In working with the same people (often actors, musicians, intellectuals) over extended periods of time, de Boer explores the disjunctions between lived time and recorded history. Her work captures the post-Modern shift from communal to individual histories. With the repetitions and cuts in her films, she avoids portraying time as either linear or chronological.
Witte de With presents two films by de Boer: Sylvia Kristel – Paris (2003) and Presto, Perfect Sound (2006). The earlier work is constructed around two interviews carried out by de Boer two years apart with the actress who rose to fame as the star of “Emmanuelle”. Kristel’s stories wander fluidly through key points in her life, turning mainly around her many love affairs and the cities in which they took place. The city to which her story returns most frequently is Paris, and while we hear Kristel’s voice, we see images of Paris filmed by a handheld camera. At first, the super-8 images seem to have been recorded in the era of which Kristel speaks, an illusion destroyed by the inclusion of architecture clearly built in recent years. We only see Kristel herself twice, smoking silently and resembling a screen goddess of the Golden Age of Hollywood. These brief appearances punctuate the two interviews, whose emphasis alters considerably, revealing certain inconsistencies in the process of remembering and recounting, her poignant pauses underlining what is left unsaid.