A living room, 2009, a few hours before departure. Outside, everything is packed for three weeks of Tibet: three paralysed cyclists are going to ride through the Himalayas, and we are going along to film it. Inside, a reporter from the local newspaper is interviewing Roelof, one of the three, together with his mother. It was my first documentary back in the Netherlands. I stand there with a camera and do what I am supposed to do: I frame my protagonist.
Roelof is in his early twenties, just out of the house, a boy with a playful, mischievous look. His mother talks a lot, adds, fills in. The accident is still fresh for her. The relief that he is alive. The pride that he is about to do this. And somewhere in that conversation she breaks. I hear the emotion come into her voice.
Every reflex in the trade then says: pan along. Pull focus to the mother, get the tear, that is the shot. I did not do it. It felt cheap, the kind of image that harvests an emotion instead of earning it. We had agreed on nothing here, the director and I. This emotion was not foreseen and neither was the camerawork for it, and in a few hours everyone would be on a plane. There was no time to confer and no second chance. So I decided on the spot, resolutely: the focus stays on Roelof, and if the director disagrees, he is free to fire me right there.
His mother stayed in the frame. That is the point: I did not cut her out, I left her out of focus. A moving, speaking blur next to the face of her son. And while she breaks, you see a tear forming in Roelof's eyes. Brave as he is, he swallows it, and inside that same movement there is also his smile: he hears how proud she is of him. Everything the mother feels arrives through the face of her son.
Four years earlier, in my graduation thesis, I had dissected the opening scene of Kiarostami's Ten: one long shot of a boy in the back seat while his mother talks and drives. I wrote down why that shot tells so much, precisely because it does not give way. In that living room I thought of none of it. Only later did I see that I had made the same choice I had been studying as a student. Apparently it had gone from theory to reflex.
Why does such a shot work? Focusing is saying: look here. Take the crying mother sharp and you say "this is sad", and the viewer nods and is done. Show her but leave her unsharp and you give the viewer work: you hear her voice, you see her contour, and you read her on the face of her son. What you have to fill in yourself lands harder than what is handed to you. Isolating, suggesting, leaving out: it sounds like doing less, but it is giving the viewer more. Bresson knew it long ago: do not show everything, and the image begins to speak.
Honesty demands this too: that shot had only just become possible. The Canon 5D Mark II was brand new, and for the first time video could hold such shallow focus without a forty-thousand-euro camera. The technology was new; the choice it made possible was as old as the craft. Technology should enlarge what you already wanted to do. It does not invent it for you.
The journey had yet to begin, three weeks of Himalaya lay ahead of us, and the best shot of the film was already in. That shot became my breakthrough as a documentary cameraman in the Netherlands. Not because of something special I did, but because of something special I didn't.
This is the first Field note: short pieces on documentary making, photography and looking, from the set and from the studio in Oosterbeek.