Seizing the day

Friday we went to Amsterdam to work with our rythm analysis.We wanted to film at three scales simultaneously, capturing one event from the detail to its context. Originally we wanted to have one camera on street level, and the other two in a slightly higher position in order to get a better view. That proved difficult, though, so we ended up having all three cameras on street level.

Camera 1 was placed in one of the alleys between Chinatown and the Red Light District, directed towards a window in which a prostitute was working. Camera 2 was placed in the Zeedijk, where it intersects with the alley, capturing people going in and out of the alley. Camera 3 we put on a tripod in Nieuw Markt, directed towards the Zeedijk.

We captured people, mostly men, passing in the alley, looking at the women in the window, pausing to consider whether or not to go inside. Some did, some didn’t, some changed their mind and come back.

We saw herds of tourists walking from the alley and up the Zeedijk, we saw chinese women and men carrying shoppingbags from one of the chinese supermarkets in the area, a man picking up trash, police on bicycles, a horse and buggy.

We saw more tourists, cars running, people going in and out of cafes, people stopping in the street talking to eachother, a woman with a baby stopping to talk to us.

At the end of our day in Amsterdam, the pace of movement seemed to change a little, in a way everything became more dense, concentrated, focused. Many of the random tourists are gone by this time, the ones that are left seem to have more of a purpose. Taxis were almost the only kind of veichle passing in Zeedijk, though passing isn’t exactly the right word, because almost all of them stop at our intersection, letting people on and off. When the everyday-life is coming to an end and leaves the place to the every-night-life, it takes with it a lot of the activites and the people performing them, and the activities brought by the night don’t quite make up for the loss.