Cinéma Invisible – Het Boek

In the project Cinema Invisible, four Dutch film makers, among them Kees Hin, take a look at several screenplays that were never realised and have been described in the book Anthologie du cinéma invisible by Christian Janicot. The other film makers involved in this project are Digna Sinke (see alongside), Cherry Duyns (about a plan by Stefan Zweig) and Rolf Orthel, initiator of the project and maker of a film about the Russian writer Isaac Babel.To pay homage to the book and the amazing variety of film ideas it includes, Hin made a film looking at no less than ten of the projects described. For each project he made the short film fragment, occasionally a fictional film version of the project through his own eyes (and that of co-writer K. Schippers), sometimes a documentary scene in which the relevant artist is introduced. Among the projects included: Alfred Döblin, who wrote a fantastic story about the melting of the ice cap on Greenland to satisfy world energy needs, Fernand Léger, who thought how terrible it would be to point a camera at someone for 24 hours a day, Yves Klein, who wanted to make a film about the colour blue and Ossip Mandelstam, who fantasised about portraying with great irony the heroism of firemen.An elegant, playful and inquisitive homage to the imagination and ideas of the scriptwriters and, in more abstract terms, also a loving homage to the art of film as a whole. (SdH)