Aye Aye (The Eye/The Ij)

May 25, 2012

In the morning I met with  colleagues at Leiden University Medical Center to discuss ongoing experiments and scientific papers in process. However, due to the continued spectacular weather, Sicco and Yvonne decided we should go to Amsterdam, where we checked out the new film museum (“The Eye”).

The name is a pun on watching films, but also because the museum’s site is the Ij (also pronounced “eye”), which is a central body of water where multiple canals meet. It’s an aquarian crossroad between the Rhine River, the North Sea, and the biggest canals that traverse Holland. To get to the museum we had to take a ferry boat (hence the triple pun, referring to the sail across the canal).

The building itself is quite stunning, and it has also gentrified a formerly bad neighborhood. The interior of the museum was notable for the large restaurant with its lights that resemble those on a film stage.

The current exhibit was called “Found Footage,” and it showcased how snippets of old “found” films could be combined to create something new with entirely different meaning. The most interesting film was called “Intervista-Finding the Words,” by Anri Sala, an award-winning Albanian filmmaker.  In his parents’ attic he found old 16 mm black and white footage of an Albanian Communist Youth Alliance congress in which his mother (see black and white photo) was interviewed as propaganda. The soundtrack, however, was lost. When he asked his mother about it, she could not remember what she said. He becomes obsessed with it and eventually hires deaf-mutes to lip read his mother’s speech to decipher its contents.