Obsessions
Pim de la Parra / NL, DE, 1969 / 90 min.
Feature debut by Pim de la Parra, who in the sixties was among the first cohort of students at the Film Academy – the ‘Dutch New Wave’. For the score of his ‘sex-psycho-suspense-murder-mystery’, De la Parra managed to recruit Hitchcock’s regular composer, Bernard Hermann.
When a student discovers a hole in the wall he gets an eyeful of his neighbour’s erotic and criminal adventures. This Hitchcockian thriller based on a script by Pim de la Parra, Wim Verstappen and Martin Scorsese (!) was sold to no less than 65 countries.
The film’s events pick up when a painting comes down from a wall. The room’s tenant, a medical student, spies on his neighbour through a tiny opening. It is not only sex that stirs his curiosity. Hidden out of sight, he witnesses puzzling and disturbing events, all pointing to crime.
Martin Scorsese, who was in Amsterdam shooting his feature debut Who’s That Knocking At My Door, contributed to the screenplay. Pim de la Parra called his first feature film a ‘sex and psycho-suspense mystery’, an English-language, Dutch-German co-production by $corpio Films. He was inspired by Hitchcock's classic thriller Rear Window (1954) for the story. De la Parra contracted Frans Bromet for the camera work, who had previously only shot on 8 and 16mm.
This is part of
Details
Director
Pim de la Parra
Production year
1969
Country
NL, DE
Original title
Obsessions
Length
90 min.
Language
none
Subtitles
NONE
Format
DCP
Part of
Dutch New Wave
They were young and wanted to counter what they saw as the staid, middle-class Dutch cinema of the fifties. Adriaan Ditvoorst, Pim de la Parra, Frans Weisz, Wim Verstappen, René Daalder and Nikolai van der Heyde were captivated by the free, unembellished Italian neorealist style and the French nouvelle vague; they wanted to make films about life itself, with true-to-life characters, like those of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Share your love for film and become a member of the Eye Society.