Dennis Lamers

Where do you live: Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Describe your art in three words: Audaces fortuna iuvat.
Your discipline: video art.

Could you tell us more about your journey as a two-time dropout from the Royal Academy of Art? How did those experiences shape your current artistic path?

The Royal Academy of Art is a very prestigious art school in The Netherlands. So getting accepted twice and dropout twice is defying the gods. They were not very happy, but I am by nature a very stubborn individual, and somewhat arrogant. Getting my film made based upon the novel The Jewish Messiah, based on the novel by Arnon Grunberg. A couple of years before embarking on this particular project I had been continuously working on a script based on Dutchbat, the Dutch military unit in Srebrenica. I even went location scouting in Bosnia, Srebrenica and Potocari. I was in talk with a famous Dutch actor, but the process became eventually in dire straits and I couldn’t get it made. I was in need for something completely different and fresh. Four months into my study Photography at the Academy, I was doing none of the assignments but went on doing my own photography assignments. I was sending one of the early drafts to producers in The Netherlands, but got rejected every time. After four months I quited the Academy and went for the next couple of years making video art and kept writing new drafts of The Jewish Messiah. In 2019 I started on the eight draft, but consequently in an English version for an international production. 

The academy couldn’t teach me all that I know now. By doing everything myself — shooting, directing, financing, producing — I created the best academy for me. And after seeing professional editors editing your project, you have to learn and understand yourself cuts to make. I decided to cut E-Motion and La Rioja myself. I should have figured it out in 2008 and 2017 that photography could not prevail my love for cinematography. I would never had any grasping of the basics in psychology and kinetics if I had stayed on the academy. I don’t know if I ever reach the Ithaca of Art, but I prefer to just float instead and see where it takes me. 

As a self-taught video artist, what challenges have you faced compared to those with formal education in filmmaking?

I had no idea where to begin. I relied, and still do, on watching all kinds of movies. I have seen so many, and many of them over and over and over again. The cuts in movies, the camera movements, the lighting. I have no idea how to write a script, so I had to do a lot of research, and lots of reading scripts. All video art-projects started with a vision, sparked by a piece of music, a moment, a conversation, a piece of writing, it could be anything. First project —‘in search for Srebrenica’ — was sparkled by my interest in Dutchbat, the second — ‘Trans|Formation’ — was inspired by Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower, and took three years to make, the third — ‘E-Motion’ — was solely of therapeutic nature because I required something easy to do after three years on making ‘Trans|Formation’ and I learned to edit my own project. La Rioja was not planned. The script for The Jewish Messiah got stuck. I was desillusioned. One day I was having a drink with my girlfriend and the bottle of La Rioja wine just stood there on the dinner table. Thus, La Rioja was born, and after minutes and hours of cutting, and getting it visually right, it had turned into hardcore guerrilla training. Everything for the right frame. The right cut. It had to be perfect. A piece of art, a  ‘Caravaggio’ shot, a ‘Monet’ shot. Are there rules of formal education of filmmaking? I don’t know. I gave myself one rule, in the words of Warhol: ‘the idea is not to live forever, but to make something that will.’ In the aftermath of finishing La Rioja, the script got moving again and the ending is almost there. 

You’ve been working on a feature film script for over two decades. Could you share what drives you to continue refining this project, and what it means to you?

Madness. Working on this script is madness and not advisable. I like what Terry Gilliam one said: “If it’s easy, I don’t do it; if it’s almost impossible, I’ll have a go.” That’s in a nutshell what should be on my tombstone. The main character, in a very abstract opposite, is a very modern kolonel Lawrence (of Arabia), and The Jewish Messiah is basically a very abstract opposite of Lawrence of Arabia. I am fascinating with characters like Lawrence, or Odysseus, and his voyage back to Ithaca. The main character reminds me of Odysseus, but instead of returning home, the main character is trying to reach his own Ithaca. The book is practically impossible to adapt for the screen, so finding the correct rabbithole for a cinematic adaptation is crucial. You have to be mad to embark on this mad endeavour, in a same way Lawrence was. When writing the script it sometimes reminds me of Lawrence dragging himself through the Sinai desert. It’s madness, but his madness is positively persuasive and compelling. I like that. 

