SPACE TO THINK

(published in the booklet The Future we deserve)

In 1956 Alain Resnais made the film Toute la Mémoire du Monde, commissioned by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Beautiful black and white, driving music by Maurice Jarre, a strict and concise commentary. The building and its logistics system are the real protagonists of the film: metaphors for a universe. The details of the seemingly trivial reveal the ultimate grandeur of the library.
That seemed like an inspiring example for a film about the BKVB Fund that should not only show all possible forms of subsidy, but also provide insight into the enormous width of the field. Why should not the building on the Brouwersgracht play the same role as the library in Resnais’s film?
Why should the road that makes a subsidy application via that building not be the main thread that refers to what it is ultimately about? Artists who make things that have meaning. A grant as space to think.

With that, a structure was sketched that would give us the freedom to make smooth jumps and at the same time bring different views of artists, designers and architects into the picture without much explanation.
Opposite the tight and efficient images of the Fund, there would be the more unpredictable material from the small portraits of nine people who had received a subsidy.

Perhaps we – filmmakers and the Fund – spent most of the time thinking and weighing who could play a role in the film. A strange and complicated process, in which film sets its own laws. I wanted to have the feeling that with this film I could at least get a little bit closer to the (art) work and the starting points of the artists, designers or architects. Sometimes art is too quirky to be filmed.
And so finally everything was recorded and edited: partly strict and ordered, based of an exact storyboard, partly airy, improvising without knowing what to expect. That resulted in special moments. The rain that always stopped when we wanted to film, the balloon that went into the air, encounters, conversations, words, images.

That it may work. That it may become clear how people make art in incredibly different ways. That everyone can get a little more insight into what role the Fund plays in this.

Digna Sinke