Programme 1

The filming of people and places through acts of speaking is a constant theme throughout the filmography of Frans van de Staak.

Uit het werk van Baruch d’Espinoza shows groups of young people reciting and reading extracts from Ethics by Spinoza —not without certain difficulty— in rural and urban interior and exterior surroundings of Amsterdam. The 17th century metaphysical text is brought into the present and shared as if it belonged to everyone. Interpreted by various people, whose reading of it is somewhere between the improvised and the geometric, the meaning of the text is constantly changing.

Based on questions from an interrogator and the testimonies of their suspect and 26 witnesses (one for each letter of the alphabet), the audience watching Rooksporen must reconstruct an event that the film itself skirts around. The suspect’s personality and the existence or not of a crime are settled via the intricate spider’s web weaved by the contradictory statements provided by all the characters.