A Man and a Camera review – doorstep prank movie is pass-agg psychological study

Film-maker Guido Hendrikx goes house-to-house in a Dutch suburb, ringing doorbells and then mutely filming – we see what people will say and do to fill the silence

Dutch film-maker Guido Hendrikx has given us a funny but also somewhat slippery and disingenuous bit of pass-agg provocation, somewhere between documentary cinema and conceptual art. For just over an hour, we get his point-of-view as he troops about a bland Dutch suburb, ringing on people’s doorbells and just mutely filming them when they appear. We never see the cameraman himself.

Some people are baffled, some bemused, some alarmed. Most, having waited in vain for to him to explain himself, are unwilling to be the first to make an aggressive or disapproving move, and certainly unwilling to be filmed doing so, so they are trapped into a kind of smiley stare-out contest. Some are very annoyed; one threatens to trash his camera and another appears to carry out the threat. The cops are called, but they don’t seem too bothered and then go away after which the cameraman resumes his house-to-house calls; well, that’s how it looks in the edit. And throughout, Hendrikx never says anything, and we see how people will politely say and do almost anything to fill the excruciating silence: therapists and cops use the same technique.

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