. The growing number of summer festivals in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain offered them the opportunity from 2000 to present new theatre productions in the borderlands of art, performance, dance and film.
- Simona Monizza is Curator of Experimental Film at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam since 2012, where she is responsible for the archiving, preservation, research and presentation of the experimental film collection. At the heart of her job lies the passion for taking care of this fragile and often neglected collection and nurturing the relationship with the filmmakers and their estates. After graduating from the Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House in 1998, she has worked at the BFI and then joined EYE in 2000 as Film Restorer and then Collection Specialist. Her field of interest also extends to Home Movies, analogue cinema and films made by women.
- Amber Mota is an alumni of the University of Amsterdam’s Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image master’s program. Embracing interdisciplinary thinking, her research aims to challenge current conceptualisations of the archive, focussing on how preservation and presentation praxis can be developed to further accommodate the idiosyncrasies of unconventional practice.