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!
For as long as I know I’ve always been fascinated with the Second World War. It is, for a lack of a better word, my favorite war. And I can’t see how this could have been any different; growing up the war seemed to have been everywhere. It was something the whole world had to live through at the time. My vastly different grandparents had experienced this global event when they were still young. My mother’s parents lived in the south of the Netherlands and had endured the occupation by Nazi Germany, while on the other side of the world, in the Dutch East Indies, my father’s parents had suffered under the occupation of the Japanese Imperial Army. Their combined experiences had influenced the childhoods of my parents and to a lesser extent seeped into my childhood experience as well. Growing up, basically everybody’s grandparents had lived through the war. When we vacationed in France we visited cemeteries filled with dead soldiers and a monumental town whose inhabitants had been locked inside a burning church. The town had been left intact to convey the horrors that must have taken place back then, seeing the bullet riddled car of the town doctor used to haunt me, as my great-grandfather had also been a small town doctor during the war. Remnants of the era were specifically obvious in the city I grew up in: Amsterdam. Tiny brass tiles are found everywhere, bearing the names of Jewish people who became victims of the Nazis. As a kid I browsed through as many history books as I could lay my hands on, usually just taking in the black-and-white photos. At night, I’d lay in my bed and I would wonder if I would have been prosecuted for how I looked. I wondered if I could have found a good place to hide and where that would be. Who of the people I knew would be willing to help me if I had to hide? I wondered how much it would hurt to lose loved ones, or if I would have been brave enough to commit acts of resistance.
The most effective way to get through to me as a kid was to show me a movie. Through this medium World War II obviously didn’t escape me. Quite the contrary, perhaps more than all the other wars combined the Second World War has been widely and extensively portrayed in film. And so my fascination with the war has seemingly always been intertwined with my love for movies. To my first cinematic hero, Steven Spielberg, the war had been just as essential. His father served in the air force during the war and his mother’s family had been ravished by the holocaust. His first amateur short films in Arizona were war films; he would put helmets on local boys that looked like grownups to him and he made them run around while he employed all kinds of cheap tricks to make it look like they were in battle. And just as the Second World War remained a thread throughout Spielbergs work, the war remained a thread throughout my life and my love for film.
Our humble Dutch film industry always had a close affinity with the war too; a glance at a list of the few classic Dutch films shows a significant number of war films. But apart from the classics, this Dutch tradition of churning out war films on an almost annual basis in my opinion rarely results in something cinematically interesting. Dutch war films basically always come with a mold, that forces these usually large productions to be extremely repetitive, both thematically and stylistically. When I started studying to become a screenwriter at the Netherlands Film Academy I gradually developed my own World War 2-set feature film script, hoping that it would someday add something new to the national cinematic landscape. This set off my deep dive into World War 2-cinema from around the world, to see how people combined their love of cinema with the shared memory of the war, how they used their movies to challenge themselves artistically about the trauma and the uncomfortable truths the war left them to deal with.
We are living in an age where having a penchant for the past is increasingly worn as a badge of pop culture honor. Who hasn’t reminisced about the films seen in one’s youth and uttered a phrase along the lines of “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”? As a child of the late 80’s I myself will look back fondly on the weekends my dad, unsure what to do with me after the divorce of my parents, placed me in front of the shelves of our local video store with the absolute freedom to pick whatever I wanted to see. The nightmare fuel I tanked from seeing Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, John Carpenter’s Halloween or witnessing Chucky’s and Freddy’s murderous rampaging in the Child’s Play and A Nightmare On Elm Street franchises at far too young an age, shaped my love for cinema and what it can do. Of course my nostalgia for those days isn’t solely tinged by 80’s horror films, but at such an early age the horrific does tend to leave the most indelible of marks.
During the 17th to 19th century nostalgia was considered a serious psychopathological disorder requiring rather dubious methods of cure. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term in his 1688 medical dissertation, from the Greek nostos, or homecoming, and algos, meaning pain. The disease was similar to paranoia, except the sufferer was manic with longing, similar to melancholy, except specific to an object or place.
