I live in Amsterdam, and it's interesting to read all the critical Dutch comments on this film and on Dutch Film in general. The camera-work, as usual, was OK here, but I couldn't get involved in the plot, if that's the right word for the sequence of scenes. I felt as though I was standing outside and watching the film go by. Not even the loud music and some fast editing could draw me in. Why?
I have a theory. Holland is 2-dimensional. Flat. Images anywhere are flat, as Mondriaan reminded us, but people who live in 3 dimensions build narratives, with flat images, in a 3-dimensional space or rather, in a 4-dimensional spacetime. They see images in a sort of deeper landscape, with a sense, an idea, of other things in the foreground and background the images have depth, 'meaning', which can be organized in a complicated pattern and dynamic, a plot. The Dutch simply can't do this, and their attempts to construct stories in 3 dimensions always seem amateurish, childish. They can't build a story into which you can enter. Some people - even some Dutch people - say: 'they have no imagination'.
They make some great documentaries, and they have some good cameramen and women. But they can't do fiction, which articulates images in the play of imagination. Documentary makers, even some wayward filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven, can turn this around and make a virtue of the problem. They can build a collage of images into something like a question, or an ironical game, leaving the third dimension, the meaning or depth, radically open in ways that people living in 3 dimensions find very difficult to do, because 'normal' people are always themselves caught up in the play of meaning from the outset, unable to stand radically outside it.
I guess the best thing would be for the Flatlanders to recognize their strengths and their limitations, and stop trying to make 'normal' films like this one. But to do this would require a lot of imagination
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