Agricultural films and stories

For the research project ‘Bewogen landschap’ (2020) and the project ‘farmland seeks future’, the Amsterdam-based Multimedia Culture Foundation (SMC) has been collecting stories from people who tell from their own experience about the modernisation of agriculture and the Dutch countryside in the period 1945-1985. The ‘Lanbouwfilms en verhalen’ collection includes documentaries compiled from audiovisually recorded oral-history interviews and information films from LNV’s historical collection.

The PhD research ‘Bewogen landschap’ by ir. Peter Veer (UvA) provided the scientific framework within which the work for ‘agricultural films and stories’ takes place. In collecting the stories, SMC cooperates with, among others, the National Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE) in Amersfoort. The Land of Maas and Waal is one of the post-war reconstruction landscapes that the RCE is highlighting.

The PhD research took place in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum (Sound & Vision). The study covers the total collection of 533 information films distributed by the Ministry’s Film Office. The core of this historical collection is kept by Sound and Vision.

In Bewogen Landschap, a collection of historical information films distributed by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture in the post-war period (1945-1985) was studied.

Still uit de film Van oud naar nieuw (1957)

Bewogen landschap

A cultural-historical study of the film practices of the Ministry of Agriculture (1945-1985)
Veer, P.M.

Thesis 2020

A film editing programme uses a timeline that consists of several image and sound lines.30 The first V1/A1 lines contain the selected fragments from the oral history interview. The fragments that are not relevant to the subject are removed. Next, the viewed historical agricultural information film is shown on the V3/A3 lines. The V1/A1 lines synchronise what the participant said while watching the film. The film and interview lines are thus connected. On the intervening V2/A2 lines, displaced fragments from the oral history interview are used as a new commentary voice that the filmmaker deems appropriate for the historical agricultural information film. Editing is a process of fitting and measuring, whereby the storyline of the archive film is leading in this case. 

• A – The historical film M 308 WITH LESS MOST, MORE RESULTS (1959).
• B – The montage of the oral history interview captured on film in large frame and the historical film in small frame.
• C – The database with the different audiovisual elements.
• D – The timeline of the oral history film in progress.
  V1/A1 the image and sound lines of the oral history interview fragments.
  V2/A2 the lines of displaced oral history interview fragments.
  V3/A3 the lines of the historical film in full and small frame.

The last phase of the editing was the adjustment of the picture frames, the improvement of the picture and sound quality, the addition of written text and music fragments in order to create an attractive audiovisual product for an interested audience product for an interested audience. The test editing of the oral history film was completed.