‘The Netherlands on Film’ shows war footage from amateur filmmakers: shaky and blurry, but highly personal

VJust remember the drama and euphoria that Sunday Netherlands on film were treated – it was about the Hunger Winter and the liberation – and unabashedly enjoys the recording that amateur filmmaker Frits Thors made in 1944 in his hometown of Baarn.

Like many other citizens, he had offered part of the family home for evacuees from Arnhem, devastated by war. We would prefer to have a young couple over, Thors had suggested to the authorities.

With his camera at the ready, Thors waited for the new guests. There they came onto the garden path. “Well, you see, it went a little differently,” is Thors’ comment, which he made long after the recordings. Two thin figures walk closer, the woman with a frugal face, gray suit and hat, just like the husband, past middle age.

Not a young couple by any means and, as it turned out, they were NSB members. With an excuse about illness in the house, Thors had managed to banjo the guests away. So that Frits could secretly continue listening to Radio London with his self-built, illegal radio.

The dryly funny commentary by Thors (the most famous newsreader in the Netherlands after the war) in combination with the images of the two frisky figures is one of the highlights in the film presented by Wim Daniëls. Netherlands on film.

The irregular docuseries at Omroep Max is traditionally composed of amateur images: an unsurpassed way of writing history from the perspective of ordinary citizens. When all materials were scarce during the war, amateurs saved their last films to record historical moments. In this way the eyewitnesses wrote their own history, which often, as pars pro toto, has a more general validity.

Their films are sometimes shaky and blurry, but also highly personal and undirected. Spontaneously. The lens is an extension of their eye, they see details that epic documentaries often miss.

For example, Thors filmed the neighbors in their front garden who dug foxholes on behalf of the Germans. Recorded how local residents fled into the air raid shelter after the air raid siren. And he was there when the princesses Irene, Margriet and Beatrix returned by plane from Canada to the Netherlands at Teuge airport after the liberation. Historical material.

Amateurs recorded everything: the joy at the liberation of Eindhoven by English and Canadians, who were welcomed with beer. But also: the coffins piled high after the German bombardment the next night, which left two hundred dead.

The hunger marches with handcarts and bicycles without tires. Children laughing and eating sugar beets. An NSB member who is put on display, with the sign: ‘I was an executioner in Vught.’ Women who had sex with German soldiers: shaved heads, their heads smeared with red lead. We knew it was all happening. But through the eyes of the amateur filmmaker, the big war becomes small and hits home hard.