Dream and Act (2012)

Directed by: Annette Apon | 74 minutes | documentary

Just now, more than twenty years after the fall of communism, ‘Dream en deed’ by Annette Apon is a revealing documentary in which the ideas and decisiveness of the Dutch poet and socialist Henriëtte Roland Holst (1869-1952) are presented in an appealing way. expression comes. Because this poet, diarist, editor and political orator, was a woman of the word, director Annette Apon opted for a tape that depicts Henriëtte Roland Holst’s inner voice. These are her testimonies (derived from diaries and poems). Her nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist ideals.

She was the first woman in the Netherlands to participate in the national board of the SDAP (the Social Democratic Workers’ Party). As a woman of wealth, she was viewed with suspicion within the workers’ party. In addition to pain and disappointment, it still led to a fierce struggle for a just distribution of resources for everyone in society. For this she also fought abroad during international socialist congresses (she met Lenin and Trotsky).

Apon combines this special life story with a fascinating series of historical photos and film images, which, together with the music of various composers from that period, evoke an atmosphere of authenticity. She drew on (mostly Dutch) images that are more than a hundred years old. We see carriages with horses next to the first cars (Fordjes?) and an omnibus driving criss-cross in a large city. Steamboats glide through the oceans. Cruise ships cleave through the waves. Dock workers tow heavy bags. The winter landscape over which the famous nineteenth-century poet Herman Gorter (advocate of ‘Das Kapital’) comes ‘skating’ is still so old-fashioned Dutch, completely empty.

Every now and then Apon alternates that inner voice (excellently played off-screen by actress Lineke Rijxman) with a connecting commentary. To underline the eventful period in the first half of the twentieth century, the music layer plays an important supporting role. Several composers, such as Mahler, Dvorak, and Ravel, effectively amplify the periods and subjects (industrialization, child labour, a knocked-down revolution, World War I, and a visit to starving Russia in 1921). Precisely because Roland Holst’s life coincides with industrialization, the development of photography and film, and the emergence of an emancipation and labor movement, the authentic film and photo archive material has a reinforcing power with regard to the subject. But the drawings and portraits that her husband Rik made of her also illustrate the reality of an artistic woman who lived in the circles of ‘the eighties’ (Dutch poets 1880).

“The unshakable conviction that the working class should resist exploitation and strive for power” completely filled her after reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Disappointing experiences ultimately lead to a choice for religious socialism. Because she continues to believe. The documentary ends with the text of the poetess: ‘Nothing was ever in vain, nothing is ever lost: everything is taken up in the stream of life, willing and thought, dream and deed,-all are reborn in him as other than they were. ‘.