Video: A look at Amsterdam in centuries past as city nears 750th birthday

Filmmaker and artist Bob de Jong made a video in which historical Amsterdam comes to life, using AI to bring life to paintings of the city in the 17th and 18th centuries. He made his video as a gift to the city in the run-up to the celebration of Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary, De Jong told Parool.

The video opens with a sketch by Rembrandt van Rijn from around 1641. You first see the sketch, titled View of Amsterdam from the northwest, and then color and movement flooding into it.

“This was more or less the first view of Amsterdam as a city. I think that’s a good start,” De Jong said. He would have liked to start his video even earlier - 750 years ago around the dam in the river Amstel. “But there are only written texts about that and I didn’t want to make anything up.”

De Jong was especially curious about the “ordinary” Amsterdam of the past. “I stayed away from overly iconic images, such as the Night Watch, because I wanted to make the ‘real’ story. What would it look like if you were to travel back in time yourself?” De Jong said. “Not in an artistic way, but in a human way. The Rembrandt that I used is very intimate, you peek with him at the city. Was it really like that? No idea. We have to trust the painters of that time.”

The video ends in the year 1780, with the mournful painting De Sint-Antoniuswaag in Amsterdam by Isaac Ouwater. “Because after that, the rise of photography began to present itself, and painting, as it were, handed over the baton to photography. Where paintings are often still an interpretation of reality, photography is a direct reflection of it. That is why I no longer felt the need to visualize that period any further because then it is mainly about recreating something that has already been recorded in a mirrored way.”