Boats and film, they have been linked since the very earliest cinema. The first moving shot is shot from a gondola in Venice, Georges Méliès already made Les haleurs de bateaux in 1896 and the much more sophisticated 20000 lieues sous les mers in 1907. With SAIL about to break loose, it is time to list the best nautical films....
Theatre festival Boulevard has a theme. This is new, and actually unusual for a large-scale festival like the one in Den Bosch. After all, how do you find so many performances for those claimed 120,000 spectators that are all about that same theme? The solution is simple: you don't have to. You can also attach a theme to a few appealing performances and a single part...
While the young musicians of the NJO Symphony Orchestra emit fearsome war sounds, behind them we see two toddlers frolicking uninhibitedly across the Veluwe moor. Moving and at the same time oh so appropriate, because although Carl Nielsen composed his overwhelming Fourth Symphony during the First World War (1914-16), he remained convinced of the good in man. He christened it Det Uudslukkelige, which means as much...
When I went on holiday four weeks ago, the European Union was anxiously awaiting the Greek government's response to its latest ultimatum on the terms of a new money loan. After being offline for over a month, I read that it is still muddling through, with yet another 'ultimatum' expiring on 20 August. Ah well.
There really is no better place to display press photos than a church. At least, as long as it is one of those Dutch churches like the one in Naarden. White plastered walls, no distracting statues and paintings. And yet that hallowed atmosphere that sort of belongs to what all those winners of World Press Photo 2015 portray: terrible stories, glorious victories and mysteries that...
Watch Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by the Dutch Comedy in 1964, or Live, the 1979 video ballet by the Dutch National Ballet. You can now do so at the Theatre Encyclopaedia. Thanks to the crowdfunding campaign Being/Not Being. Theaterencyclopaedia had wanted for some time to put videos of a number of crown jewels from Dutch theatre performances on the internet. A nice start has now been made on that. Through a Voordekunst action, even more money has been raised...
Pixar set the bar high. So high, in fact, that its recent output was downright disappointing. But Inside Out exceeds all expectations. It may be taking it a bit far to say that Pixar single-handedly revived the animated film. But ever since the software company founded by George Lucas started making great films, the competition was blown away. Toy Story broke all records in 1995,...
There was an air of more expensive perfume in the foyers than at a Dutch gala premiere. The women were younger and smoother, or had a better botox doctor than usual. The jewellery looked very expensive, as did the dresses. Russian sounded everywhere. It seemed as if Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg had been moved for a while to PC Hooftstraat, a few hundred metres away....
Eye organised a Lulu Marathon as part of the William Kentridge exhibition at the Holland Festival. Kentridge directed Alban Berg's opera Lulu. As part of that, Eye screened the two main Lulu films that inspired him. The first was Leopold Jessner's Erdgeist (1923) and the second was G.W. Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (1929). Two iconic Weimar...
Minister Jet Bussemaker's letter will keep tongues wagging for a long time to come. There are considerable gaps here and there between the Culture Council's advice and the minister's letter. Also in the field of film and media. A list of differences. Bussemaker notes that the film sector is changing considerably. Media consumption is changing due to the rapid rise...
The new format of the Holland festival puts the spectator first. Plenty of visible events, free performances and being in the middle of the city. It's director Ruth McKenzie's trademark. It is therefore not surprising that she does not shy away from the digital universe. After all, what better way to share than digital art? But what then is digital art...
Manger, the new performance by Boris Charmatz and Musée de la Danse, gives spectators all the space they need. Where you line up to watch or just to listen, who or what you watch and for how long, is up to you. The Purification Hall on the Westergasfabriek site, majestically empty and echoing, creates a wondrous atmosphere in this for Charmatz'...
It is one of the most pre-discussed performances of this Holland Festival. Newspapers, magazines and webmagazines dived en masse on The End featuring Japanese superstar Hatsune Miku. That she is not real. About all of us being fascinated by the virtual and technology. About her two and a half million Facebook friends. About the fans who have written more than 100,000 songs for her. About the costume designs...
