See Holland Before It Gets Too Big (1969) Poster

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5/10
This is NOT about land reclamation . . .
cricket3024 November 2013
Warning: Spoilers
. . . as the title SEE H0LLAND BEFORE IT GETS TOO BIG would suggest to anyone with a brain in their head. After all, Holland is that country civil engineers hold up as an example of gaining land mass by building dikes and sea gates, a feature of Dutch landscape about as prominent as windmills. Thus, the labeling of this pointless 11-minute bike ride promises the astute viewer that they'll see giant machines moving tons of earth in huge public works projects. Instead, the observer is NOT enlightened by a single spoken word as to why some scruffy guitarist is seeing a homely blonde chick pop in and out of his vision. Has the beatnik just ingested LSD, the sort of thing one might expect from a person looking like him bouncing around Holland? Is the girl supposed to be a witch (I think the one that married a Weasley boy in Harry Potter came from somewhere close to Windmill Land). This is never explained. Nor is anything else in this film. It would seem producer Norman Weissman (is that his REAL surname, or some sort of a joke?) had this footage he wanted to use up before it went bad. I've never heard of him; Weissman could be the Dutch Andy Warhol, for all I know. But watching a dude sleep for eight hours sounds far more exciting than the actual SEE H0LLAND BEFORE IT GETS TOO BIG experience.
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A personal vision
Owlwise11 July 2016
I have to disagree with the previous reviewers, who don't seem to be seeing this short film in the spirit intended. Maybe you had to be of a certain age, in a certain time, for its appeal to become apparent. It's a wordless journey of a young man, obviously idealistic, artistic, yearning -- as so many were in 1969 -- as he travels through Holland, envisioning the same mysterious young woman in various settings, evoking various eras, capture din his sketches & inner eye, but not on camera. Clearly she's his own idealized Eternal Feminine, what Jungians would call the Anima- his own soul, his dream of beauty & meaning -- projected onto the landscape. And perhaps she's also the embodiment of the land, at least as he experiences it. A lovely, Romantic, dreamlike film that couldn't be made in these more literal, imaginatively poor times today.
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Strange and Creepy
Michael_Elliott23 November 2013
See Holland Before It Gets Too Big (1969)

** (out of 4)

I'm sure the intentions of this travelogue were good but the film ends up coming across rather creepy. This 10-minute short has a man riding his bike across various parts of Holland where he sketches various images while at times running into a beautiful blonde who he never talks to. SEE Holland BEFORE IT GETS TOO BIG is one of the strangest shorts I've ever seen and that's saying quite a bit because I do love shorts and I watch as many as I can. I'm sure the intent was to make people want to visit Holland but everything in this film just comes across rather creepy. We can start off with the nameless lead actor who just walks around looking like he's very angry. The angry facial gestures really don't make you want to come see Holland and especially if you run into someone like him. The music score by Dan Berrie is actually very, very good. It's very good when you listen to it on its own but mix in its creepy nature with the creepy guy walking around and once again you're not wanting to visit this place. None of the locations are ever identified so even if I did want to visit them I'd have no idea where to start looking. There's really no point in watching this film unless you just want to see something rather weird.
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