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Bron: Esquire His working-method is always the same. A story doesn't excite him, but the image of a man who gives his wife a dear's head as a token of his love for her, does. Also stimulating is the oldish boy who tries to cut flies out of the air. Van Warmerdam prefers not to know what they mean exactly or how they should be processed into a performance. That does harm to the mystery. Alex van Warmerdam grew up in the time one was disgusted by the American imperialists (Vietnam, Chili, Cuba) and everything that came from Hollywood. Something of that sentiment remained. He dislikes the American emotion, to which one is driven by specific worked-out mechanisms: "I do not seek the emotion of the wet eyes." "I need to have the freedom to be inconsequent", he says. "For me that is a condition to be able to make something. My work is never laid in realistic surrroundings. Realism demands too much. It makes one a slave of something one made up someday. Then, one has to be consequent and it becomes craft. One has people, and they do things. That is the way I see it. I get someone and make that someone do things. I don't like to show how that person has let things get out of hand. Besides, I'm not capable of doing that." There are journalists that see some engaged statement in The Northeners. Isn't it about the narrow-minded Dutch lower-class citizin with his bottled-up frustrations versus the free natural man, personified by the wood-nymph and the negro? Isn't that negro really the modern, escaped asylum-seeker? Van Warmerdam shrugs his shoulders. As a young boy, the first time he saw a negro, it made a lasting impression on him. The picture remained in his head, so it had to be used. And what else? "At the last viewing I thougt: "it is just a nature-movie on the human species." Esquire |