We have to be thankful psychology now looks at the phenomenon differently otherwise the entire film industry would have to be put into a sanitorium for life. For nostalgia – sometimes flashily concealed under the guise of ‘retro’ – is rampant in the Hollywood system. Rehashing old ideas or remaking films has always been in the bloodstream of both filmmakers and productions studios – Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s The Fly two praiseworthy examples and Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho being a severely dubious one – but as of late it seems more widespread than ever before. From the seemingly endless string of comic book movie adaptations to various reimaginings of the very horror films I watched as a child, the critique that the film industry is running out of ideas is getting louder and louder. From a commercial standpoint one could argue that this tendency to rehash, revamp or ‘update’, let’s say, the entire body of work of Stephen King or Clive Barker, is a great way of getting bums on seats as we already have a connection with these materials. We’ve all been to the Overlook Hotel before, we all remember Pennywise The Clown lurking in the sewer, and we’ve all looked in the bathroom mirror saying Candyman, Candyman… And even if Michael Jordan is replaced by LeBron James to sink a hook into Generation Z, and I do my best to tell myself I should never go see it, I still couldn’t restrain my nostalgia once the trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy dropped this month. Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
But even if ‘retro’ has replaced ‘renaissance’ and, like Hugo put it rather eloquently recently, mainstream filmmaking can sometimes feel like a calzone of familiar ideas being folded on top of each other over and over again, we shouldn’t condemn our personal sense of nostalgia, for the films that we remember so longingly, and in some cases rather naively, helped shape who we are as grown ups. Looking back at my childhood one director stands out as having the biggest impact on my nostalgia to come and that is of course Steven Spielberg. After scaring an entire generation out of the waters two decades earlier, the American director of other sentimentality drugs like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and the Indiana Jones series, would in 1993 forever convince me that a velociraptor can easily open a steel door with its sharp claws. “Clever girl.” Jurassic Park remains a masterpiece of 90’s Hollywood filmmaking with its childhood wish fulfillment premise, groundbreaking blend of CGI-special effects and animatronics, thrilling roller coaster-like action set pieces, that iconic score by John Williams and the most memorable Jeff Goldblum laugh in cinematic history. It’s a story about a wealthy businessman who, inspired by his own case of ultimately naive nostalgia, builds a wildlife theme park filled with previously extinct dinosaurs, and can be read as a cautionary tale about what might happen when you bring the (very distant) past into the present. Therefore it’s an excellent starting point for a conversation about nostalgia and nightmares, sequels and remakes, retro and rehash and the question if we can ever truly escape our past. So like Samuel L. Jackson’s character would say: “Hold onto your butts!”
I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to April the 26th, the date when the 93rd award ceremony of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences will be held. Although I’m probably looking forward to it for another reason than you might think.
You could say I’ve got the Oscar Fever. Which means a lot to those out there already initiated in maybe the most important group of cinephiles out there: the junior movie buffs.
Since 2013 Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, comedians that take on the role of very knowledgeable film buffs, knowledgeable is in quotation marks here btw, have streamed their own Oscar Special show live and in tandem with the Oscars. These shows, all part of the ever-growing On Cinema At The Cinema Cinematic Universe, are comedy gold: two self-proclaimed critics attempt a Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel style television show about all things movies and cinema but fail horribly and rather clash with each other over the most basic of things: whether Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is set in San Francisco or not; whether Mission Impossible or James Bond is the best spy movie franchise out there; or whether making music and hanging out with your buddies is more important than engaging with film and collecting them on VHS in a frantically labelled but also kinda chaotic archival system.
