As a millennial, your cinematic religion comes to you by accident. The magic you come to believe in falls into your lap the first time you see something that you want to become a part of. Whether that be the house of Griffindor, the glittering skin of Edward Cullen, the animal tribe from the Lion King or Lord of the rings. Something very fundamental happens when you fall in love with a fantasy world for the first time . It is the moment that a deep passionate desire is planted in your heart, a longing to a warm and safe place, where you can drift off to for the rest of your living life. It is the moment that you learn to understand a certain sense of spirituality, magic and morality that become so real, that this feeling never leaves your body again.
For me, my religion was Hayao Miyazaki, and my wonderland was Studio Ghibli. I think I must have been around six years old when I saw Princess Mononoke for the first time, in my grandmother’s house in the small mountainous village that she lives in, together with my cousins and aunts. The story is an epic tale about a prince names Ashitaka, and his involvement in a struggle between the mountain Gods and the humans who consume its resources. The film demonstrates the power imbalance between man and nature, between destruction of the environment and human industries, between spirituality and capitalism, and is deeply grounded in Shinto religion.
After having watched the film, we went on a walk in the woods with my family, and I remember one of my aunts reminding us that we had to thank the trees for allowing us to walk in the forest. My Japanese family’s animistic believes had become crystal clear to me. The omnipresence of demons, ghosts and spirits in daily life in Princess Mononoke made me understand the power of the mountains for the first time in my life. You may consider it my most religious experience.
Miyazaki once said that children’s souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. He said: “it’s just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower.” These are words I return to, and his films are a place to be embraced by when this sense of power feels lost.
Miyazaki’s films take place in countries that you cannot actually show on the map, a moment in time that is not quite the future nor the past, but seem oh so familiar, the characters live in between mundane sweet daily life and adventure, nature and city rumbling, magic and planet earth. His films reveal the complexity of antagonising demons or glorifying heroes. The moral duality in his films shows that Miyazaki believes in the good of people. And one thing is clear when it comes to Miyazaki: we all believe in the good of his filmmaking, because I am yet to meet someone who doesn’t love his work.
Martin Scorsese. The man, the myth, the light and the life, the man who has given face and shown us the shadow of the 20th century rags to riches American dream, who has embodied the Italo-American identity in the US, the man who tells the tale of the man who is seduced by the vices of life. The man who has been able to portray God as if he were best mate of man, the man who has given us the man Robert de Niro again and again and again, the man who makes two peni – which is my new way of saying the plural of penis – two peni talking to each other till eternity -fighting, screaming, stabbing hitting each other- that’s his thing.
Scorsese is a phenomenal filmmaker who is particularly good at telling one story which the one of the self-absorbed, Jesus-complex, money-driven man, and often times a pedophile suffocating from his own greatness. Many of his films are a slight variation of this tale taking place on a different New York street corner. Whether these men are gangsters, bankers, boxers or drivers, or a combination of these professions, the men, often also played by the same three people, show the danger of what may happen if you as a man completely give in to the temptations of the greatest manifestations of manhood.
Even though he tells the same story over and over again, he is quite genius at it. I don’t like them as much as I did before, as this particular story is becoming longer and longer and the men are becoming older and the action slower so I’ve slightly lost interest. However, I often go back to his older films. My personal favourite is the King of Comedy, a 1982 film with yes, Robert de Niro playing a delusional self-obsessed clown in New York, but the character has a sweet tenderness that you can really fall in love with. Now I think with these films, my personal aversion is not the peni, because Scorsese actually does a really great job in creating these characters, but it is more so that Scorsese feeds into a desire of his audience who have fallen in love with the lifestyle of this characters, and therefore I feel as if his films are wrongfully celebrated, as his critique on the lifestyles that his characters live are not always as clear. Too many of his films remain a celebration of vile living.
Anyways, alongside making peni films Scorsese is a true hero for founding the Film Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the film preservation and exhibition of restored and classic cinema. I have discovered so much beauty thanks to his initiative. Maybe I just don’t enjoy listening to peni talking for a long time.
One event that many of us film fanatics were especially excited about this winter, was the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature film, Licorice Pizza. Paul Thomas Anderson, who’s such a 21st century icon that his name is often abbreviated to PTA, is a writer and director who has been in the limelight for showing the dark heart of humanity’s past and present since the 90’s. With Licorice Pizza, he may have made his most lighthearted and optimistic film to date. Even though the film does not contain the usual dark-heartedness and forceful aggressive vibe he is known for, he has again shown us what I personally find his strongest quality as a teller of tales, which is the truthfulness of portraying humans as human as they can be.
