Manon de Boer’s film Presto — Perfect Sound depicts composer and violinist, George Van Dam, performing the fourth movement of a Bartok violin sonata. In order to achieve the ‘perfect’ soundtrack, de Boer edited together the audio track from the five different recordings with the performer and then edited the film to this soundtrack. In allowing the audio sequence to dictate the image on screen, de Boer inverts the traditional dominance of image over sound in cinema. The film is a meditation on the relationship between sound and image and offers an intense reflection on a moment of creative concentration, when the subject is fully absorbed, almost as if out of sync with the world around him.
About the artist
Manon de Boer (b. 1966) is a Dutch artist based in Brussels.
Presto — Perfect Sound is a development of de Boer’s acutely structuralist approach to filmmaking, evident in earlier films such as Sylvia Kristel – Paris (2003) and Resonating Surfaces (2005).
Recent group exhibitions include Don Quiote, Witte de With, Rotterdam, (2006), Documentary Creations, Kunst Museum, Luzern (2005) and Nederland niet Nederland, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2004). De Boer’s film Sylvia Kristel — Paris (2003) has been screened in numerous international film festivals since 2003 including (Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Buenos Aires and Montreal), her film Resonating Surfaces (2005) has been included in the International Film Festival, Rotterdam and is in the prestigious International Competition FID (Festival Internationale Documentaire), Marseille (2006) she was previously awarded the Prix Georges de Beauregard at Marseille in 2004.
This Frieze Projects/LUX commission is de Boer’s first 35mm film production.
I find it fascinating to watch the face of someone who is reading, playing music or thinking, because these are often moments when people seem to forget their ‘social face’, being so concentrated on an interior activity; moments in which a mental space is reflected on the face — this surface between inside and outside.
Manon de Boer, May 2006
