Just returned from a wonderful week at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam.
I gave five days of workshops on the audiovisual there, invited by René van Uffelen, Head of Montage, and the composer Michel Schöpping, who also teaches at the Academy. They’d attended my Do The Eisenstein Thing talk (about the audiovisual in Spike Lee’s great film Do the Right Thing) at the School of Sound in London last year, the international symposium directed by Larry Sider and Diane Freeman.
The workshops got off to a most convivial start, with René’s students singing him the traditional Dutch birthday wishes, then presenting him with an apple crumble covered in lit candles. He blew them all out with a flourish, but one of the candles was a musical one, which turned out to be quite irrepressible and required some drastic action to silence it.
After this it was easy to start exploring how Eisenstein’s ideas on the audiovisual could be applied to a wide selection of works by Spike Lee, Sergei Paradjanov, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Satyajit Ray, Kaneto Shindo, Akira Kurosawa, Terrence Malick, and Eisenstein himself. The students were terrific – enthusiastic, asking questions, making excellent contributions. René also joined in, adding a whole other dimension of valuable experience.
The screenings were in one of the Academy’s cinemas, which you can access through a mysterious ‘Trap’. We also went to the atmospheric Kriterion cinema (opposite the University of Amsterdam), which was ideal for the workshops on David Lynch and Werner Herzog.
The Academy is housed in a vast green glazed building, which takes up a whole city block. In its central section there are huge spaces for film sets, studios and cinemas. The place is buzzing with activity, and there’s a handy café on the top floor, which opens out onto a roof garden.
The programme there is truly interdisciplinary – among the students were sound designers, composers, a theatre director, visual art specialists, filmmakers, film editors. Nearby are several major institutions, including the Amsterdam Conservatory, with which the Film and Television Academy collaborates.
Here traditional hospitality is important – I was taken to cafes and restaurants. Mieke Bernink, the Head of Film Research, arranged a wonderfully varied summer evening, starting with a ferry ride to a riverside restaurant, then a visit to the spectacular Amsterdam Eye, the film museum which has just opened. With its vertiginous angles and vast cantilever, it looks ready to take off into space at any moment, ideal for a building dedicated to cinema.
Its riverside site, akin to the placing of the Opera House in Sydney, is enhanced by the indoor and outdoor café/restaurant, from which you can look over the river, and at night enjoy Amsterdam’s myriad lights reflected in the water. Though the restaurant is packed, the clever acoustics soften the sound of the voices, so you don’t have to shout to be heard.
I gave five days of workshops on the audiovisual there, invited by René van Uffelen, Head of Montage, and the composer Michel Schöpping, who also teaches at the Academy. They’d attended my Do The Eisenstein Thing talk (about the audiovisual in Spike Lee’s great film Do the Right Thing) at the School of Sound in London last year, the international symposium directed by Larry Sider and Diane Freeman.
The workshops got off to a most convivial start, with René’s students singing him the traditional Dutch birthday wishes, then presenting him with an apple crumble covered in lit candles. He blew them all out with a flourish, but one of the candles was a musical one, which turned out to be quite irrepressible and required some drastic action to silence it.
After this it was easy to start exploring how Eisenstein’s ideas on the audiovisual could be applied to a wide selection of works by Spike Lee, Sergei Paradjanov, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Satyajit Ray, Kaneto Shindo, Akira Kurosawa, Terrence Malick, and Eisenstein himself. The students were terrific – enthusiastic, asking questions, making excellent contributions. René also joined in, adding a whole other dimension of valuable experience.
The screenings were in one of the Academy’s cinemas, which you can access through a mysterious ‘Trap’. We also went to the atmospheric Kriterion cinema (opposite the University of Amsterdam), which was ideal for the workshops on David Lynch and Werner Herzog.
The Academy is housed in a vast green glazed building, which takes up a whole city block. In its central section there are huge spaces for film sets, studios and cinemas. The place is buzzing with activity, and there’s a handy café on the top floor, which opens out onto a roof garden.
The programme there is truly interdisciplinary – among the students were sound designers, composers, a theatre director, visual art specialists, filmmakers, film editors. Nearby are several major institutions, including the Amsterdam Conservatory, with which the Film and Television Academy collaborates.
Here traditional hospitality is important – I was taken to cafes and restaurants. Mieke Bernink, the Head of Film Research, arranged a wonderfully varied summer evening, starting with a ferry ride to a riverside restaurant, then a visit to the spectacular Amsterdam Eye, the film museum which has just opened. With its vertiginous angles and vast cantilever, it looks ready to take off into space at any moment, ideal for a building dedicated to cinema.
Its riverside site, akin to the placing of the Opera House in Sydney, is enhanced by the indoor and outdoor café/restaurant, from which you can look over the river, and at night enjoy Amsterdam’s myriad lights reflected in the water. Though the restaurant is packed, the clever acoustics soften the sound of the voices, so you don’t have to shout to be heard.