It is especially the human men from his films that give me life. Many protagonist-boys from PTA films remind me a lot of the men I used to find attractive when I was younger and easily impressionable. The men I fell for were easy talkers, masculine yet charming, successful, intelligent and authoritive. However, these are also the men that, the moment you’ve gotten attached to them, they turn into master manipulators, selfish, uncomfortably aggressive with a narcissistic cherry on top. Men, who, in the course of time, will eventually, always, choose for themselves. These are boys better known as fuckboys. PTA understands them like no other, and has been making us fall in love with them and telling their tales throughout his oeuvre.
However, PTA gives us much more than solely the fuckboy flavor. He introduces us to countless prototypes of people who are in the likelihood of people we may have met in our lives. He shows us characters suffering from deep sorrow, unbeatable addiction, extreme paranoia, powerful love and indestructible love, often played by his solid squad of stellar actors, oftentimes with sensational performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who’s sudden death 8 years ago we are remembering today on the day of our recording. Throughout the darkness, there is always one thing that PTA gives us to pull us out from human agony. He never forgets to make us dance. PTA films are musicals of the groovy.
Today, we will not discuss Licorice Pizza, or maybe we will for a bit, but I’d prefer to talk another stunning PTA film which came out in 1998, called Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights is a film that takes place in California in the 70’s: a story about the discovery of an upcoming porn actor, who goes by the name of Dirk Diggler. As we follow Dirk along on his way to fame, fortune, and hot girls, we get a deeper understanding of the ethos and pathos of old American porn business, of how social inequality manifests itself in darkest corners, but primarily, we get an insight of the struggles that come with being a boy with a big penis.
Throughout my life, I have experienced passionate feelings towards the tomato. The tomato is a special fruit that may seem simple at a first glance, but as you think of her more, she turns out to be emblem of life and beyond.
The tomato is like family. Often sour, sweet at times, bitter when gone wrong and a combination of these flavors when done perfectly right. Tomatoes can be soft, wrinkly, squeezable, juicy and rotten. It is the all-encompassing fruit that represents all flavors and stages of life, different in every language. Depending on how I feel, the way I perceive the tomato differs. Sometimes she is a round red ball filled with tasteless water, sometimes (often), she is the holy fruit.
You may find this story unordinary and a bit out of place for a podcast about cinema, but I am going somewhere with this. My confession and coming out a tomato-phile is only because cinema has taught me that my intense love for the edible is shared by others. You might be familiar with a phenomenal film made in 1988 by Juzo Itami, called Tampopo.
Tampopo tells the story of two truck-drivers who stumble upon a struggling ramen-chef in Tokyo, who then end up having a collective mission to create the best ramen that the city has to offer. In their quest for the exquisite, the trio stumbles upon many figures who feel as passionately about food as I do. We meet the housewife who rises from her deathbed to cook her final meal for her family, a young gangster and his girlfriend who explore all erotic possibilities with food, and a gang of vagabonds who know how to cook proper French cuisine like no Frenchman does.
I am a student at the film academy, and one of my teachers recently said to me: “a good scene is like a sun-dried tomato: dense, concentrated and filled with flavor.” If this is true, Tampopo can be considered the sun that dries the tomato. The film is juicy, bitter, mushy, creamy, romantic, candy-coated and quite spicy at times.
My love for food may be as big as my love for cinema. Both make me understand our basic human needs, our passions and our pain. It is when film and food are combined and strengthen one another, we reach a higher understanding of what the word delicious truly means.
I fall in love quite easily. When I see someone whom I find beautiful, a glimpse becomes a stare, a stare turns into an attraction, the attraction becomes a fascination, the fascination is then an infatuation, which then becomes a passion, often turning into an obsession.
I’ve had many lovers in my life, and by that I mean that I have fallen in love with many movie characters who I’ve encountered over the years. Especially as a young girl, I was easily obsessed with cool boys from various movies. I was very much in love with the hot Peter Pan character in the 2003 feature film ‘Peter Pan’, and Peter Pan was later swapped for other hot knights/vampires/high school hotties or gangsters over which I drooled in front of a screen. This form of obsession never really changed. I swapped Peter Pan and King Arthur for Marlon Brando and Marcello Mastroinanni , and many of the real people I’ve fallen in love with are often more or less a spin-off version of my movie lovers.
