Take One (Sep-Oct 1972)

but his vision, and the lessons that he draws tolerantly from his material, are universal. Ape and Super-Ape (Bij de beesten af), which took him over three years to create, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1973 and is a superb cinematic essay on the parallels between mankind and the animals. Scorning |ibrary footage, Haanstra and his two-man team spent months in the Antarctic, Africa, North and South America, filming at close quarters such species as penguins, anthropoid apes and _ chimpanzees, sticklebacks, and lizards. The Sage but never patronising commentary points out that man rejects the lessons of nature at his peril. “Sentimentality is only for humans,” says _ Haanstra. “Nature can’t afford that luxury.” Haanstra’s films, now mostly of feature length, are popular in Holland although, like Ingmar Bergman's, they depend on the international market for their profit. Ferno, van der Horst, and van der Linden (who won an Academy Award for This Tiny World in 1973) could not hope to achieve such a degree of financial viability and must continue either to leave their country — as lvens did in the Thirties — and seek work elsewhere, or remain in Holland and concentrate on short subjects. . One man who did leave Holland for a period is George Sluizer. After serving his apprenticeship with Haanstra and in the field of sponsored documentaries for Shell and others, he visited Brazil. The result was Joao and the Knife, screened at the Berlin Festival in 1972, and a clutch of shorts made in the Brazilian interior. — Another wandering Dutchman is Louis van Gasteren, whose The House, with its fragmented time structure a la Resnais, caught the attention of film festivals a decade ago. Balked, embittered, but superbly articulate, van Gasteren has long been a thorn in the side of the Dutch film establishment. Like most directors in the Netherlands, he manages his own small production company, and has had to turn to television not so much to earn his livelihood as to find a medium that can accommodate his constantly questing and shifting imagination. Je ne sais pas ... moi non plus is a haunting interview film, in which the director himself is seen talking to an old woman in a dilapidated farm area near Limoges in France. Van Gasteren cleverly lulls the spectator into a false complacency as he shows us first a series of Pieter Bruegel paintings of ancient farm dwellings, and then a montage of modern roads, highrise apartment blocks, and the miracles of the technological age. Then comes the interview with the farmer’s wife, and one realises that people still live in those conditions depicted by Bruegel, and that, if not quite content, they are at least resigned to the status quo. Van Gasteren is a radical filmmaker, but unlike most agit-prop cinéastes he has the visual Columns fantasy and control necessary to express his ideas. There are also directors in Holland who are quite content to work outside the pattern of subsidised production, and foremost among them is Frans Zwartjes, a modest lecturer in his forties. Zwartjes is the one true “underground” filmmaker in the Netherlands, and his short fantasies are constructed with meticulous care. His style is obsessive and immediately recognisable. His girls are creatures of the night, their faces starkly lit so that lips gleam like black weals against the white cheeks, reminiscent of Louise Brooks in Pabst’s films. They inhabit an hermetic world of guilt and disgust, although in the past two years Zwartjes’s vision has brightened somewhat, with movies like Through the Garden bubbling with comedy and a Méliés-like enthusiasm for the tricks of the medium. Zwartjes handles all phases of production himself, even to the extent of composing the music, and his strength lies in his ability to tap the deep currents of frustration and fantasy that run in human nature. In one of his longer films, Home Sweet Home, a girl and her mate set about their love-making with palpable distaste. She lies limply on a bed while he tries to project his wishimage of a writhing, full-breasted nude onto her body in an attempt to achieve orgasm. The lighting and the processing (again executed by Zwartjes himself) convert the faces into dark landscapes, the eyes into sombre craters of desire. At last the man finds a beetle squirming on the bed-clothes and thrusts it into the girl's mouth. As she stirs, and then rises to crush the creature into the pillow with her shiny leather shoe, the kinkiness of the relationship reaches its climax. 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