Congratulations to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on his recent Oscar win. Have you noticed that the Dutch are quite overrepresented in Hollywood, particularly behind the lens?
Netherlands-born Jan de Bont, who shot Die Hard and directed Speed, would have us believe that his visual facility is an inheritance from the Dutch old masters. De Bont gushes about Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, in particular the painting’s staged quality and its inconsistent and highly artificial light sources. If a documentary or a small-budget movie is like plein air painting, then a big movie production is like Rembrandt’s studio, with the artist aggressively manipulating every last thing in pursuit of transcendence. De Bont draws inspiration from Rembrandt because of his careful attention to detail and his obvious contrivances.
If Robby Müller were around today then I expect he would have a different explanation for why Dutch cameramen punch above their weight. Müller studied at Film Academy in Amsterdam and became an accomplished observer of American landscapes. Besotted with natural light, Müller’s artistry speaks of a kind of quest to absorb the world. It’s impossible to imagine him making a career dangling lights for some urban dinner party movie back in Europe. Müller explored wide Texas horizons with Wim Wenders, and in one of my all-time favorites, the desolate, corrupt stretches of sun-baked concrete in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A.
Probably the best explanation for the laureled Dutch cinematographers has to do with the position of their country in world culture. The country is highly educated, and particularly advanced in visual aesthetics. But when de Bont and Müller came up, there was not really a native film industry. The market for Dutch language cinema was too small to sustain a local studio system, and so talented technicians moved abroad. If Ivo van Hove found his voice directing English-language classics, Dutch film workers may have simply gone where the jobs were.
Anyway, there are too many great Robby Müller images to list, but a scene that sticks with me for its Edenic sumptuousness is a homecoming from the Willie Nelson vehicle Honeysuckle Rose. Willie plays a version of himself and sings many of his most famous songs, but in the movie he’s a struggling artist and needs to tour constantly to earn money. This means semi-abandoning his wife, played by Dyan Cannon. But it also means leaving his little Texas town, where hootenannies last till dawn and children play in the creek under cottonwood trees. Müller is there with his camera to record the dying embers of the party as the sun rises. The calm warmth of this scene is too much to bear, and it far overshadows the “love triangle” plotline. Müller makes rural Texas a lost paradise, and the sunlight is intoxicating even watching it on your phone on YouTube.
When I was an exchange student, I remember hearing that the sponsoring club from back home offered two bus tours of the U.S. for students from abroad. One of the tours covered the cities and towns of the East, and the other one the vast spaces of the West. The mostly European students were so much more interested in traveling west that the eastern bus was simply re-routed. I guess anyone who wanted to see the Washington Mall was out of luck.
Anyway, I think back to that canceled bus tour when I hear about the rapturous enthusiasm that visitors from Old Europe have for the vastness of the western USA. It’s something to behold even if you’re not framing Harry Dean Stanton as he yearns for all that he’s lost.
Further Reading:
“Jan de Bont: When you light in a different way, you can make the characters more interesting,” Film Talk, 2019.