Gerard Holthuis

Biography

Gerard Holthuis was trained as a sculptor, but also followed the film workshops at the Vrije Academie in The Hague. He started making films in 1979; he also works for others as a producer, cameraman, and editor. For The Hague’s Filmstad, for example, he produced the first series of Filmblikken. Since 1999, Holthuis has been producing films for his own company Filmstad Produkties, including films by Joost Rekveld (#11 Marey <-> Moiré and # 37) and Bart Vegter (Forest Views and Zwerk).

The films that Holthuis made in around 1980 show clear similarities with the work of other students at the Vrije Academie. With I Remember and Fiction, Holthuis filmed two major themes (artistic inspiration and the threat of nuclear energy), but he did so without choosing for a clear narrative structure. He circles around the themes, and tries to show the underlying reasons.

In his later films, which he made starting in the late 1990s, we see this process return to a certain degree, this time not with loaded themes, but rather with predominantly visual interpretations of reality, such as the air traffic over Hong Kong in HKG, or the fascinating underwater world in the Careless Reef cycle. Once again, Holthuis does not opt for a narrative structure, but instead for a much more intuitive approach, one where we do not so much get to know the topic as we do experience it.