Interview with Els van Riel

Anthony Brynaert: We meet at Art Cinema OFFoff in Ghent, a few hours before Robert Beavers is a guest here tonight. Have you ever met him?

Els van Riel: I’ve known his work for a long time. In the early 1990s, I worked at STUK in Leuven as a projectionist. Dirk De Wit was the programmer there at the time. I was studying cinematography, but it was there that I really got in touch with experimental film for the first time and realized that I shouldn't work on a film set if I didn't feel like it.

I first met Robert Beavers at Media City Film Festival. I was there with Gradual Speed (2013) and Beavers presented Listening to the Space in My Room (2013). He won the first prize with his film and the second. I was quite proud of that.

Beavers is currently preparing an exhibition in Biel, Switzerland on the work of Gregory Markopoulos for which I will be one of the technicians.

Brynaert: You’ve been active in the field of experimental film for a long time now, both as a filmmaker but also as a member of Labo BXL and screening platform Cinema Parenthèse. Has film always been a big part of your life? Did you go to the cinema regularly as a child?

Van Riel: Actually, no. There was no cinema in my village. I am certainly not a cinephile. Occasionally, I see films that touch me very hard and inspire me, but I am not at all concerned with trying to see everything. I started with photography quite young, simply because there was a camera at home. I then started studying photography, but not in art school. As a student, I have worked for the photo service of a department store where I learned a lot in terms of technique, more than in school.

Where did you study photography?

At Narafi in Brussels. After photography, I studied film after all, because with still photography I always had the feeling of being just too late, just missing what I wanted to capture. With moving images, there might be more chance to actually capture something special. Narafi was founded as a training to go and work for VRT, the Belgian television broadcaster. If you were lucky, you could start there to drag cables. If you did that for ten years, you might be allowed behind a camera. That was the trend in the late 1980s. It was there, though, that I actually learned to shoot on 16mm film and got a taste for the materiality of film equipment.

How did you eventually discover experimental film?

At STUK, Dirk De Wit programmed experimental film together with Willem De Greef, who was the director of Sint-Lukas in Brussels at the time. That's where my eyes opened up. Someone who has also been very important was the American filmmaker Leslie Thornton. Around that same time, she was in Brussels making the decor for a play at Kaaitheater. I was working as an assistant there, together with Anouk Declercq. It was then I started to realize that you can make a lot and go deep with only small materials.

Did you start working as a projectionist to learn more about the materials and equipment of film?

Yes, to be able to actually hold those little images in my hands. I then pretty soon started putting together my own studio by buying a camera, lenses, tripods and a Steenbeck editing table.

I have the impression that many experimental film collectives in Belgium originated somewhat later than in our neighboring countries. While several film labs were already emerging in the Netherlands and France in the 1980s and 1990s, there was no Belgian film lab represented at the first Film Labs meeting at Cinema Nova in Brussels in 2005.

In those years, I was more involved in the music scene myself, but I do know that the founders of Labo BXL were present at that meeting and started not long after in 2006. I only became an active member myself in 2013, when I wanted to use their printer for Gradual Speed.

When did you start Cinema Parenthèse?

Daniel Swarthnas started the screening platform in Sweden and moved to Brussels with it. I am the only Dutch-speaking member of the collective. The idea of Parenthèse was to invite filmmakers together with their work. Half of the group no longer lives in Brussels, but we want to revitalize the platform. Daniel always chooses very specific and radical work. That's what makes the programs so fascinating. Labo BXL recently moved to Argos. Maybe a collaboration is possible there.

Is it true that your earliest film and video works were mostly in response to compositions and music? You collaborated with composers Phil Niblock and Antoine Beuger, among others?

Indeed, at one point I started working a lot with Q-O2 *, an arts laboratory for experimental music and sound art. In 2006, they received structural funds to open a studio. During the absence of founder Julia Eckhardt – who is also part of the Courtisane festival program this year with the composition Occam Delta XX (2022) – I took over her role for two years. Partly because at that time I was very convinced that there where all the arts stop, where they can no longer continue to develop visually, materially or conceptually, that is only where music starts. In abstraction. I found that idea overwhelming. The starting point of composers is: 'What is it that you want to hear?' For a filmmaker, there's always already light, movement and reality you're working with. A composer starts from a blank page. What may disturb that silence?

When did you start working with music as a filmmaker?

With film work and improvisations to music. In Lost and Found, I connected my camera to a projector during concerts to reflect visual impressions in the space. Spending time with a space and with sound is a simple starting point, but enough to keep you busy for a long time. It is also an excellent exercise in concentration, to learn to look and listen, of being in a space and building a dialogue with the environment.

At what point did you start thinking about making your first film, Gradual Speed?

I quit Q-O2 * in 2008. At that time, it was in the air that film stock would disappear. Kodak was going to close its doors and many labs were shutting down. So what was better to do than to make some sort of swan song for film stock? That ended up being Gradual Speed, a film as send-off of black-and-white film on film. In that spirit, the film was made. At Courtisane festival in 2013, Gradual Speed was also shown together with a film by Rose Lowder, Bouquets 21-30 (2005). It's a nice gesture to do this again at this year's edition with my new work, ELLIPTIC (2025).

The dissection, exploration and investigation of light plays a central role in your films. Is it also that aspect of Rose Lowder's work that particularly affects you and creates a dialogue with your films? Rhythmically, ELLIPTIC and the film of Lowder you combine it with, Retour d'un repère (Recurrence, 1979), are very different.

