FILMS WITH PAUL VAN DEN WILDENBERG

Paul van den Wildenberg (1952) studied a.o. at the Vrije Akademie in Den Haag and the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam. He made documentaries (a.o. Stilleven / Still Life – about J. Bernlef, Wit- Zwart / White & Black – Aart Klein, photographer, Charley Toorop – the will is everything the last one in co-operation with Kiki Amsberg) and contributed as a freelance editor / director to many art programmes on Dutch television (a.o. about Peter Struycken, Sol Lewitt, Emil Nolde, I Nuovo Futuristi).
Their films were shown in the main programs of film festivals in the Netherlands and abroad (a.o. IFF, IDFA, Mannheim, Nyon, Oberhausen, Gent, Hamburg).
Jan Ketelaars and Paul van den Wildenberg work together for a long time. They make films with an expressive photographic slant to it. Their focus is on the unusual of the usual and the transience of human efforts. Man in relation to his environment is a recurring theme in their joint work.
Both are also teaching at the Department of Audio Visual Media of the Utrecht School for the Arts.
In Stad / Town (1984, 45 min., black & white) the soullessness of a provincial industrial town (their place of birth Tilburg) served as a model for the diffuse character of similar provincial towns. Terrain Vague (1992, 48 min., black & white) showed the vitality of the periphery of a big city (Amsterdam). Thuis / At Home (1996, 70 min.) was about personal domains within the square meters of a house (tenants in Amsterdam). Wasteland – de berg en de kuil / the hill and the pit (2001, 45 min.) focused on the character dominated by labour of damaged sites (the hill: a slag heap of a derelict coalmine in the Belgian Borinage region, the pit: the quarry of a lignite mine in the German province of Nordrhein-Westfalen). The same subject was used for De Belgische vulkaan / The Belgian Volcano (2000, 3 min.), a short film produced and broadcasted by the VPRO as part of their millennium night program.
The short fiction film Uit/zicht / A Dutch Day (2002, 18 min.) gives a suggestive picture of an uprooted man of foreign descent staying in a trailer home in the grey polder landscape behind the dykes.
Droomland / Dreamland (2004, 75 min.) concentrates on the question whether one can feel at home in an area where man is constantly in danger to lose his battle against nature. The documentary takes the viewer to a neglected part of the US: the prairies of eastern Montana getting emptier all the time.
Passage (2007, 15 min., black & white) is a short, evocative film. In the early morning a man is waiting in the docklands, killing time in mental isolation. A visualization of uprootedness.
Triptiek, beelden van een koninkrijk/ Triptych – images of a kingdom (2011, 60 min.) is a purely visual, evocative film with three places as intriguing protagonists.