Brandend Kalf wants more fire in Dutch cinema. But who should stoke that?

While at the City Theatre the Dutch Film Festival was festively opened with Tulipani murmurs resounded elsewhere in Utrecht. Party? According to Burning Calf, an initiative by film journalist Karin Wolfs and writer A.H.J. Dautzenberg, there is no cause for celebration. Dutch film lacks true fire.

As demonstrated opposite the festival pavilion by using a portable projector to provide some calves with vivid flames. A playful mini pinprick, watched with interest by a few passers-by and the guards. The latter didn't know what to make of it for a while, but came to a stop after back talk.

Clandestine college

That more is needed was then explained by Brandend Kalf in a room of the former squatters' stronghold ACU under the title 'Clandestien College'. Alongside initiators, writer Eva Rovers, visual artist Harma Heikens and recently graduated filmmaker Stijn Bouma revealed what is wrong. Not only with Dutch film, but actually with the entire Dutch arts management. The latter is a very dirty word, if I understood it correctly. Too bad there was no one from the Film Fund in the audience.

Waking up

Karin Wolfs summarised once again what she had already said in The Film Newspaper and the Volkskrant had written about it. Dutch cinema is the world of romantic comedies, book adaptations and children's films. Even so-called arthouse film is often about personal problems, not about what's out there in the world. And when something resembling engagement does pop up, it is always in a safe package. It lacks subversive films that shake us up hard.

Wolfs is rigorous. Even the acclaimed Dutch Oscar entry Layla M., about a radicalising Amsterdam girl, cannot appeal to her. Empathetic though, yet the protagonist safely portrayed as a victim. How then? Wolf had no examples of Dutch trailblazers to hand. She did have an excerpt from Terry Gilliams The Fisher King. A fairy tale full of bizarre humour and sarcasm, with sharp criticism of the television world. Proving that real engagement can also be done in a mainstream film. As long as the filmmaker takes things to his own liking.

Art is anarchy

That you cannot blame only filmmakers for a lack of fire became clear as the evening progressed. Filmmaker Jos Stelling announced from the audience that it already starts with the mistake of calling a filmmaker a 'maker'. That is as much a misunderstanding as the opinion that art and culture belong together. Art is anarchy. Calling an artist a maker is right up the street of cultural managers (theatre directors, policymakers, etc.). We have far too many of these in the Netherlands, according to Stelling. A filmmaker is an artist, that's where it starts.

But then again, speaker Dautzenberg was not so quick to see a Dutch equivalent of the British Ken Loach and Andrea Arnold, or of the Belgian Dardenne brothers. I myself would add that, as a small film country, you cannot always be as lucky as, say, the Danes with their sleeper Lars von Trier.

1960s jargon

Harma Heikens gets Spanish cramps from all those filmmakers who are nice and authentic with their little personal stories. But she too did not want to blame them for everything. She herself has completely had it with the current art world and has decided to go underground, which does not mean she will become an activist. Activism in art, she says, is a way of showing that you are on the right side of history. Heikens' interesting observation is that many policymakers still use the rebellious jargon of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, they are behaving just the opposite. She even suggested that previously advocated engagement and art are mutually exclusive.

If I understand correctly (but it is easy to be wrong in this matter), Eva Rovers is also roughly on this line. Following the ideas of philosopher Albert Camus, she argues for an artist who rebels. For films that confront, which is not the same as committed art. But that is hard to achieve in an environment that talks about 'cultural entrepreneurship' and 'creative industry'. In that world, art is allowed to be critical, as long as it is manageable.

Pampers

Fortunately, Dautzenberg did stand up for the filmmakers, noting that filmmaking requires a lot of money, you work with a whole team and also that there is no rich tradition of committed cinema in the Netherlands. Joris Ivens perhaps, he suggested.

So someone in the audience asked the rhetorical question whether the problem lies in lack of makers with urgent ideas, or whether there is too little willingness to support and fund those ideas. Only to then give the answer herself: budding filmmakers are cuddled to death in pamphlets that rely too much on cooperation from broadcasters, among other things. But she also sees young makers who lack guts and are happy to conform in order to belong to the incrowd.

Film is music

A bit of a pity in all this is that of the five introducers and fire makers, only the newly graduated Stijn Bouma was able to provide the filmmakers' voice. This did place a very heavy task on his shoulders. He limited himself to quoting a number of principles he had learned at the film academy of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr in Sarajevo. According to Tarr, you have to dare to put morally reprehensible characters at the centre, dare to show love, and dare to free yourself from the screenplay. Film is not a book, but music. That complemented by a disconcerting excerpt from Fassbinder's magisterial series Berlin Alexanderplatz.

One attendee concluded, "We should focus on the industry and subsidy streams, and not stray into philosophy. Who are these decision-makers with their hollow views on audiences and ratings? We should agitate against that."

If it is up to Branded Calf, this meeting was a start and more discussion is going to follow. Will policymakers be there? Or filmmakers, nay, artists with rebellious plans? And let's not forget that the famed French Nouvelle Vague was not started by policymakers at the time, but by film critics who decided to make their own films.