In essence, the On Cinema At The Cinema series, all free to watch on YouTube, reveals the absurd nature of extensively engaging with the film industry at large, which makes it very enjoyable for me, a film critic who also sometimes thinks in movies first, life second. In a way It’s also a perfect mirror for institutions like the Academy that behind their professional image seem to be a deeply ineffectual and low-key amateuristic platform to truly reflect what film culture is about. The Oscars are too white, too male centric, too much catered towards the industry itself and too unfair in giving the statuettes to the people that seem more deserving of it, and yet we hold the ceremony and its prizes in regard as one of the most important indications of the quality of a specific movie, maker, writer, performer etc. I think the moment where Warren Beauty accidentally gave the Oscar for Best Film to La La Land instead of Moonlight came across as a mask-off moment for many, giving an insight into how broken this archaic institution seems to be.
But of course, something as prestigious as the Oscars has to constantly reinvent itself to remain just progressive and appealing enough to remain a firm grip on the cultural landscape. A very cynical read of the sweeping win of Bong Joong Ho’s Parasite could be that the film had to win in order for the Oscars to hang on to some of their relevance.
In this pandemic year in which the biggest films have mostly been indefinitely postponed or dumped onto our VOD platforms, the Oscars were faced with another challenge: to remain the biggest and the best, even though the eligible films don’t necessarily fit the mold of what an Oscar-winning-movie might look like in the 21st century. There’s much to reflect on here and there’s some interesting titles out there that are vying for the most important awards this year, but if you’ve come for this kind of detailed Award speculation you’ve gone to the wrong place.
In this episode we’d rather take the Oscars as a cue to talk about the inherent absurdities of the film industry that reveal themselves when you take a peek behind the curtain. We’ll be doing that with the help of a daft little film that got released in 2013 and didn’t really get hold of the cultural imagination around that time but has proven to be almost prophetic in its highly critical stance towards the film industry. I’m talking about The Congress, a hybrid feature animation film by Ari Follman, who rose to critical esteem with his animation/documentary hybrid Waltz With Bashir about the 1982 Lebanon war.
On the back of the success of that film Folman basically decided to bury his career by making a batshit insane adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem novel called The Futurological Congress about a riot in a Hilton congress hotel that gets suppressed by psychedelic drugs spread through the drinking water. Folman combines that psychedelic and satirical narrative with a scathing critique of the film industry in which an actress called Robin Wright, obviously played by Robin Wright, is enticed to digitize her body, voice, movements and gestures so she’ll never have to act another role in her life again. Her CGI counterpart will do the acting for her, and in exchange she’ll check the royalties of her pictures for the rest of her life.
When in the second half of the film the by now permanently out of work Robin Wright checks into a hotel where Stanislaw Lem’s congress takes place, the film takes a radical left turn and becomes an aesthetic and reality bending animation film in which all of culture at large seems to co-exist within the same realm. It’s a lot to handle and the film doesn’t really give you a map of how to navigate its chaotic narrative. Which is exactly why we’re taking it here as a starting point to talk about the film industry, ownership of images, culture as competition and our own role in this complex spiders’ web of culture and criticism. And all of that can easily bring us back to the Oscars and the upcoming ceremony.
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.
In our first episode we’ve established our love for cinema in all its facets and intricacies, of which there are so many that it prompted this quote from Jean Luc-Godard.
He said: “Film is truth twenty-four times a second, and every cut is a lie.” The Austrian auteur Michael Haneke boiled this statement down to its natural conclusion: “films is 24 lies per second.”
So, loving film is akin to loving the lie…
If you explore that idea even a bit further it plunges you down a rabbit hole about the way we perceive film, reality and ourselves. It makes you think about the way the media we consume have shaped our perspectives on politics, ideology, representation and practically life itself. It forces you to pause and think about what you consider to be real. Aren’t we all just living the stories made up by the selective perception of our minds? In times ` fake news, deep fakes and rampant conspiracy theories these questions remain eerily relevant.
I’m reminded by this fascinating story widely shared after the release of James Cameron’s 2009 3D blockbuster Avatar that beautifully rendered the new age CGI world of Pandora on which majestic creatures called Na’vi live in close relation with the flora and fauna of their surroundings. People were so in awe of this fantastical and alien place, in the film obviously invaded by colonizing humans, that they experienced an actual bout of depression after leaving the cinema. They thought: why can’t our world be like that of the Na’Vi?
