Maarten Peels
Maarten Peels
Independent Artist
Country
Netherlands
Member since
Bio
I'm a filmmaker working on movies about the European Late Palaeolithic. In the past two years, I have worked on a short film inspired by the eight-legged bison of the Chauvet cave and the flutes from Hohle Fels. This short film was shot in May 2024 and premiered in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden in October of that year. It was fully a passion project of myself and it was financed with a crowdfunding and my personal savings. It is called "De Poten van de Bizon" (The Bison's Legs). It tells the story of two hunter-gatherers on a dream quest to make a new cave painting. After a bad dream, the main character wants to make a new painting. He performs a shamanistic ritual. Then he and his friend find a bison herd and make a sketch. They bring the new drawing to life in a cave using fire, shadows and rhythm. The film has since been shown in the Hunebedcentrum Drenthe and the Urgeschichtliches Museum Blaubeuren, and I am planning to organize more viewings.
In the meantime, I am networking with EXARC members to form a scientific basis for the next film. This next film will be a middle-length feature on the same topic. I plan to talk to many experts in order to get the most up to date picture of what the world of around 30-12kya could have been like. I have a story in mind that is more or less universal: a young hunter is wounded in the shoulder and cannot hunt anymore. He is greatly saddened by this prospect. A teacher-shaman helps him reinvent himself, and he becomes a storyteller and painter. In the latter part of the film, many tribes meet up for summer celebrations, and the remainder of his grief gets dissolved in the collective festivities. He works himself into a group that has exclusive right to making ritual rock art. At the end of the summer, he is taken to a secret cave, where he is allowed to leave his best work on the wall. The young artist disappears into the darkness, and a deep silence ensues. Then, voices appear from the distance, and flashlights hover over the cave wall: French archaeologists finding his bison painting, 30.000 years later.
This story to me is probable for the era. But it needs a lot of 'filling in': what tools people used, how they subsisted, their cultural artefacts and rituals, how large a gathering of could tribes get given resource constraints, etc etc. To form a scientifically accurate picture, I have done a lot of reading myself, but I wish to speak to many experts as well.
From September 2024 until January 2025, I will finish my Master's degree in Applied Ethics at Utrecht University. I will find a job for subsistence in order to keep working on my passion. I will be making documentaries and video essays on YouTube (see below), perhaps generating an income from this later.
If you are interested in collaborating on this project, or if you have ideas for telling stories about the Palaeolithic, please send me a message!
For more details, check out my website: www.potenvandebizon.nl
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@potenvandebizon
In the meantime, I am networking with EXARC members to form a scientific basis for the next film. This next film will be a middle-length feature on the same topic. I plan to talk to many experts in order to get the most up to date picture of what the world of around 30-12kya could have been like. I have a story in mind that is more or less universal: a young hunter is wounded in the shoulder and cannot hunt anymore. He is greatly saddened by this prospect. A teacher-shaman helps him reinvent himself, and he becomes a storyteller and painter. In the latter part of the film, many tribes meet up for summer celebrations, and the remainder of his grief gets dissolved in the collective festivities. He works himself into a group that has exclusive right to making ritual rock art. At the end of the summer, he is taken to a secret cave, where he is allowed to leave his best work on the wall. The young artist disappears into the darkness, and a deep silence ensues. Then, voices appear from the distance, and flashlights hover over the cave wall: French archaeologists finding his bison painting, 30.000 years later.
This story to me is probable for the era. But it needs a lot of 'filling in': what tools people used, how they subsisted, their cultural artefacts and rituals, how large a gathering of could tribes get given resource constraints, etc etc. To form a scientifically accurate picture, I have done a lot of reading myself, but I wish to speak to many experts as well.
From September 2024 until January 2025, I will finish my Master's degree in Applied Ethics at Utrecht University. I will find a job for subsistence in order to keep working on my passion. I will be making documentaries and video essays on YouTube (see below), perhaps generating an income from this later.
If you are interested in collaborating on this project, or if you have ideas for telling stories about the Palaeolithic, please send me a message!
For more details, check out my website: www.potenvandebizon.nl
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@potenvandebizon
Topics of interest
Focus areas
Looking for collaborators to help with my research in the following topic
