Amsterdam, far from the limelight
Adapted from a classic of popular literature, Ciske de Rat (Guido Pieters, 1955) is one of the first great successes of post-war Dutch cinema, which today has little more than documentary value through the brief glimpses it presents of industrial Amsterdam. It was remade in color in 1984, which was also a great success. A child's portrait, intimately and tragically linked to the city's history, is an important landmark: a Hollywood adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, by George Stevens, was released in 1959, in which Amsterdam, of necessity, appears only in the background. Neglected by Dutch filmmakers, Amsterdam appeared mainly in foreign films. The Girl in the Window (Luciano Emmer, 1961), starring Lino Ventura, draws a parallel between the plight of Italian immigrant miners looking for a weekend's pleasure and that of the prostitutes in Amsterdam's famous red light district. The James Bond series also made a stop here in Diamonds Are Forever (Guy Hamilton, 1971), taking in views of the city, its canals and the famous Magere Brug. Joseph Losey's exhilarating spy comedy Modesty Blaise (1966) opens with a view of Amsterdam from the top of the Havengebouw, the port offices, and takes us through the city in the footsteps of Monica Vitti. The B-movie Puppet from a chain (1971) is especially noteworthy for its spectacular boat chase.
Paul Verhoeven, the incarnation of a subversive and transgressive cinema
At the dawn of the 1970s, Dutch filmmaker Verhoeven burst onto the national scene. An inveterate provocateur, he dynamited the codes of traditional cinema in just a few films, before heading for Hollywood. Turkish Délices (1971), a sort of joyfully obscene anti-bourgeois manifesto that ends in a surprisingly gentle melodrama amid the greenery of the Vondelpark, remains the biggest box-office success of a Dutch film to date. He also revealed Rutger Hauer in the lead role, who would go on to become an international star. Verhoeven then turned his attention to the trials and tribulations of a young woman condemned to prostitution(Katie Tippel, 1975), the backstage world of the Second World War and the Dutch Resistance with the same taste for provocation(Soldier of Orange, 1977), a subject he tackled again on his return to Holland in 2006 with Black Book. Symptomatic of an era marked by the sexual revolution, Dutch cinema was characterized by a licentiousness and freedom of tone that exploded taboos in a no-holds-barred manner, without however producing any truly memorable films - with the exception of those by Verhoeven. In the same decade, a curious French film is Barocco (1976) by André Téchiné, starring Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Adjani, in which Amsterdam plays the role of an imaginary northern European city, offering a singular, almost fantastical face. Less interesting from a cinematographic point of view is Amsterdamned (Dick Maas, 1986), a farcical thriller that takes us on the trail of a serial killer through the canals of an Amsterdam... partially reconstructed in Utrecht or Leiden. Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Mâcon(1994), which later took up residence in the city, is filmed in part in the Oude Kerke (Amsterdam's old church), and will be of interest to fans of the filmmaker's lavish formalism, sometimes to the point of excess. In the meantime, Johan Van der Keuken has become the leading exponent of the Dutch documentary school, notably with Amsterdam Global Village (1996), an experimental documentary about a cosmopolitan and motley Amsterdam.
The rise of Dutch cinema
The last few years have not brought any notable changes other than a slight revival of Dutch cinema, as witnessed by De Heineken ontvoering (Maarten Treurniet, 2011), inspired by a news item that gripped Holland, the kidnapping of a member of the Heineken family. Riphagen (2016), a portrait of a notorious Dutch gangster and Nazi collaborator, confirms a certain savoir-faire on the part of Pieter Kuijpers, who had previously distinguished himself with the edgy thriller TBS (2008). International productions continue to come to Amsterdam in search of a picturesque or eccentric setting: comedies about young foreigners on the prowl or films about trafficking are almost sub-genres specific to the city. Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004) and Layer Cake (Matthew Vaughn, 2005) are just two examples. La Jeune Fille à la Perle (Peter Webber, 2003), set mainly in Delft, but featuring the Paleis op de Dam and other famous spots, attests to a renewed interest in the rich history of Flemish painting. In 1999, Charles Matton directed a biopic on Rembrandt, and in 2007, Greenaway devoted a fictional film of the same title to the famous "Night Watch". The Rijksmuseum, which houses the painting, appears in the adaptation of the teen bestseller Our Opposite Stars (Josh Boone, 2014), as does Anne Frank's house, or a bench on the Leidsegracht, which has since become a place of pilgrimage for lovers. A sign of this new-found vitality, which goes hand in hand with the city's international character, is the fact that series from all over the world have chosen it as their setting, such as the second season of Sense 8 or Baptiste, starring Tchéky Karyo and based on the English series The Missing. Bollywood fans will want to take a look at Queen (Vikas Bahl, 2013), in which the journey of initiation of a young Indian girl from a traditional family ends in Amsterdam. Alex Van Warmerdam, one of the most internationally-represented Dutch filmmakers on the festival circuit, is a devotee of the absurd and the cruel, but has so far steered clear of the Dutch capital, which still seems rich in future discoveries.
