From the Exterior

Summary

The first experimental film by Meter, in which the camera outside secretly peers through the windows at night in Amsterdam homes.

‘In this film Barbara Meter invokes one of the most abiding and contentious issues in film: that of the camera as a voyeur. She points her hand-held camera at the occupants of houses at night-time Amsterdam, where windows are large and curtains often open.

Behind the occasional reflective glass of the window itself there are lampshades, plants, a seated figure, chairs, tables, faces, animals, a TV set, walls, doorways. Meter sometimes compounds the effect by superimposing two views.

There is a productive tension between planning and chance whose results are usually serendipitous. In one shot a poodle stares out at the dark. In another the camera plans across the faces of a widely spaced group sitting around a table. Between two of these figures is a TV set, which at the moment the camera sweeps past, bears the image of a talking head, identical in size to its real neighbours’. (Nicky Hamlyn, 1996)