ABSTRACT
Bert Haanstra can be seen as the most ‘‘Dutch’’ of the internationally known Dutch filmmakers. In the Netherlands he became famous with his often humorous, ironic but tender portrayals of Dutch people and society, both in his documentaries and his feature films (of which his Fanfare [1958] is still one of the most successful Dutch films). Internationally, Haanstra is mostly known for his poetic short documentaries, showing the natural, cultural, and industrial landscapes of the Netherlands. Together with Herman van der Horst, he is seen as the most important exponent of what has been called the Dutch Documentary School. Although there has never been a real school or organized documentary movement, the success of Dutch documentaries at international festivals during the 1950s urged critics to invent this label with its reference to seventeenth-century Dutch painting. This reference is not completely devoid of meaning, as many of its characteristic elements can be found in the films of Haanstra and his contemporaries: water, skies, landscapes, and the portrayal of people in their everyday surroundings. Especially in the work of Haanstra these elements are very prominent. In his second film, Mirror of Holland (1951), Haanstra takes this approach to a poetic extreme by filming everything through the reflection of the water surface. Normally, things (landscapes,
people, buildings) appear upside-down when filmed in this way, but at the beginning of the film, with images of windmills reflected in the water, Haanstra turns the camera upside-down, which makes the images appear upright, but still filtered by the movement and ripples of the water surface. The entire film has been shot in this way. But his work is also characterized by the well-
thought out composition of the images and the rhythmic editing style that evokes the work of Joris Ivens who had the same attention for water, skies, and people in his films. The high point of this film style is without doubt Haanstra’s Oscar-winning short film Glass (1958), which portrayed the craftsmanship of a glass blower in a commercial glass factory.Machinery is taking over this craftsmanship and the film shows a rhythmic sequence, stressed by the accompanying music, of ‘‘dancing’’ machines and moving bottles, until one of the bottles breaks and interrupts the rhythm of the machines. A human hand is needed to speed things up again. If not a kind of homage, this sequence is at least a reference to Joris Ivens’s Philips Radio of 1931, in which a similar rhythmic sequence is shown. One of Ivens’s lessons to other documentarists has been that if one wishes to make the spectator aware of the rhythm of the film, it is necessary to interrupt it at least once, a lesson that has often been brought into practice by Bert Haanstra.
