An intrepid cineaste
Henk Alsem was a cameraman and an adventurous “reporter” who, in the 1920s, travelled the globe and witnessed many historical events. In 1927 he documented the civil war between the Nationalist government forces of General Chiang Kai-shek and the insurgents. It was an extremely violent clash, with mass executions and beheadings of prisoners and civilians, pictures of which also appeared in the Dutch magazine Het Leven. Henk Alsem, who was there as a guest of the Chinese general, made recordings for the US company Fox, but during his stay in China, he was also active in the local film industry. He shot The Emperor and the Monkey, starring the Chinese American actress Olive Young, also known as “The Chinese Mary Pickford”.
Alsem’s career as a reporter began in 1924. In October that year a KLM plane with the pilots Van der Hoop and Van Weerden Poelman, and the engineer Van den Broeke left for the Dutch East Indies. It was an endurance test for KLM, and a way to gain international notoriety. The flight was followed with high expectations in the Netherlands and so the disappointment was huge when the plane had to perform an emergency landing in Philippopolis, Bulgaria (now Plovdiv). The damage was considerable and, in the end, the crew had to wait over a month for new parts.
Alsem left for Bulgaria and documented the repair of the plane. The flight then resumed successfully and the airmen were received as heroes in the Dutch East Indies. In the Netherlands people waited impatiently for their return, The men made their way home on a boat. In Alsem’s recordings of the return trip, we can see a very cheerful engineer and two more reserved pilots.
From 1924 Alsem directed for his own production company: Hispano Filmfabriek. The laboratories of Hispano were located in the former tea pavilion of the Boschhek hotel in The Hague, where Alsem’s father had been working as managing director. Alsem shot a number of films for Hispano while he also freelanced as a cameraman for other companies.
Then, in 1931, he traveled again to the Dutch East Indies to shoot the missionary film Rawana. During his stay in Bali, he shot a short news item with Charlie Chaplin who was there to promote his new film City Lights. In the piece, Chaplin is shown amid some Balinese cinema directors. A year earlier, Alsem had also shot the other great director of the time, Sergei Eisenstein, while he was visiting Volendam, as a guest of the Dutch Filmliga.
Alsem also had an active role in the birth of sound film in the Netherlands. In the summer of 1929, he was the cameraman for twelve short films directed by I. Louis Cohen, the brother of L.C. Barnstijn. Lou Bandy, Willy Derby, Kees Pruis and Stella Seemer were just some of the many Dutch artists whose performance he recorded on camera and phonograph, to be later projected with a Loetafoon in theatres across the Netherlands.
He also made sound recordings in the Dutch East Indies, of the actress Elly van Stekelenburg and her husband, Jan Mulder. The actress read a poem to the camera after they tested the sound with a phonograph. This time Alsem made use of the optical soundtrack system, which guaranteed a perfect synchronization of images and voice - the weak spot of the Loetafoon.
De geluidstests met actrice is not the only appearance of Van Stekelenburg and Mulder before Alsem’s camera. The EYE’s archive houses a large collection of material shot by Alsem, both private recordings and working material. One of these rolls is entitled Vliegeniers en zwemsters (‘Airmen and swimmers’). This film shows, amongst other images, an airport in the Dutch East Indies and an outdoor party. Van Stekelenburg and Mulder appear at this celebration as friends of the cameraman - they wear the same tie and scarf they wore in the sound test film.
The second part of the film – Zwemsters – is a long recording made at the pool next to the Waalhaven airport, in Rotterdam. More than two dozen women in similar, playful swimsuits paddle in the water. These images reveal the other side of Alsem. Not chasing historical moments around the world, but just enjoying the pleasure of simple ‘home films’.
For Henk Alsem home was Boschhek. And, after all his travels, Alsem returned to Boschhek’s tea pavilion in which he had turned into his laboratory. In the 1930s, Alsem even became the director of Boschhek and turned the hotel into Château Bleu, “a fairy tale for the city”. He also founded a football club for the eighty and more men that worked there and in his other two hotels nearby. At home, Alsem was, of course, always ready to capture with his camera the events around him and, from the 1920s to World War II, his life is largely documented with countless images from parties and festivities.