How do you approach the intersection of video art and traditional storytelling in your work?

My video art are basically creative results from a mind stuck in a sort of creative twister. This has settled down in the years following. Especially ‘Trans|Formation’ got lost and it went all over the place. In the editing I tried to save it as much as possible but failed miserably. Storytelling is very important. Having a vision and then construct the movie very carefully to convey what you want to convey. A lesson for me learned the hard way, a big continuous process of trial & error. When you lose direction as a creator in the midst of making it, the storytelling goes straight out the window before it is even finished. I find video art to be a tremendous specificity for me to make very, exceptional art that encapsulates both the creator’s creative mind – its fluctuations, pitfalls and highs – and the story. One and the other, to my believe, have to be understand like cars on a two lane highway, and both going one direction, next to each other. In the beginning when I started out storytelling and video art went in the same direction, but moving at different speed. It doesn’t work. You’ll crash and burn.

Can you elaborate on the themes of your current video art projects? What are you trying to convey through these works?

I felt to make every video art something that lives forever, in the pursue of my Warhol-rule, and make a product of deeper psychology. Dutchbat, Chelsea Manning are political engaged, La Rioja is not so much a matter of wine addiction and the subconscious, but has history too in it. My projects visualize and tell my fascinations and interests for specific political subjects, history, individual extravagance, made in different visualizations, either in color, black and white or chairoscuro. I want people to challenge themselves, to motivate to go on their own quest in life like Lawrence, Chelsea Manning and Odysseus, seek the boundaries of life and the impossibilities. With ‘E-Motion’ I wanted to make an abstract, paradoxal visualization which could be a somewhat very futuristic car commercial of the far future. The adaptation I am working on is too about someone on his own odyssey, like me. There is a very specific narrative in my storytelling. I think everyone is stuck in a narrative and my work hopefully contributes to unlock these narratives. 

The concept of a woman exploring a new level of alcoholism in her subconscious is intriguing. How do you translate such complex psychological themes into a visual medium?

The subsonscious by itself can be beyond comprehension and is still being written about. Nietzsche, Jung, Freud, they conveyed beautifully, intellectually, philosophically the psyche, its psychoanalysis and the wonders emerging from it. With that, the sophisticated symbioses with the elementary functions of the brain. An individual is perfectly competent to dream grotesque, visually compelling, construct beautiful dreams and horrible nightmares. Something as simple as wine is brutally unique in its sublime simplicity to spark enough force of cognitive and mental energy to empower an imagination that is impossible to grasp, but also possible due to the psyche being a complex universe. The woman in La Rioja drank too much and constructs her own universe when she passes out. Her subsconscious supplies her with everything that she went through, she experienced, she has seen, she felt, her needs and consequently her subconscious multiplied these basics psychologically with different settings, history, text, colors and visuals. The outcome is La Rioja. I am merely the instigator, the director behind her subconscious and shapes all into a intellectual visual storytelling. I translate so much as a composer translates his notes with the outcome being perhaps an ouverture or a symphony. 

What do you hope audiences feel or reflect on when they view your work?

I hope that they say exactly what they feel and reflect when they view my work. Art is arbitrary as much as it is a medium to reflect the truth or spirit as much as it an instrument to project an opinion, point of view as it is to tell a narrative. I hope it inspires viewers to travel into their subconscious and construct their own artistic world. To see how beautiful art can be, to see how free art can be. I just hope that I have begun paying off just a little bit of the guilt and honor the artistic inheritance of the great masters in art, whether they are painters, sculptors, filmmakers or video artists. Lincoln once said: ‘ government of the people, by the people, for the people. Now, replace ‘government’ for ‘art’ and I think that sort of stipulates free interpretation of art being a free and rightfully ours, of everyone, no matter gender or skin color.  I am just a man among the people. If within that man is an artist, well, I let others to be the judge of that in their free interpretation and articulation.