Anton van Munster: “Framing has always been very important and interesting for me. Framing has been for me one of the reasons why I always could get along so well with Bert Haanstra, we make, you could say, the same frames. One of the most important things when you are telling story with images is paying attention and making sure that all the images can be alternated. They get played up by being closer or farther away, closer, totally. The message changes when you look at something from above, or from underneath, that is the language of film. And I have practiced that in a certain way. In my own way,”
Above: Anton van Munster photographed in Tanzania. He gave this interview a few months before his death, about his work as a cinematographer. On September 27th, the Netherlands Film festival, exhibited some films of his work, and his last film 'Survivor' was shown in the premiere.
Bart: Anton, from my own documentary experience I know that a documentary is in fact always as good as the contact that you have with the people who are in the film. At a certain moment I realized that you not only make a film about someone, but also with that person. And that the trust that you have in each other is very important for the success of your film. But, what about working with animals? People perceive if you mean it and that you respect them, or not…
Anton: In the documentaries I have worked on, there was always a good relationship. If there isn’t a good relationship, then it becomes very difficult. You constantly feel like there is a wall up, people react detached if they don’t trust you. Often, you have to get over that. I wanted to make a film about the technique of violin making, an impression of how musical instruments are made.
Actually, I wanted to include all the building blocks that are necessary in making a musical piece sound, from the composer to the performance. All the details; the cutting of the trees for the wood to make the violins, the horses, with their horse tales, which is the hair that is used for the bows, all those details. I wanted to make an image composition with the existing classical music. Fragment “Quartet”.
A long time ago, in Hilversum, I filmed a couple that made violins. In the beginning the woman was particularly careful. She would say things like: “someone is coming to our studio, is going to sit there and observe us”. I had explained that I wanted to observe them, but that they could see all the shots made, and that I would always tell them everything that I shot, and no one else would get to see them first. We had a deal, like; I come twice a week, I’ll sit behind my camera, move it from time to time a bit and observe them. And that was of course a lot for them, violin makers are people that work alone, in total concentration and are worried about doing very precision work. But that went very well and now we are the best of friends. That is about the understanding between the filmmaker and the filmed. It is also possible to achieve this in a very short period of time. You can meet in the afternoon and an hour later you are under way. The easiest time to film is when people that practice their profession, are busy with their own things.
And filming animals, what you actually asked me, there you have a great opportunity to look back with satisfaction to a filming period if you know something about those animals. You become familiar with their behavior and life cycles and understand the way they behave. How do they function as a group, or are they loners. Actually everything about animal behavior is well known, there is a lot written, everything can be read. I just read a fantastic book from Frans de Waal; he is a primatologist, a world class specialist. The book is about the evolution of morals, the moral as a fact, like how we interact. He has researched this and established that in evolution morals have grown. There is already talk about moral by the lower species - in comparison with us -, and that goes very far. Actually, it is an affirmation from Darwin. I have worked in two different productions with hyenas, and I have read a lot about them. I have had to struggle through very difficult scientific articles, where I didn’t understood half of it, but eventually I could understand the behavior of the hyenas. Afterwards, I spoke with people that are knowledgeable about the topic and they also explained it to me.
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