Five Days in Amsterdam, the City of Rain/Regen
Joris Ivens’s poetic documentary Regen (1929) has always been a special film for me as a filmmaker and an urbanist. It is part of the city symphony tradition in film history—a short symphony. It consists of rainy images of Amsterdam. These images simulate the spectator to reflect on her/his Amsterdam through rain|regen (in a historical perspective)…
Before and after the masterclasses, we took long walks in the city of Amsterdam with Tuna Taşan-Kok, sometimes under rain/regen, sometimes under a sunny sky. We discussed the urban development in the city of Amsterdam, especially the affordable and social housing shortage. These discussions and walks became excursions in the Amsterdam Nord and the Amsterdam Zuid.
The goal of the masterclasses was to encourage the use of a audiovisual research methodology for knowledge production. In the first masterclass, we watched Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929). We discussed the potential of audio-visual materials (photographs, videos, fiction and non-fiction films) and apparatuses (cameras, editing suites, and video archives) in urbanistic knowledge production. Indeed, video cameras have been field research recording devices for a long time and ethnographic documentary filmmaking has been an inherent act of knowledge production in social sciences and humanities.
In the second masterclass, we discussed the essay film as a documentary sub-genre and essay filmmaking as a critical epistemological perspective in knowledge production. Different than the traditional documentary filmmakers presenting the reality of life, essay filmmakers question the realities of life in fragmented and subjective perspectives. While traditional documentaries are closed forms as a coherent totality in a positivist manner, essay films are mostly open forms to question the totality in a Bayesian understanding.
I also visited Amsterdam Museum and Rembrandt House. In the Amsterdam Museum, the Panorama Amsterdam exhibition starts with Cornelis Anthonisz’s Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam (1538), which is the oldest map of the city. The exhibition consists of (group) portraits of regents and regentesses, cityscapes, different types of maps, (historical and contemporary) photographs, etc. It is a real panorama not only in geographical, ethnographical, cultural, social, economic, and political senses but also a temporal panorama of Netherlands history. The other two exhibitions were “Women of Amsterdam—an Ode,” curated to express women’s impact through their artworks and stories, and “Homeless in the City,” which reveals the unheard stories of the streets. Both of these exhibitions included many videos in the form of short non-fiction films and installations.
With the digital turn, video production is part of daily life and has become usable by many social scientists and humanities scholars as well. Nowadays, many artists and scholars think that digital video should be (re)considered as a thinking apparatus for the formulation of research questions and research designs for artistic/scientific purposes.
