Nieuwe architectuur

Part of 'Archives Present' IDFA 1996

Cinema is a child of the nineteenth century theatre tradition. But it is also a part of the process of modernisation which got underway at the end of that same nineteenth century and was put into full effect in the twentieth century. Film has changed our view of the world and made us witnesses to a changing world. With the curious look of a newborn child cinema has voluntarily or involuntarily registered that process of change, in fiction and in non?fiction.In this light film archives are veritable treasuries of history. With its enormously rich collection from the early years of cinema the Dutch Film Museum archive contains the sediment of that process of modernisation in bits and pieces. This programme features a modest selection of non?fiction films about a country that is on the threshold of modern times.How modern exactly were the Netherlands at the beginning of this century? If we believe the most important filmmaker from those days, Belgian director Alfred Machin, Holland is still a country in clogs around 1910. In his COMMENT SE FAIT LE FROMAGE DE HOLLANDE (1909) every trace of the modern era is absent. His portrait of Holland is painted according to the image that the painters of the Barbizon school have of it, rural, idyllic, as if time stood still for a century. It seems as if Holland does not awaken until the early twenties, when industrial activities are recorded in numerous company films and the consumer interest is stirred up through advertising films. But also in the new genre of the company film it seems that Holland has not completely cast off the nineteenth century. The priners in the coal-mines of LA HOUILLE and the paint factories and glassworks are more reminiscent of Emile Zola's and Charles Dickens's world than of Henry Ford's conveyor belt society.Our chroniclers are particularly impressed by the powerful wheels and gears that are the products of industrialisation. Like the labourer ? sometimes with his cap in his hand ? is immortalised standing next to the immense machines, amazed at the capacity of the new medium, the cameraman is likewise astounded at the marvels of technology. All the same these films are still fascinating today. Oddly enough it is the spontaneous and uncontrollable phenomena in the factories that determine the picturesque beauty of this genre, like the desolation of an empty workshop, the light shining in, wisps of smoke and blazing fire or the arch or surly look of a worker into the camera.In PANORAMA VAN DE KONINGSHAVEN TE ROTTERDAM we are introduced for the first time to the dynamics of modern times. Although the film concentrates on the famous lift bridge in Rotterdam (the same bridge Joris Ivens would make his lyrical documentary about a few years later), nevertheless we get an idea of the hustle and bustle of the big city with its chugging locomotives, packed out ships and nervous car traffic. It is an image of the modern city as we still know it. With Ivens's serene pictures of modern architecture by the Amsterdam school and the straight lines of the 'light, air and space architecture' by the Nieuwe Zakelijkheid Holland has once and for all entered the twentieth century.