Episode 114: Filmmaker Peet Gelderblom on “When Forever Dies”

This week on the blog, a podcast interview with director and editor Peet Gelderblom on his collage feature, “When Forever Dies.”

LINKS

A Free Film Book for You:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12

Another Free Film Book:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6

Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/

When Forever Dies website: http://www.whenforeverdies.com/

Watch it on Vimeo:  https://vimeo.com/ondemand/whenforeverdies/806226783

Watch it on the Eye Film Player: https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/when-forever-dies

Eli Marks Website:  https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/

Albert’s Bridge Books Website:  https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/

 YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcast

Interview Transcript

 

I do want to just spend just a minute or so talking about When Forever Dies. But oh, my goodness Peet. Where did that come from? And how do—I realize you could probably talk for an hour about it? How did you come up with that? And the very process of putting it together is mind blowing. How would you describe it to someone who hasn't seen it?

Peet: Yeah, When Forever Dies is an archival fiction and it cobbles together scraps of existing films to tell an entirely different story of its own. And that is the story of the relationship between a man and a woman, and how this relationship sort of degrades over time. And it's really experimental in the way that it takes shots and bits and scenes from completely different movies and also completely different genres. It can be advertising, documentaries, animation, love silent films, everything really, and it still manages to tell a whole story.

 You know, you say it's experimental, as someone who has seen it, it's experimental for a few minutes. And then you understand the experiment. And it's then a normal narrative, you get it. I mean, you use some interstitial cards that help bring us along.

 Peet: I say that, because I've always believed that experiment in accessibility shouldn't be a mutually exclusive. It's actually, it's a roller coaster ride of a film and it's in a very, in a lot of ways, it's actually very traditional because I'm using the rules of continuity editing, but I’m using the rules against themselves a little bit, because I take from different films, and then I create, you know, sometimes the opposite meaning out of different shots. Yeah, but what gave me the idea was just I saw a way to do this. And it has evolved, of course, with maybe the start of it was the Raising Cain recut, and making movie mashups after that—video essays—but it