From the Exterior

16mm | 1970 | 7 minutes | color | (excerpt)

Barbara Meters eerste experimentele film. De handheld camera gluurt van buitenaf stiekem naar
het leven in nachtelijke Amsterdamse huiskamers.
Opnamen van lampenkappen, planten, stoelen, gezichten en huisdieren. Een poedel staart uit het raam....

Barbara Meter's first experimental film. From outside, the handheld camera surreptitiously peers
at life in the living rooms of nocturnal Amsterdam. Shots of lamp shades, plants, chairs, faces and pets. A poodle stares out of the window.

barbara meter (c) 2019

"FROM THE EXTERIOR is eight color minutes of spontaneous searching, looking at peoples lives through open-curtained windows, from the outside-in. The film moves, blinks, grasps (lyrically) at the fragments of (room) reality; patches of color, the edge of a plant, a man sitting camouflaged within his surroundings, blinking TV sets, etc. It's a vision at un funny high-speed (shot at 8fps) of moments lost, passed too quickly for accurate memory-impact to be formed. Thus the film must be seen and reseen; people exist in a non-linear time, they just are. Their situations are, unobtusively; simply, those of Giacometti-like existences, focussed on for moments only, then left to themselves. Gesture (the film-maker's and the subjects') becomes the form content of life and film. Sometimes existences overlap (physically through superimposition), as patches of shape in a defined space, specific yet timeless." --Peter Gidal (TimeOut-1971)