Sunday, August 28, 2016
my private rotterdam... the cinematic presence
in between watching films at the architecture film festival in rotterdam, I wander by dramatic structures old and new, floating heavenwards with monstrous glowing fruits let loose in the luminescent sphere of the markthal...
waiting for my ship to sail from the dock of the holland america line building, now transformed into the hotel new york, I dine in a lost era on a moonlit evening overlooking the wilhelminapier...
de rotterdam soars skywards in vertiginous splendour while I am lifted to the seventh heaven floor where the glamour set rises to the occasion and sometimes confuses the sunrise for the sunset...
drawn into the courtyard of the museum boijmans van beuningen by the black and white stripes swirling towards a mirror-framed folly, the alice in me slips through the slats and disappears into another dimension of dutch eminences...
enormous grey and yellow cubes of the kubuswoningen tumble precariously towards the square but manage to balance each other into place before being just great big boxes cluttering up the shaken ground...
it is enough to just skirt around this divine modernist villa, now the chabot museum, and to trace the pure geometry, the orderly arrangement and the pristine whiteness, still de stijl even in today's stylistic jumble...
finally, my ship has docked, but the rotterdam no longer sails out of rotterdam and the captain has left the bridge; the river breeze cools the decks and those passengers who embark can pass the night on a calm phantom sea...
...and in the morning the tri-colour flags of the netherlands will again flutter briskly against a clear northern sky...
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
my private rotterdam... cinematic mise-en-scène
He was sixteen years old when he witnessed the first German Luftwaffe landing on the River Maas while standing on the Oosterkade bank of the river directly across from Noordereiland (North Island) where I was staying at a lovely AirBnB (and where my father-in-law's father had his office as the manager of a ship-building company).
His brother had even managed to photograph the event before his camera was confiscated by a Dutch policeman who was soon shot down by the invading Germans. A few days later, Rotterdam was bombed into submission and the Battle of the Netherlands was quickly over, but Holland remained occupied until 1945.
The camera was retrieved from the dead policeman and returned to the family later on that same momentous day, but the film had been removed - and to this day, my father-in-law does not know if it had been destroyed or stored away and forgotten about, proof of a personal historical experience now perhaps lost forever.
View of the Nieuwe Maas river from the Willemsbrug looking west towards the Erasmusbrug, with the Oosterkade on the right bank across from Noordereiland on the left.
The view from my perch on the top floor of an older apartment house that survived the bombing on the Noordereiland.
The surviving apartment houses on the Noordereiland now dwarfed by the Maastoren (the tallest building in the Netherlands) behind and further down the Wilhelminaplein, OMA's massive De Rotterdam's staggered vertical blocks.
Across the Erasmusbrug is a mid-20th century apartment building where my mother-in-law's parents had lived on the 10th floor for a while.
A flock of swans float towards the Erasmusbrug that is known affectionately as "The Swan" by the locals.
At the end of the Wilhelminapier where the headquarters of the Holland America Line once stood prominently alone, it has since been converted into the Hotel New York which has retained much of the nostalgic design features and furnishings of the historic shipping offices.
"Rotterdam NightTide"
a short film of evening scenes on the Nieuwe Maas river set to the contemplative music composed by my son ENZIO VERSTER.
Labels:
enzio verster,
erasmusbrug,
hotel new york,
noordereiland,
rotterdam
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)