Alberts Frères

'Zandvoort in an uproar! On Saturday morning at roughly 10 o’clock, with beautiful weather and calm seas, a Frenchman sat in a beach chair to gaze upon the magnificent view that the sea always affords, until he slowly began to fall asleep’ So begins a report in the ‘Zandvoortsche Courant’ of July 25, 1905. The article explains how the man was faced with the oncoming tide, and – to the amazement of the audience – took off his trousers to prevent them from being ruined by the saltwater. While trying to escape from the policeman who had rushed to the scene, he jumps into a passing car, and hides out in a small changing cabin. Eventually he's nabbed by the police. Accompanied by a band and a large crowd, he is escorted to the police station. The article ends by saying that ‘Messrs. Alberts Frères’ had staged the whole incident for a film in which two of the most popular genres of that period - the locally-shot film and the chase film – would be combined.

Children in costume. fishing boats. Island of Marken on the former Zuiderzee bay, Netherlands.

The short story tells of a young man who, after being rejected by the girl of his dreams, hangs himself from the tallest tree in the local park. He is soon discovered by the park keeper and, amid much commotion, various people are called upon to get him down as quickly as possible. The young man turns out to be still alive and is resuscitated with a bicycle pump.

A popular-scientific film about beekeeping. The beekeeper Jan Luberti gives a tour of his Bijenlust bee farm near The Hague, Netherlands, and shows the many aspects of keeping bees, and how they make honey.

The harvest of gooseberries, apples, pears, and cherries. The film includes shots of the fruit-picking – by men, women and children – as well as the transport and the auction. The images of the harvest are interspersed with idyllic pictures of flowers, grazing cows, and young women eating cherries.

In the vaults of the Film Museum is a short film which, when it arrived in the 1950s, was given the title Bloemenvelden in Haarlem (The Flower Fields of Haarlem). The film shows the visit of two women and a child to the bulb fields. One woman buys a bouquet of flowers from a farm labourer who is hard at work. At the end of the film, a man joins them. He also buys a bouquet of flowers. Both the husband and wife give their bouquets to the child.