Den Doode Steden aan de Zuiderzee (1912) Review: Haunting Dutch Lost-Cities Film Explained

The Zuiderzee once licked its chops across the belly of the Netherlands, a salt wolf gnawing peat and promise. In 1912 Willy Mullens pressed a crank, let light bite celluloid, and trapped that wolf mid-snarl—though the villages it had already swallowed continued to vanish even as the sprockets turned.

There is no plot here in the nickelodeon sense. Instead, Den doode steden aan de Zuiderzee offers a funeral dirge stitched from postcard shots: leaning church spires, doors ajar to nowhere, gull droppings like Morse on abandoned quilts. Mullens, a rotund showman who had previously toured Java with a magic-lantern troupe, understood spectacle. Yet here he reins in the carnival barker and channels a geographer’s melancholy, framing each ruin as if it were a reliquary emptied of its saint.

The film is less documentary than séance: we watch phantoms learn to swim.

Technically, the short is a masterclass in contested exposure. Mullens often shoots contre-jour against pewter skies so that gables become black paper cuts, their windows blazing orange when the sun sneers through cloud-rips. The resulting silhouettes anticipate the German Expressionist fever that would erupt a decade later in The Secret of the Hieroglyphs, yet Mullens’ purpose is not stylised madness but topographical elegy. You can almost taste magnesium flare in the air, acrid as burnt ship’s paint.

Intertitles arrive sparingly, lettered in florid Art-Nouveau curls. One reads: ‘Memories sink faster than stone.’ Another: ‘God subtracted land; man subtracts memory.’ These fragments flirt with propaganda—the government wanted to justify the vast Afsluitdijk project that would dam the sea into lake. Yet Mullens refuses jingoism; his camera lingers too long on a child’s wooden shoe bobbing in a flooded parlour, the lace still tied. The image indicts any promise of easy reclamation.

Compare this with Upstairs, where social mobility and architecture entwine like illicit lovers. In Upstairs staircases ascend toward gaslight futures; in Den doode steden the only ascent is that of water up a grandmother’s rocking-chair legs. Both films obsess over verticality, yet one dreams upward, the other downward. Their mirrored anxieties make them ideal double-bill companions—though you’ll need a tolerant crowd and plenty of jenever.

The score, long lost, survives only in anecdote: a trio of Rotterdam seamen who moaned shanties while someone pumped a harmonium. Modern festivals often substitute Arvo Pärt or field recordings of tidal sluices. Either choice works because the images themselves throb with an internal cadence—waves hammer, windmill sails chop air, film grain fizzes like wet salt on a stove. Watching, you sense a cosmic metronome ticking between land and not-land.

Performance, if we dare call it that, comes from weather-beaten extras who sign the lens with their absence of vanity. A farmer in clogs strides across what was once his potato patch, now lagoon, and the camera tracks him until water reaches his knees. He never looks back; perhaps he knows the shot’s purpose is not rescue but witness. His gait, stiff with peat-core stubbornness, rhymes with the stoic tramp in A Day’s Pleasure, though Chaplin’s gag pivots on urban absurdity while Mullens’ tableau suspends us in rural bereavement.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Den doode steden aan de Zuiderzee (1920) through its definitive frames.

Ethical prickles arise. Did Mullens pay these villagers to wade? Did he wait, vulture-patient, for the season when water mirrored sky so perfectly that horizon vanished, gifting him an infinity of drowned steeples? The answer, scribbled in a 1913 ledger, notes expenses for ‘boat hire, gin, and cigars for Dominee’—so yes, currency crossed palms. Yet exploitation feels too brash a word; the film’s mournful tempo suggests complicity rather than predation, a communal mourning staged in celluloid.

Color enters only in the mind. Contemporary hand-tinting, fashionable in 1912, was eschewed; Mullens wanted slate, salt, rust. When you dream the film afterwards you may hallucinate livid greens because your retina, starved of chroma, rebels. That psychological after-image is the first tint. The second arrives decades later when surviving prints blush with vinegar syndrome—amber bubbles creeping like iodine across the emulsion, turning sea and sky into bruised peach. Decay completes the artist’s intent: a movie about erosion begins to erode.

Narrative closure is denied. The last frame shows an inverted reflection of a church tower; the tower itself is already gone, so we contemplate a ghost of a ghost. Fade to white. No ‘The End,’ no ‘Finis.’ Just a gap where a community once breathed. This open gullet strategy would influence the cyclical despair of The Lotus Dancer, though that 1920 oddity cocoons its fatalism in Orientalist exotica. Mullens needs no exotic veil; his home province suffices.

Cultural resonance ripples outward. When the Afsluitdijk finally closed in 1932, newsreels quoted Mullens’ shots of watery graves. During the North Sea flood of 1953, Dutch TV stations broadcast excerpts as cautionary hymn. Even now, climate-change symposia loop clips while scientists discuss managed retreat. Thus a 12-minute pamphlet becomes prophecy, its flicker repurposed across eras like driftwood refashioned into gallows, then again into cradles.

Restoration notes for cinephiles: the Eye Filmmuseum’s 4K scan in 2019 retrieved facial details obliterated on 16mm dupes—you can now spot barnacles on the minister’s boots. Yet the lab retained gate-weave and density flicker, honouring the patina of witness. Torrent hunters beware: most online copies stem from a 1999 VHS with Japanese subtitles burned in, turning every Zuiderzee wave into a sushi roll of kanji. Seek the 2019 DCP; your retinas deserve truth.

Why revisit this morsel of despair? Because we, too, inhabit provisional ground—mortgaged coasts, fire-prone canyons, suburbs laced with fault-line lullabies. Mullens’ achievement lies not in predicting engineering triumph but in modelling humility. His film whispers: every map is a palimpsest, every deed of ownership a sandcastle. To watch is to practice surrender, a rehearsal for the day when our own doors stand ajar to nowhere.

So dim the lights, pour a jenever, let the sea inside the machine swallow your certainties. When the screen goes white, listen: bells still ring, faint beneath the floorboards of the world.

If this review floated your skiff, paddle over to our takes on The Secret of the Old Cabinet and Heart Strings—equally haunted, marginally less damp.