A Fleeting Dream

Visual artist Henri Plaat got an Eumig-camera in 1966, then he started making experimental short films, ‘an exploded hobby’. Plaat traveled a lot, to Greece, the Middle-East, India, South-America et cet., where his fascination began for ‘places of the past’, characterized by decay and destruction. What he saw got registered on film and silenced fragments got edited into pure visual cinema. Like his drawings, montages, and paintings Plaat’s 8 and 16mm films blends imagination with reality. Plaat describes them as “atmospheric movies, often photomontages with mixes of war sounds, airplane rumble, Zarah Leander’s voice, Wagner’s music… All fragments, leading to amazing effects”.
Henri Plaat (Amsterdam 1936) made about 40 films, from absurd and surrealistic to melancholic. He has a fascination for WW2, traveling, film music, and the slow decay of things.