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Mirror of Holland is a 9 minute short comprised of a collection of images from the city. The catch is that director Bert Haanstra filmed it all using the reflections in the water. It has no dialogue, and it's only accompanied by a score from Max Vredenburg. It sounds like a simple concept and, technically, it is; but much like its blurred and rippled images, it can lend itself to many interpretations.
The short opens on the countryside as we see a kid that much like us is looking at the reflections in the water. We see windmills, cows, farmers, swans, and boats. As it progresses, it seems to move closer to the city. With that, the images become a bit more blurry and the music gets slightly more frenetic, challenging both our literal and metaphorical perception.
I decided to check this out after @SpelingError included it in his list of favorite short films. In the surface, there doesn't seem to be much more to the short than that. But much like Thoreau said, it's not necessarily in what we're looking at, but rather in what we see and what we get out of it. That sometimes we should try to look at things from a new perspective, and maybe we might see something different.
Grade:
MIRROR OF HOLLAND
(1950, Haanstra)
(1950, Haanstra)
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." --Henry David Thoreau
Mirror of Holland is a 9 minute short comprised of a collection of images from the city. The catch is that director Bert Haanstra filmed it all using the reflections in the water. It has no dialogue, and it's only accompanied by a score from Max Vredenburg. It sounds like a simple concept and, technically, it is; but much like its blurred and rippled images, it can lend itself to many interpretations.
The short opens on the countryside as we see a kid that much like us is looking at the reflections in the water. We see windmills, cows, farmers, swans, and boats. As it progresses, it seems to move closer to the city. With that, the images become a bit more blurry and the music gets slightly more frenetic, challenging both our literal and metaphorical perception.
I decided to check this out after @SpelingError included it in his list of favorite short films. In the surface, there doesn't seem to be much more to the short than that. But much like Thoreau said, it's not necessarily in what we're looking at, but rather in what we see and what we get out of it. That sometimes we should try to look at things from a new perspective, and maybe we might see something different.
Grade: