Photographer and Filmmaker

It was my grandfather who introduced me to photography. Somewhere between the age of 12 and 17, experimenting with whatever material happened to be available, I became a photographer. In 1955, I published my first book of photographs, Wij zijn 17 [We Are 17], a 30-picture portrait of the Amsterdam high school group I was part of.

The book was followed in 1957 by the romantic Achter Glas [Behind Glass], published when I was already a student at the IDHEC film school in Paris. There were no scholarships for photography at the time, but there were for film. Film was more serious.

I didn’t know much about film. I had seen Pabst’s Dreigroschenoper, Carné’s Quai des Brumes, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and a couple of ciné-poème type Dutch documentaries by Herman van der Horst and Bert Haanstra. That was visually challenging, that was a photographic art form and that was a world I wanted to explore. The rest, organizing everything, arranging the props and the people, doing the production, was not my cup of tea.

Today the purely visual – or rather the purely sensory image and sound – is still the nucleus it all revolves around. The first convolution around that nucleus is the montage, the process of splitting up sensations and combining them again to create an object in time, an optical statement. As soon as I detected that first convolution, it made me suspect there were more. Chains of problems I didn’t want to have anything to do with at that stage, but which I later successively moved through, from one film to the next: where do you put the statement, the argument of your film, in relation to the purely sensory energy you aspire to if you notice that without the argument, you cannot find a montage form in which the energy is effective? How can you make time, movement and framing the subject of your movie, how can you approach them musically and graphically without lapsing into impressionistic frivolity? How can you create an autonomous composition that nevertheless makes a statement about reality?

How can you evoke a physically perceived three-dimensional space on a flat surface? How does a text enter into this entity and how clear does it become if a political dimension is added to your worldview? What discrepancies are there between the text and the entire composition of visual signs? If an actor comes in, how does he speak? How does he move? What kind of position does he assume? And if, with all of that, a story should develop, does it remain on the surface of the film or is it concealed underneath? Does it exist in formal fragments of narrative or is it projected from the holes, the missing images of the film?

This journey along the convolutions of a spiral is still in progress today. The problems I could not solve three years ago are assailed again in the film I am making now. Next year I might just come across last year’s pitfalls again. Thus my approach to the material is in a constant state of flux and, in art terms, it is sometimes more abstract, sometimes tried to get a grasp on it. The book was not published until five years later, in 1963, in a limited edition, but after the four versions I had made of it in the meantime, in the end the personal and original element prevailed above all those influences. For the time being, the tension between the fragmented outside world and the slow moving inside world permeated, with all its limitations, the carefully balanced selection of photographs. The explosion, the vertigo and the desolation were tranquilly deposited upon the flat surface.

In that sense, I am a self-taught person. The school had no particular interest in asking questions, just in conveying the values and techniques of a system. A system I did not really fit into because it was based on theater, on literature, and on financially profitable production. I came from the tradition of the lonely, wandering eye, a myth I had already made my own in adolescence. From the age of 18 to 20, I roamed about Paris, cutting classes at the film school whenever I could, and my mind was on photography.

I took my chances with that grand theme, Man in the Metropolis, and tried to give it a touch of myself. I had already pored over the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (I still study it, time and time again), I was somewhat familiar with Izis, Doisneau, Bishoff, Brassai, Seymour, Capa, Haas, Ronis, Roiter, Emmy Andriesse and the Americans who worked with existing light. I was stimulated by Ed van der Elsken and the fact that he ventured to put himself on the scene as a participant observer and violate the sociology of reporting, and by his way of dealing with the color black. I was influenced by Rene Groebli’s very intimate book of photographs entitled The Eye of Love, showing how you can create a continuity with a minimum of statements, of arguments (see above!). And now, in Paris, it was as if I were knocked senseless by the “New York” of William Klein: no one had ever spoken that directly before, here was a way to break through the culture wall.

There were other influences as well, John Coltrane’s solo in Straight, No Chaser on a Miles Davis record called Milestones, exposing the very bowels of music. And before that there had been Parker and the other bebop musicians, and the paintings I had been looking at for the last couple of years at modern art museums. Paris Mortel, the book of photographs that emerged from all that was my last large piece of work in the period when I was developing as a photographer and didn't yet consider myself a filmmaker.

After the inner-directed work I had done in my closed world of Amsterdam teenagers, this was a harsh confrontation with the outside world. Paris in the twilight of the colonial era, the coup of Massu and Salan in Algiers, de Gaulle’s rise to power, the boy who felt lost amidst the turmoil and beforehand, when I began to improvise, to think via the images that emerged of their own accord from the confrontations with reality, when I started to illuminate people and things with one or two tiny lamps as I had been wanting to do when I took pictures, and when I started to dissociate myself from theatrical naturalism, the pretence of true-to-life that dominated and still dominates current thinking about film, when I rid myself of the inhibiting idea of production and could more freely experience the pleasure of creating images, when I had the courage to define film first and foremost as a visual art, then it became my own medium.