In our current lockdowned state I think we all have a bit of the Pandora Blues. I don’t know about you, but I get deep aches whenever I see groups of people coming together in films, or when people shake hands or hug or dance in a club. I want to live in that world, not my world…“We’re all mad as hell now and we won’t take this anymore”…
In the previous episode Tom aptly described our need to escape our reality wholesale. And yet it’s also important to realize what happens when we get enticed to do so. LAB111 has been working on a film program that shows the many dangers and challenges of trying to escape our own reality. We hope the program will screen soon. From the puzzle narratives of spectacular sci-fi films like ExistenZ and Inception to the ideological paranoia of Total Recall and They Live. These films take you down the rabbit hole and show you that sure, you can escape the surroundings of your reality, but can you ever escape yourself and the structures you grew up in?
For this episode we’ve watched a film that touches upon all of these themes, and also handily reflects on our current stay-at-home bubble state. It’s a film that also anticipated the wildly mediated state in which we’re all actors now of our own social media accounts. I’m talking of course about Peter Weir’s 1998 Jim Carrey starring The Truman Show, a marvel of American film making because it’s simultaneously deeply moving and extremely funny, but also eerily poignant and perhaps even prophetic,
The Truman Show stars Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, a man whose entire life has without his consent been broadcasted on television as a continuous soap series. His life has been perfectly comfortable: he has a desk job, a caring wife, a good friend and then so more, but nonetheless he feels that something doesn’t adds up when he starts to question his surroundings.
Using Truman’s quest of self-fulfillment as a departure point, this episode will deal with the opaque relationship between fiction and real life, about the way films have shaped our perception of the world and the way we allow stories to fuck with our mind.
As I lie here waiting for these lonesome, dreadful days to pass, pacing the cage of my homely confines, flipping through my film collection and returning time and time again to the same classics I’ve watched dozens of times, I began to wonder what it is that I miss so much about the cinema. Movies have always been a reflecting pool for me; a basin of fantasies to experience vicariously so as to better understand oneself and the world around us, or – being the preferred modus operandi in the middle of an apocalypse – to escape reality wholesale. Is it that without the fantastical the real just becomes too unbearably real?
One of my all-time favorite fantasies is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic Vertigo, a film that’s all about looking, projecting and, very much, gazing, and in doing so asking the viewer what it means to be looking, projecting and gazing (at a film). What makes the greatest films so great is that, unlike any other art form, cinema is manifested on what you project onto it as a viewer. As James Stewart’s former police detective Scottie tails the mysterious woman he is tasked to spy on, we project our own thoughts and feelings onto his gaze, making it our own. As cinema can do like no other, we get swept up in it all. And so these films become part of our psyche and of who we are. Not just touchstones for small talk at cocktail parties, but signifiers of our very identities.
There is a great deal of unrest in the seas of cinema. Waves of change are crashing down on everything from the way films are made to how they are screened. But no matter how the climate has changed over the decades the medium and its brave creators have always proven to be incredibly versatile in navigating any sea-change, finding new streams to traverse and tap into. As the programmer of LAB111, a cinema dedicated to maintaining and celebrating the mind-boggling rich reflecting pool of cinema, I dearly miss the captain’s duties on our ship. There’s nothing like putting together the puzzle of a film program and sharing the experience of escaping into films with others in the magical dark of a film theatre. I believe that the past year has proven that we need film more than ever, that we need those twenty-four frames per second to encounter life through fantasy, to escape and dive deeper into ourselves and each other. We need, we crave, however different we may be from one another, to share these experiences with others, because it is in sharing those cinematic reveries we can find what it is to truly be together.
As I lie here waiting for these lonesome, dreadful days to end, wishing to return to my beloved cinema and the beloved visitors who frequent it, I am reminded of two Morgan Freeman voice overs. The first from David Fincher’s Se7en, which concludes with Freeman stating: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.” The other from a sentimental prison drama I need not name. “I hope to see my friend and shake its hand […] I hope.”