Retour d'un repère is a title that I could have perfectly used for ELLIPTIC myself, and by extension for my entire film practice. I once asked Rose Lowder: “Do you ever measure light? Of course not. She knows the environment and the film material so well that her own camera and lenses are enough for her to film the environment as she sees it.

When did you start experimenting with the focus puller that deepens the image, manipulates it and sets the rhythm in ELLIPTIC?

The film started from the question of when you get actual black in a projection. You only really get black black when the details in the image are very light. Moreover, I was looking for an alternative to the ever present rectangular frame. Why not use a different shape as a frame? I simply cut a circle out of a black plane and started playing with different lenses. Suddenly, I discovered that the image becomes very spherical as the focus shifts. In fact, it's strange that as filmmakers we work with lenses that are round, but then always project onto a square surface.

The shots in the film follow a clear pattern: you start very close and, by shifting the focus, you dive deeper and deeper into the frame, to eventually go back. It is fascinating that regardless of that fixed pattern, the technique still leads to different outcomes each time.

I'm still seeing new things myself. In some shots you get this spherical suggestion very strongly, but other images just lead to a stretched out landscape. I would have loved to continue experimenting with it for years to come and never have to finish the film.

We see very diverse landscapes and places in ELLIPTIC. Are the shots made in your close surroundings?

Initially, my idea was to shoot in a studio. It's not so easy to find objects which, standing behind each other, maintain a beautiful, in-depth image, layer by layer. However, that artificial way of working lacked life. The first image ended up being shot accidentally in my living room and became the last image of the film. Suddenly I saw the sunlight falling on a picture of my mother among my books and took the camera.

There are a lot of little miracles in the film. The light falling on the picture in the shot you mention being one example.

It's really about the belief that something can happen by taking enough time to look at the environment. I have ten minutes per shot, the length of a roll of film. The moment of shooting is very short, but it took a lot of time to choose the right spots and moments for the film. By granting that time to the process, you sometimes get back those little, wonderful moments.

Rose Lowder speaks of Retour d'un repère as a response to problems of perception: “It seemed to me that if you wanted to create, not reality – that’s not interesting at all; you might just as well see reality – but if you want to make a work of film art that is as rich as what one is used to in reality, you have to enrich the film image somehow. One way is to continually focus on slightly different focus points that allow you to see around.” Are the focus experiments in ELLIPTIC part of a same aim of adding an extra layer to reality?

Looking at reality differently is always at stake, in almost every experimental film. One of the basic ideas behind this work is my belief that the medium of film is really capable of digging into a piece of reality, of using the lens to approach the layers in that piece of reality as a caress, or as a deepening, an encounter, also to strengthen my own consciousness in order to maybe one day understand something of what life actually is or can be. This is, of course, also a reaction to our insane political world, as if we can only catch at a straw.

How did the collaboration come about with Marie-Cécile Reber, the Swiss composer who made the sound for the film?

We met in Düsseldorf at KLANGRAUM, a series of concerts by Antoine Beuger where every year he invites musicians and artists to show things to each other. What struck me about her work is that she really makes music with her field recordings, in a very subtle way. Sometimes with humor and a bit wayward. I asked her, still without the context of a possible film, if she would be interested in imagining what the sound of light might be. For me, light is the source of inspiration from which everything starts. Occasionally, she would send me bits of music and we continued to talk. She told me that this exercise led her to look at light differently herself.

She then started using pieces of those experiments for the film?

Yes, in total freedom. Each piece was supposed to have its own sound, but she started weaving certain sounds throughout the film nonetheless. At the very end, she discarded a lot. Which was very radical actually, because there were sounds and music in the film that she had worked on for days on end. Radical silence now plays a big role in ELLIPTIC.

Is that something you yourself are looking for in your films, that power of radical silence? The question of to make the silence between two sounds visual?

What is special about sound is that you hear it much more strongly the moment it stops, but bringing silence into a film is indeed a very fascinating thing.

For instance, I was reminded of the white surface at the start of each shot in Gradual Speed.

True, but at the same time that white surface also creates enormous expectations. Visual nothingness should then perhaps rather be black, or just the empty white screen hanging at the front. One of my earliest film works, Unwritten Page (2001), was made to Antoine Beuger's composition of the same name. For that film, I had hung a white cloth in the Zwin nature park. I filmed through the canvas and gradually closed the aperture so that the image slowly starts to appear. The idea was to make the white screen part of the film. The silences in Beuger's music were indispensable for this.

You sometimes speak of playing film instruments.

I keep discovering that machinery. The medium of photography is some 200 years old. 16mm recently celebrated its 100th anniversary, and yet this all still feels new when you compare it to other arts like literature or painting. It remains new every day. Every time you go in a certain direction, a whole range of new possibilities open up. Initially, I wanted to shoot ELLIPTIC in black and white and gradually add color in the printing, but because of the specific negative stock, the black also changed color with it. I need to reserve that experiment for a subsequent work. Eventually, I shifted the idea of inserting more and more color into the sequencing of the images. We start with a white-gray, snowy landscape and end with bright sunlight.

I especially take from ELLIPTIC the radical attention and taking time for and with the environment around us.

And using film as a tool in the process. The language of film itself is part of what I want to explore. The camera turns and works as a tool to really be somewhere. Then it's waiting for something to happen.


This interview was conducted by Anthony Brynaert on March 31, 2025 on the occasion of the screening of ELLIPTIC at Courtisane festival. Anthony Brynaert is part of Atelier OFFoff.