As everywhere in Europe, after the Second World War people in the Netherlands picked up life and started to rebuild the country, attempting to leave the past behind as soon as possible. During the same period that freedom and sovereignty was restored in Europe, in many ‘overseas territories’ the decolonization movement started to emerge. Demands for independence in the colonies were most often met with violent responses from the different European nation states. Between 1947 and 1949, while recovering from five years of German occupation at home, the Dutch government ordered military actions (‘politionele acties’) to keep the Dutch Indies from independence. After numerous bloody battles a truce was signed; Indonesian sovereignty was granted in December 1949. Both the terrible and still fresh recollections of the war at home and the violent actions overseas had an effect on the young postwar generation of artists who started rebelling against all forms of authority. In the arts in the Netherlands the first reactions came from a group of writers, the Fifties Generation (‘de Vijftigers’). They were closely connected to artists of the COBRA movement. Writers such as Lucebert, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Remco Campert, Hugo Claus and Simon Vinkenoog and painters such as Karel Appel, Corneille, and Constant Nieuwenhuys started to break with all conventions in writing and painting respectively. They replaced formal aesthetic rules with spontaneous, sensuous and free forms of expression, loosening the conventions of poetry and painting. They wanted to break free from the narrowness of all conventions and normative behaviour that had slipped back into generational relationships and power structures after the war. They denounced the military actions overseas. And they resisted the status quo by smoking hashish, listening to jazz and reading existential philosophy.

In 1947, Van Gasteren came to live among this bohemian group of writers of the Dutch post-war generation, rebelling against the narrow mindset of the post-war society. In a way, Van Gasteren envied his cohabitants’ simple, yet powerful way of expression by means of just pencil and a piece of paper. Van Gasteren had opted for the (certainly at that time) more complex medium of film.