Barbara Meter

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

A wordless experimental collage of impressions and moods. Grainy fragments of landscapes, flakes whirl in the wind. Fog and mist, shadows of people in the city and by the water… Silhouettes that fade and turn into pure light and shadow until we discern the specks and scratches on the film strip itself. Sometimes, for a fraction of a second, a face, a person. A film as a memory that eludes us.

Short film by Barbara Meter.

An attempt to communicate the feeling of evaporation, of disappearing and slipping away of the fragile material which is called time.

A day in the life of an old Ottoman bath with the bath itself as the main character -- from dawn till dusk, where the light, the mirroring in the water and the visitors figure alongside the protagonist .

The constant movement of the wheels, threads, sprockets, feet and hands suggests restlessness, and this is paralleled by the soundtrack. The unknown woman could be Gretchen from Faust, hopelessly in love or Ariadne who gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of labyrinth or perhaps she is one of the fates, weaving destiny… Enlarged from Super-8 to 35mm, the film is very grainy, in itself an homage to the medium of film which is also emphasized by the depiction of all kinds of turning machines, both in image and sound.

The dutchified Hungarian Joszef Katús returns, after a months-long absence, to Amsterdam on 29 April 1966. The arrival of the Provos changed a great deal in the Dutch capital. The film follows Katús, mostly roaming the streets, in a loose documentary style. The events are set against the backdrop of four national occasions - The Queen's Birthday, Labour Day, Liberation Day and Remembrance Day.

The film has elements of documentary, narrative and avant-garde. In a big house a party is taking place. People arrive and greet each other-encounters, some dancing, flirtations, a moment of drama. The camera is looking while slowly approaching the lit windows as if someone wanting to take part.

In her recent film Up to the Sky and Much Much More, Meter uses letters sent to her by her father during World War II to provide the film's narration, while interviews with her mother expand on his opposition to fascism — as well as to constraints of any kind, including the bonds of family — and his eventual conscription to the Eastern front. Remarkably, her father's epistolary accounts of his daily life as a soldier also include fantastical watercolour illustrations of his travels, which Meter incorporates to movingly amplify the emotional resonance of a father-daughter bond made fraught by distance and war.

After eight years of feminist activism, ANDANTE MA NON TROPPO was Meters’ first step back towards experimental film. The camera observes a street corner from a window in Meters’ house. Turkish women meet on the sidewalk outside. Children play, dogs walk by. The shots repeat, just as the actions recorded reoccur every day.

They can be seen in the whole of Greece: the small and humble buildings along the roadside dedicated to a saint. Often a burning candle illuminates the colourful interior. Most of them are erected to the memory of a beloved, killed in a car accident, others because someone has been miraculously saved. They are the evidence of a daily devotion and are called 'proskynitaria' or 'ikonismata'. The older ones many have been built becuase somebody had a significant dream on the spot, or to indicate the place of a former church or perhaps to protect the entrance of a house against ill luck. Each 'proskynitari' has its own story. This documentary tells us some of these stories and shows an importnat aspect of how the Greek people deal with death and what role religion plays in everyday life.

A very impressive film is Barbara Meter's 'Distance to Nearby.' The film is a dramatic reconstruction of memory. The memory of the alienation and solitude of a (half) Jewish child -the filmmaker- while in hiding, dramatized in restrained but touching imagery. For instance the looking through corridors and rooms, which should have given the feeling of protection. D. Ouwendijk, Trouw, 1982

Often the images are held for awhile and then left to themselves - only to fade out just as they begin to move. For me this enhances the feeling of memory - and the sensation that when you leave a place you know that everything is still there, without you. And so the film is both elongated and fragmented.

Photos and film footage are edited, damaged, scratched, and painted. The original images are only vaguely recognizable, as if they are already part of our ‘tainted’ memory. The film was made in response to the death of Janis Joplin.

A man and a woman sit in front of a window and eat breakfast. Through the window, we see the countryside. During the day, they remain seated at the table. The settings, light, and depth of field change: slowly we learn the vocabulary of the medium. In the final shots, the camera is reflected in the windows, and we see lights being cleared away. The film itself, and not the man and woman at the table, has become the subject of the film.