Who’s that knocking at the door? For the subjects featured in A Man and a Camera, Guido Hendrikx’s playful and provocative new documentary, it’s the director himself, arriving on people’s doorsteps uninvited, waiting to see how they will respond.
“It’s actually recorded throughout almost all 12 provinces [of the Netherlands],” the director says of the geographical reach of the film (supported by the Netherlands Film Fund). “I tried to avoid more familiar places, like the bigger cities…that’s why most of the material comes from the borders of the country, close to Belgium and Germany.”
Hendrikx’s stalking grounds are all places where film crews are rarely, if ever, seen. Nor do we actually see the director – but we do catch sight of his shadow.
“I believe the vast majority of documentaries today including those that are labelled ‘creative’ or artistic’ to me are mostly exploring extraordinary subjects using ordinary forms,” Hendrikx reflects. Often, such docs are solemn, unselfconscious and predictable. He wanted to “subvert’ and “satirise” the form.
The project has its roots in experiments he conducted ten years ago in Belgium when he would shoot passers-by on the streets. Now, he was venturing towards subjects’ homes.
“What is the meaning of this?” perplexed householders ask him when he turns up at their homes. He doesn’t answer. They look at him in bemusement. Some shut the door in the face. Others laugh or were intrigued or offered him coffee. His one rule was that once they opened the door, they were the ones calling the shots. He would do what they told him. Some invited him inside – and then the encounters could last for hours.
“The first time I did it, I felt an exhilarating mixture between shame and power,” Hendrikx describes of his feelings on first ringing a first stranger’s bell. There was instant excitement in the fleeting encounters but the director also acknowledges he wondered if he was being “intrusive and immature” in approaching all these people he had never met and knew nothing about.
“Every time I would appear on someone’s doorstep, there was always this voice in my head saying ‘what kind of immature nonsense are you up to?” he admits.
Yes, there were ethical issues. These weren’t subjects who had agreed to be filmed. The whole point was that they didn’t know in advance that Hendrikx would be approaching them. “That was kind of risky as I couldn’t obtain release forms any time before we were already quite far in the editing suite.” However, when he later explained his concept to them, the subjects all eventually gave permission for the footage to be used.
The director was surprised, and relieved, that he wasn’t generally met “with aggression.”
“Of course, there were exceptions,” Hendrikx says of the odd occasion when he was attacked or someone tried to wrestle away the camera from him. It was far more commonplace, though, for him to be treated with old fashioned Dutch hospitality.
There were surreal moments too. One person invited Hendrikx into his home and then left him there when he went off somewhere else.
“I would say this is the most personal work I have been involved in so far,” Hendrikx reflects on A Man and a camera. “When I was filming, it was also kind of like a performance for me. I tried to be like a robot but when I was in these situations, I really had to act out of intuition much more than (in) any other films I had made.”
The documentary was made through Aventura, the production company the director has recently founded with sales agent Wouter Jansen (Square Eyes) and director Ena Sendijarević (Take me Somewhere Nice). It is sold through Square Eyes and co-produced with boondocs. Hendrikx is currently developing ideas “pointing toward” fiction. But before that he also another documentary to finish, Rules Of War , made in South Sudan and co-produced by Lemming and Aventura.
This article was first published in See NL (Eye International, Netherlands Film Fund)
