- The Heart Book, 2013
Duration 29 minutes. Drawings, text, concept and production: Tanja Smit; sound recording and mix: Justin Bennett; editing: André Bijma; voice over: John Lonsdale, Anne Wolfson. Funding: Stroom Den Haag.
The Heart is a stop-motion video of a book. It shows, page after page, a story in multiple layers. Source is 1952 hard-cover edition of the book The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, that Tanja Smit inherited from her father. It all evolves around the letter h of heart. On each page of the book one or more words beginning with an h are selected, marking the white space around them. The drawings react to them; either to the amorphous shapes that surround the h-words or to their content. The hand-written text above each page contains all selected h-words from underneath in chronological order and creates, page after page, a new story, an absurd romance entangled with Greene´s novel through the mutual h-words, but further completely independent.