Hands

An impression of schoolkids in Amsterdam: in the canal boat, in Artis Zoo at the monkeys and swimming in the canal.

Report of the last market day on the old Waterlooplein in Amsterdam. Traders and visitors are interviewed and van der Elsken provides the commentary to the events.

An entire summer, van der Elsken walked through Amsterdam an filmed in the same manner as he used to shoot his photos, strolling through the city centre and making contact with people that fascinated him. It became hís portrait of the city and its inhabitants.

The fainthearted cigar trader Ducker keeps himself quiet during World War II. That changes when parachutist Dorbeck lands in his backyard. It turns out the parachutist bears a remarkable resemblance to Ducker. Ducker follows Dorbeck blindly, becomes involved in the Dutch resistance and soon starts killing people. When he escapes through German lines to the freed South Netherlands, no one has ever heard of Dorbeck.

Rhythmic composition of moving photographs of cyclists in Amsterdam, ‘set’ to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

A filmic portrait of the Australian visual artist Vali Myers, whom Dutch photographer and filmmaker Ed van der Elksen got to know in post-war Paris. With Myers, Van der Elsken shot his photo story LOVE ON THE LEFT BANK.

BEPPIE is a moving and disarming portrait of an Amsterdam street urchin. Van der Keuken once described her as follows: 'She was ten years old and the joy of the Achtergracht, where I was living at the time. An Amsterdam child, sweet and crooked as a corkscrew.' He films her while she skims the city with some friends and knocks at strangers' doors. Her family has nine children and is not well off. In those days, a visit to the De Miranda swimming pool cost a quarter, but only ten cents if the weather was bad. At school, Beppie gets a poor mark because she is too boisterous, but when the whole class rattles off the multiplication tables, she joins in at the top of her voice. All of TV-watching Holland was wildly enthusiastic about this portrait, with which Van der Keuken even made the front page of the national newspaper De Telegraaf.

For the exhibition Dylaby, the museum’s director Willem Sandberg and artist Jean Tinguely transformed the Stedelijk into a huge labyrinth. The film follows a tour of the exhibition in which the viewers have to actively participate in this DYnamisch LABYrint. Van der Elsken walks through the exhibition; looks, sees and hears what is happening, and also records viewers’ responses.

Famous Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken, suffering from prostate cancer, shares his thoughts predominantly on his illness, but also on his life and work.

Poverty, Demolition and Waterlooplein 1962/1964

As part of the celebrations for 100 years of Amsterdam’s Vondelpark in 1965, the Vondelpark was transformed into a massive sculpture garden under the direction of Stedelijk Museum director Sandberg. 25 epic artworks by well-known artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Shinkichi Tajiri and Jean Tinguely were placed in the park. Karel Appel was also represented, by a gigantic elm tree trunk brightly painted in Appel’s characteristic manner.

In 1960, Utrecht University took over the Studio for Electronic Music from Philips. In this studio in Utrecht, composers and artists worked on their own compositions. In 1961, Jan Vrijman made a film about Karel Appel, De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, and Appel himself made a musical composition for this film in the studio in Utrecht. Van der Elsken films and photographs Appel during the composition of his Musique Barbare, as well as recording conversations on tape; the film is in fact a kind of collage of film, photographs and sound. As well as an exceptional record of Karel Appel’s working process, this film is a unique documentation of the studio and therefore a significant piece of Dutch musical history.

Famed Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken documents the natural world as well as the local people in and around his hometown of Edam, the Netherlands.

A collage of autobiography, reflections on previous work and the photographer in action. Van der Elsken tells us that he’s working on a photo book about life, from the cradle to the grave, about how people are: physical, sensuous, naked. He takes the time to show us a selection from the thousands of slides he has made during his wide-ranging travels as a photo reporter.

A self-portrait of the Van der Elsken family, with his heavily pregnant wife Gerda in the lead role. She is expecting their second child, and Van der Elsken portrays her in a kind of free cinema style in her everyday surroundings, in the living room of their house in Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood. The film is also a portrait of the energetic life of this neighbourhood, of which the Van der Elskens are an integral part.

In the seventies, Waterlooplein square and the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood faced a great deal of demolition in relation to the construction of Amsterdam’s new opera house, the ‘Stopera’, and the metro system. Van der Elsken did a lot of filming in and around Waterlooplein and its centrepiece, the legendary flea market which faced closure.