Den doode steden aan de Zuiderzee

Silver nitrate ghosts drift across a half-drowned map: villages once loud with clogs and psalms now surrender to silt and mirage. Mullens’ camera, equal pathologist and poet, glides past leaning steeples that jut like broken needles from the Zuiderzee’s skin, capturing bell-towers tolling under water, their bronze mouths choked with eelgrass. A fisherman’s widow—face a topography of salt and grief—haunts the foreground, her lantern bobbing like a hesitant moon while she combs the beach for splinters of her husband’s dory. Intertitles bloom like frost on a windowpane: ‘The sea remembers what the ledger forgot.’ Children, half seal, half saint, somersault through roofless cottages where wallpaper peels in pale spirals, each curl a stanza of Protestant guilt. A bureaucrat in top-hat arrives on skates, clutching parchment plans for a new dike; his silhouette slices the horizon like a black paper doll, emblem of man’s arithmetic war against water. The final reel dissolves into a time-lapse baptism: acres of clay swallowed whole, bells heard distantly beneath the brine, their bronze voices softened into whale-song. No protagonists, only procession—windmills gnawing air, cattle sinking to their knees in pasture turned lagoon, a lone photographer (Mullens himself?) who cranks his handle even as the tide laps at his tripod, archiving disappearance until the film itself blisters, bleaches, corrodes—an artifact of entropy that watches itself drown.