Most present are the saint, the boy, the forester, and the butcher. Threading the episodic bursts into, if not a narrative, then at least a form of textually-depicted progression, is The Northerners’s cast of characters. The divisions between each poem are extreme, and yet, there are always two on a page and, save for the 37th poem, there’s always a degree of visual continuity.
1992 DE NOORDERLINGEN MOVIE
The Northerners is episodic, like watching a movie in a theater cast in violent strobe-lighting. Altogether, a film well worth seeing.Ben Niespodziany’s The Northerners (above/ground press, 2021) is a collection of 37 short, numbered poems written while watching Alex van Warmerdam’s 1992 film De Noorderlingen on mute. The film features many later-to-be prominent figures in Dutch cinema, including Theo van Gogh – the murdered director in the role of Fat Willie.
1992 DE NOORDERLINGEN WINDOWS
Light and air were governing principles in modernist strip architecture: large windows facing the street are just great for getting shine into your home, with the added benefit of being able to see the neighbor from across the street wrestling his wife in his own living room. There is a special role in this for the urbanity of the 60’s. The Northerners can be seen as a commentary on post-war society, showing a time both simpler and more complex, when a front door could be opened by anyone pulling a string cord hanging from the letterbox. The fact that the forest is just as manufactured as the street itself is perhaps revealing of the pathology of said central conflict. Each of these characters seems to want to either dig in, seek a settlement with or claw a way out of this tiny universe.Īnd then there is the black forest at the fringe of the little community – it is a place where fantasies go to die, misconduct of all sorts can happen and where undesirables can go into hiding. These exploits feature a sex-deprived butcher, a blackface boy, an invasive postman (played by Van Warmerdam), a holier-than-thou wife and an armed forester. The petit-bourgeois lives of the streets’ residents are riddled with domestic anxieties and struggle, which although fought out in the confines of home, sometimes spill over into the Great Outdoors. Typical of this period it is perhaps it is the most central point of conflict in this film: a collision between morality and liberty. At the same time, there are strict social conventions, strangling the disobedient.
It is clear we are witnessing happenings on a frontier, a space unfettered by law and order and yet of possibility. The film portrays the antics of an unfinished 1960 suburb consisting of only a single street, sitting in what can hardly be described as anything else but an empty world. Where typical cinema from Holland refuses to digress from commercialism, The Northerners provides a remarkable experience with depth and many layers of meaning. The Northerners ( De Noorderlingen) is a film by director Alex van Warmerdam of un-Dutch quality.
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