Hoogstraat is an avant-garde short about Rotterdam’s main shopping street, made by Hungarian filmmaker and cameraman Andor von Barsy (1899–1964), who lived in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, he worked as a cameraman on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), and he was awarded prizes for best cinematography at the Venice and Berlin film festivals.
Focusing on one specific location in the city, Hoogstraat can be considered as a city symphonietta, or microscopic city symphony. As an independent project, the film shows daily activities and appearances in and around a busy street, using the framing device of a puppet theater, which opens and closes the “stage” of life on the street. In a dynamic montage, Von Barsy shows street vendors and all kinds of city dwellers—from policemen and workers to women dressed in traditional costumes, window shoppers, children, an old lady who can barely walk, a postman emptying a mailbox, and a sandwich-man with an enormous shoe on his head.
The film alternates between diverse camera angles, and intercuts the crowd in the street with masses of luxury goods displayed in shop windows. Von Barsy, who himself called Hoogstraat “an absolute film,” uses the semi-transparent quality of windows and mirrors to double or even triple the images. The film also depicts contrasts: for example, garbage in the street and luxury goods in the shops. The long shadows people cast on the asphalt acquire an almost abstract quality, which continues in the evening shots with electric illuminations at the end of the film.
Hoogstraat was one of the first films that the newly established Nederlands Historisch Film Archief, predecessor of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (now EYE), acquired in the 1940s. Von Barsy was also involved in the production of several other films about Rotterdam during his stay in the Netherlands. These commissioned productions included the 1928 city symphony De stad die nooit rust (The City that Never Rests), which Von Barsy made with the German Friedrich von Maydell. Hoogstraat includes several recycled shots from this film.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Hogenkamp, Bert, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988).
Paalman, Floris, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011).
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