In order to prevent one of his friends in the counter-culture scene in Amsterdam from performing a controversial act of ‘mind expansion’, in June 1964, filmmaker Louis van Gasteren confiscated the tools that the friend wanted to use to drill a hole in his own skull. Nevertheless, in January 1965 Bart Huges performed the operation to create a ‘Third Eye’ without any assistance. When Van Gasteren found out the next day, he immediately grabbed his camera and went to see Huges in his small apartment where Van Gasteren filmed him, sitting in bed with a bandaged head, explaining in an astonishingly clinical way (Huges was a student of medicine) how and why he had pursued trepanation. The film that Van Gasteren released years later (in 1979) under the title THE OPERATION (DE INGREEP) also contained black-and-white photographs of Cor Jaring. Watching THE OPERATION almost fifty years after the event, the film remains remarkable; not only because it presents a unique document of the spirit of that period in time, but also because one can feel the urgency of a filmmaker who saw the cultural and political importance of events in the present as a means of understanding the past and the future. A filmmaker engaged as a visionary participant observer in his surroundings, camera and microphone always on stand-by in an era long before we all carried mobile recording devices in our pockets.

After I saw THE OPERATION, I sought out other films by one of the most prolific and longest actively working Dutch filmmakers. I continue to be amazed by the films of Louis van Gasteren, with their unusual audacity, passionate rigour and idiosyncratic combination of the serious and traumatic with the playful and surreal aspects of life. Given that, despite their wide scope and depth, Van Gasteren's films are perhaps less well known than the works of other acclaimed filmmakers of the Dutch documentary tradition, I felt the need to investigate the legacy of these films. During the research and writing of this book I met regularly with the filmmaker and his wife and long-time collaborator, Joke Meerman. This book owes a great deal to their inspiring hospitality and their generosity in sharing films, documents, background information and priceless stories.