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The technology used in making a film should be appropriate to the subject. For Dutch Light we used the latest, high-quality lenses, filters and lens coatings to obtain sharp, panoramic images of vast overcast skies, often against the light. The film was shot with...

Dutch Light gives us time to contemplate what we see. We’ve grown accustomed to shifting our attention from one thing to the next, never pausing to examine things properly. No sooner is the television on than we anticipate what we might see on other channels. We’ve...

Pieter-Rim and Maarten de Kroon describe Dutch Light as being purely about light and observation. ‘While researching the project we realised that the film was mainly about a certain way of looking. When Joseph Beuys said that the only faculty the Dutch possessed was...

The myth also inspired the emerging Hague School, the painters responsible for the rediscovery of landscapes and light and their revival in art. ‘Light and sky, the great magicians,’ Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch was to say. ‘We have to direct our gaze upwards.’ And...

The myth about Dutch light started circulating in the 19th century. In the 1850s, the Netherlands became popular with painters and writers. Monet, Manet, Liebermann, Whistler, Boudin, Fromentin, Mirbeau and the Goncourt brothers all came to see Holland’s famous...

Joseph Beuys postulated his theory in the late 1970s. He said that the light for which Holland was famous had lost its unique radiance, thereby acknowledging not only that it had disappeared, but that it had actually existed in the first place. The idea was...

‘Dutch Light is a documentary about the light in Holland. Is it unique, as people say, or is that simply a myth? It’s about the light celebrated in paintings – in landscapes by Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael, and in interiors and still lifes by Johannes Vermeer,...