My movie crushes have always been white, black, mixed-race, but never of Asian descent. It could be my personal preference, it could simply not be my thing, but most probably, it is not a coincidence. There has always been a ridiculously large absence of sexy Asian men in Western media. It’s not as if there aren’t any Asian actors playing roles in American or European cinema: we know Bruce Lee, we love Jackie Chan, and someone we don’t love but isn’t absent is the racist character of Mr. Chang in the Hangover.. Just to name a few. Hollywood has caricatured the east Asian man as the model-minority, the kung fu fighter, the yellow peril incarnate, always as the perpetual foreigner, and, more importantly: never as a potential love interest.
It is often said that what we consider as hot and sexy is in the eye of the beholder, but what if the beholder has always only seen male beauty as white, white, occasionally black but still primarily white?
Thankfully, when it comes to rightful representation, we have more than Western cinema. The first time I fell in love with an east-asian man on the movie screen was when I saw Takeshi Kaneshiro playing He Qiwu in Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 Chung King Express. Chungking Express is part of a canon of Wong Kar Wai movies about romances with grand potential that actually never happen. It is a story about spontaneous encounters between gorgeous-looking characters, who each fantasize about a life filled with passionate love. The movie makes you fall in love with the characters as each cast member is more beautiful than the other, but it also makes you fall in love with love, with grand gestures and silent romance.
To talk about East-Asian caricatures, Western misrepresentation but also about the wonders of Wong Kar Wai, I am pleased to announce that today we are joined by Dutch journalist, writer and documentary filmmaker Pete Wu. Pete Wu’s debut book the Banana Generation which came out in 2019 is a collection of stories and experiences of so-called ‘banana’s,’: people who are white from the inside and yellow from the outside. With the banana generation, Pete has created the first testament of Dutch people with Chinese heritage, formulating the modern day obstacles of this community in regards of generational clashes, discrimination towards East-Asians, media mis-respresentation and dating as a Chinese man. It is the man who made me understand why the world had mismanufactured me to fall in love with an east Asian man, especially on the big screen. Pete, welcome!
To film or not to film? To make your subject cry, or to offer a shoulder to cry on.
How close is close enough, and how close is too close?
The duty of a documentary filmmaker is to show, how master of reality Werner Herzog likes to call it, the ‘ecstatic truth’: a truth that is not necessarily fact-related, but more so a story that is an intensification of the world as we know it. In search of this truth, the documentarian is on an everlasting quest for the secret stories, the hidden pain that has not yet seen the daylight, or the – often troublesome – characters whose voices are yet to be heard. And mankind is vain. If a documentarian asks you to make a film about your life, you will most likely say yes. We like to believe we are special, that we have a story to tell.
The responsibility a documentarian then carries to create a spectacle of one’s life is tremendous. How does one exactly create this ecstatic truth, and how does one mold the truth to create the story that we believe is the right one to tell? This is where cinema comes into play. Cinema is a place where realer than real images can be created, where we can film the wishes and nightmares that people have. In a good documentary, human nobility and human evil is exposed at its best.
I cite: “Some men just want to watch the world burn, and some men just want to come all over it.” Truthful words which could have been mine, but it’s the catchphrase for the new VPRO Dutch documentary series Zaad van Karbaat, or in English, ‘Seeds of Deceit’. Right upon graduating from the Dutch film academy, documentary filmmaker Miriam Guttmann delved into the genetic heritage of Jan Karbaat, a Dutch fertility doctor who, for years, secretly used his own sperm instead of donors. The aftermath of this crime only became evident after his death: over 68 people have now officially come forward as a donor child of Jan Karbaat. The film questions not only the mad intentions of the perverted doctor, but follows the lives of his children, raising questions about nature/nature and family relations. Guttmann successfully recreates the fantasy worlds of the mothers, children and male donors involved. She uses methods that we might recognise as fiction. The series are a play of re-enactments, interviews, found footage, fly-on-the-wall, animation, and visual depictions of sperm everywhere, which some might argue is on the edge of what it means to capture reality.
The documentary recently premiered at Sundance and has been largely discussed ever since. We are enlightened to have had director Miriam Guttmann at our table today to discuss her new film, documentary ethics, and the thin line between reality and fiction.