Mirror of Holland (Bert Haanstra, 1950) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Brandon

Oh, Inverted World

I'll confess, Bert Haanstra is one of those names that has always been bouncing around in the back of my head, as someone I should really look into. And to be honest, I could say the same thing about Dutch cinema in general. Granted, I have seen a couple of Joris Ivens films, and a couple of Johan van der Keukens, but compared with other European national cinemas, I'm woefully uninformed about film from the Netherlands. Among contemporary directors I know even less, except that Nanouk Leopold is pretty interesting, and Alex van Warmerdam is terrible.

Mirror of Holland is an early experiment by Haanstra, only his second credited film. It is quite simple in concept, but undoubtedly very challenging in execution. I invite you watch it above -- it's a mere nine minutes -- and you'll see what I mean. Haanstra has made a rural landscape film, showing farmers and fishermen, trees and windmills, all reflected in lakes and rivers. Once Haanstra inverts his camera, we are treated to right-side-up images of pastoral Holland, but with the persistent ripple of reflecting water.

Apart from being a neat formal trick, the aquatic "lens" of Mirror of Holland suggests life by the water as the dominant characteristic of life in the Netherlands. A full 17% of Dutch land has been reclaimed from the sea. A third of the country is below sea level, and is protected by a system of dikes, canals, and water-pumping windmills. So in fact Haanstra has made a landscape film about his native country, in the sense that the landscape of the Netherlands is also always a waterscape. Solid metaphor, lovely film.