Inspired by stories by Borges, whose widow was present at the launch of the online interactive musical piece at the Holland Festival, The Book of Sand still looks most like an elaborate, very chic music video. Is that a bad thing? "Neither the book nor sand possess a beginning or an end." Borges' story, to which the title refers, is about...
A special film programme opens at Eye on 5 June: Where do we go now? Arab women behind the camera. Those who think of the Middle East and North Africa may think of conflicts and IS, perhaps of the origins of algebra, but probably not of women filmmakers. Yet they are rising considerably. In 1994, Moufida's Les Silences du Palais was...
As Big as the Sky I am looking forward to Arnoud Noordegraaf's new multimedia project, As Big as the Sky, with sets by Ai Wei Wei. Noordegraaf is a master at blurring the boundaries between film and reality. His music is elegant and appealing and serves the story. As Big as the Sky, op...
Fort Nieuwersluis is the biggest surprise of the art event Gimme Shelter. Until a year and a half ago, the defensive work was a no-go-area. The BB ('Bescherming Burgerbevolking') sat there until 1989 to protect telephone lines during, but especially after World War III, when the rest of the Netherlands would be hiding under the kitchen table from the H-Bomb. When the atomic-proof fortress became permanently obsolete, the...
Visiting M.U.R.S. without the app on your smartphone is a challenge. The performance by the infamous Barcelona-based theatre collective is a commentary on how people are unwittingly becoming part of a SMART society run by international corporations via all sorts of gadgets. Are you in or out? Is there actually anything to choose? According to Jürgen Müller, one of the founders of...
In The Loom of Mind, Icelandic folk singer Mugison, his bosom friend Pétur Ben, and Flemish baroque ensemble B.O.X. join forces. What does that sound like: melancholic Icelandic blues with 17th-century instruments? Like a stand-up storytelling concert performance? Or like a drunken panda who wants to have a game? How did you find each other? Pieter Theuns, lutenist and founder of B.O.X.: "I found Mugison...
Europe's biggest hangout. That's the best way to describe the roof of that half-sunken car park in the heart of Rotterdam. Transformed fifteen years ago into the impression of a ship's deck, that 'Schouwburgplein' is now mostly owned by groups of skaters, vagrants, street urchins and other metropolitan troublemakers. Visitors to the Schouwburg usually rush without looking around too much to the...
The only one really remembered in Jan Wolkers' novel 'The Peach of Immortality' is former resistance fighter Ben Ruwiel. On 5 May 1980, the entry of the Canadians from 35 years earlier was celebrated in Amsterdam. The crowds, not far from where Ben lives, fill him with disgust. It is unreal. People, wrapped up by welfare society, have no concept of...
The building alone made literature festival City2Cities worth a visit. After all, the Post Office on Utrecht's Neude, built in 1924 as an ode to progress in a style that brought together the best of the Amsterdam School, had been closed for years. So even those who don't get excited by Nick Cave and who think Michel Houellebecq is a creep had a reason...
Yep, I'm running behind, because just now I finally saw (in parts) the King's Day concert! But hey, good music has no expiry date and for now this concert will be online for a while. What a party! Some of my favourite musicians participated. Faithful readers of Culture Press know that violinist and composer Oene van Geel is definitely one of them. He brought along Zapp4...
How can you write about a three-day conference, part of which took place behind closed doors, the closing night of which looks very neat on vimeo, but where the tension in the room was palpable? With a completely open mind and not much more background than an average newspaper reader, but with a firm belief in the power of the arts,...
The 1970s have for some time been the target of what we shall conveniently call the up-and-coming generation. And so we are talking about the 1970s as the glory years of hippyism, the jubilant times of the left-wing church and everything else that, with the knowledge of today, is dirty and dirty. They were the years when...
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