Bas Jan Ader

Biography

Bas-Jan Ader was a visual artist. He lived and worked in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, and made several short experimental and conceptual films. The most famous ones are the films Fall I - Los Angeles, Broken Fall (organic), and Fall II - Amsterdam, in which Ader respectively falls from a roof, falls from a tree, and rides a bicycle into a ditch.

Ader disappeared in 1975 in an attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat. The trip was part of the project In Search for the Miraculous. A few weeks after his final radio contact, an empty boat washed up on the west coast of Ireland.