The way I feel about it is that Paris Mortel was on one and the same track as the films I was to make later. In addition to the strong preoccupation with form, in the films there is virtually always the direct contact with people, the clash with circumstances, the emotional and often over-emotional interchange between the one who sees and the one who is seen, and often the reluctance to focus the camera straight onto a face. In the late fifties and early sixties, for me photography also had an aspect of action, of intervention, of intensified contact. The more I learned to film and the film camera merged with my eyes and my body, as the photography camera had before, the more that function waned.

I retained my love of photography, but it made its way into quieter, more reflective waters. I no longer argued, announced or demonstrated in my pictures, I simply noted what I saw: about seeing – how much there is to see in how little – how to place it within those four borders in such a way that what is outside them is also present, how to create colour in the gradations between black and white, how to depict objects, soft but not limp, how to work with light, where to stand. The people who populate my films are fewer and less emphatically present. Photography thus became less a matter of conquest. With its miniature observations, it nourishes my films but it also means a “filmmaker’s holiday.” I no longer have to depend on it exclusively for making a living and that makes it much lighter, because for the photographer the economic aspect is even more of a torment than for the filmmaker: he is almost never his own pictures’ boss. Learning to make films in the years after the film academy had again a lot to do with photography. It was only when I started to take the camera off the tripod and ventured to film on my own eye level and arm's length, when I began to incorporate what I was observing at the moment into the flow of images and to mix it with what I had planned more figurative. The formulation of questions and the pursuit of answers keep pace with the discovery and exploration of life.

What did bother me at the time was the “photographer’s film” label that was sometimes put on my work. But ever since the emancipation of photography (paradoxically enough, partly because it has been admitted to the capitalist gallery arts) and the notion of mixing the media have made such great advances, it no longer fazes me. A photographer’s film: What could be more exciting than the almost stand-still, the highly visible section of reality, the frame that is almost final, only to explode at the very last moment, upwards, downwards, any which way, towards new visions? The photograph is not able to do that. Only the moving medium can show the standstill and its abolition.

When you make a film, you constantly think: What is the next step, what sound, what text, what music, what act, what fact can I link to this shot? How do I connect everything to everything? In the first instance, film works by a process of expansion. When you take a photograph, you think: how do I get all those observations into one and the same shot? How do I separate that one picture from all the others? How do I stop it and get it to stand still? Photography mainly works by a process of reduction. I have noticed that my way of thinking tends to be a predominantly binary one, a binarity that dissolves into endless combinations. It is never a matter of this or that but always of this and that: indoors and outdoors, people and things, the others and me, north and south.

A binary stance that sets me editing. Two elements compete and merge into one concept without their battle ever completely ending: The individual against the surface also always remains the individual in the surface. Solving this conflict in a unity of vision, but still keeping it alive all the while, is a contradiction the film medium has easily managed to live with. In photography, it is more difficult to show the montage in its active stage within one and the same picture. If you want to do that, taking pictures is more difficult than making films. You have much less to work with. After years of filmmaking, I too have seen the idea of the unique picture fade away. In retrospect, reality seemed to have been disguised as often as revealed by it. One second of film frequently contained a number of meaningful and varied photograms, thus making the selection of that one and only photograph I had in mind quite a problem. The intensity with which you take your photographs, the desire to make your move at exactly the right moment, gives the photograph an added emotional value that no single film photogram has, affected as it is by chance circumstances. But that element of chance, once it is admitted, menaces an image that is perhaps only an ideal image born of the fear of the free fall, that absolute image in which everything that moves chaotically is called to order.

In 1976, there was a special exhibition of 30 years of Dutch photography at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. For the first time in years, I exhibited my photographs again. In 1980, the Stedelijk Museum showed a selection of my photographs since 1955. These relatively public viewings stimulated me to turn back to photography on a more regular basis. The only restricting factor was that it is difficult for me to take pictures and make films in the same period. No matter how much they do have in common, the way of thinking about time, of thinking in time, is totally different, perhaps diametrically opposed.

Thus the spell of the unique was broken. Two or more are possible. The moment you are looking for is invisible between two visible moments. Only before the mind's eye, time is made to stand still for a while. Perhaps I take photographs because time passes too quickly and make films because I am short of time. This year, I am making a film called "Time." There is not only time, there are times, layers of time. We talk about it as if it is something, but it is nothing. Nevertheless, within that nothingness, we have got a body. What name can it be given?