In Memoriam Rosemarie Blank

With her background in the Berlin student movement, Blank would address the relationship between farmers and landlords in Italy (La terra in due, 1985), she made films about the squatters' movement in Amsterdam – of which she herself was a member – and films about the euthanasia of her husband (Punt uit, 2020). She also investigated the impact of the war in Ukraine on the life of a young Ukrainian art student (Lost in Time, 2024).

Constant experiment

In her work, Blank was always looking for a deeper truth that could not be read from reality immediately. She did not find documentary as pure reportage interesting; she constantly experimented with film means and forms in order to crawl beneath the surface of what was visible to the naked eye. The use of fiction or historical film material was not avoided.

Transit Levantkade (1991) is an example of a predominantly documentary film that uses archive material and fictional elements, while Rit over de grens (1994) is a fictional film, but is carried by predominantly documentary elements.

Her most ambitious fictional project was Farewell Pavel in 1999. She would return to the subject of the squatters' movement once more, in a film that was so close to her heart that it took her twenty years to complete it. Using footage she had shot twenty years earlier, Blank completed Job and the Dutch Free State (Job en de Hollandse Vrijstaat) in 2009.

Important source

Looking back at Rosemarie Blank's oeuvre, her notes on film, filmmaking and her visual studies in the form of photo collages – which she often used in preparation for a film project – prove to be an important source for understanding and appreciating her cinematic legacy.

Shortly before her death, Blank was still able to work on a book that can be described as an artist's book. It contains reflections on her work in words and images, under the title: Workshop Reports. It is expected that a small edition of this book will become available in the coming months and can also be consulted in the Eye Study.

In Eye's collection

Rosemarie Blank's films have been included in the film museum's collection and her photographs and (paper) archives will also be transferred to Eye.