We had barely recovered from the rebirth of Celine Dion. The traditionally long-winded and kitschy 'Son et Lumière' with which France had this time made the opening of the Olympics a quintessentially French event had also unleashed a storm of protests with a tableau vivant to the sadly just not famous enough painting 'The Feast of the Gods' by Jan van Bijlert. From 1635.
American Christian conservatives, who share their disgust with decadent Europe with Russian despot Putin, saw it as a blasphemous, because 'woke-', or rather 'DEI-', versie in van Da Vinci’s Laatste Avondmaal. Dat zagen de Fransen op hun beurt weer als een belediging, want Leonardo Da Vinci was geen Fransman, dus waarom zouden zij die ooit eren bij hun eigen feestje. Nee dan liever de Minions. Want die zijn ook French.
The organisation then apologised, for something the creatives had not thought of at all.
Relief
Wars have been started over less, which is why the broadcast of Zomergasten on that last Sunday of July 2024 was such a wonderful breath of fresh air. Though relief is perhaps a poor description of the minute shred of hope with which the interlocutors ended the evening by 11.30pm.
I must honestly confess that I did not yet know Sana Valiulina , and in the first minutes of the broadcast I saw Jelle Brandt Corstius talking to a very tense and stern Estonian. It seemed to be a long evening, but in the end it flew by.
It was a Zomergasten as we have long missed. Especially after the ponderous 2023 with Theo Maassen, who proved especially very unsuitable for talking to women. His conversation with choreographer Alida Dors was an embarrassing display full of mansplaining and misplaced white superiority.
How different it was this time with Jelle Brandt Corstius and Sana Valiulina. They shared their love for Russia, and their sadness over what direction that country has taken. That gave the conversation an intimacy that could become awkward, but as both were mindful of the few hundred thousand viewers, it remained a jewel of clarity. Their conversation was also equal, and Brandt Corstius managed to keep his interlocutor on his toes with journalistic curiosity.
Yelling horde
In that lucid conversation, it was the television clips that made one's mouth water for the first time in years. The magisterially disturbing mass scene from Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev stays with you. Not so much because of the now unimaginable number of extras, but mainly because the howling horde of horsemen, even in black and white and sixty years after the premiere, inspired terror. Valiulina interpreted this aptly by referring directly to the way Russian troops, according to eyewitnesses, are now raging in Ukraine.
Aldous Huxley, who in a few sharp sentences on a flickering black-and-white image gives a perfect analysis of how submission to our own progress ultimately makes us slaves, followed by a deadpan excerpt from Midsommar, the film in which people sacrifice each other because fixed rules are nicer than having to think for themselves.
Rikkie and Slingertje
The image from this second Zomergasten was a huge contrast to the first episode, in which race optimist Eric van den Burg showed us a picture of the socially engaged and empathetic VVD man as we have missed for years. He might still have started with an excerpt from De Verrelijker and Rikkie&Slingertje, if the editors had given him the chance to do so. Now Sana Valiulina brought a selection of images of silent people.
Early on in the broadcast, what moved me deeply was the image from the film 'The Cold Summer of 1953', in which a woman is told that her husband has died in the Gulag. The messenger of that calamity has brought only his pasted glasses as a memento for the heartbroken woman. In a long shot we see her, seemingly unmoved, holding the glasses in her hand. The grief shown thus becomes heartbreaking and indescribable.
That way, Valiulina herself had watched a legendary broadcast of 30 Minutes by Arjan Ederveen. The comedian engages in genius satire in this mockumentary about a Groningen farmer born in a rather unexpectedly wrong body. Where we mainly want to look at how Ederveen makes fun of a particular social theme, Valiulina saw that other side that made Ederveen's work so unforgettable: a fractious character, out of place in this world, portrayed entirely believably.
Unmoved
Such impassive silence is high cinema, and they invented that art too east of our borders. You sometimes see it reflected in modern television work, as in The sixth episode of The Bear on Disney+, but thus also in Zomergasten. Indeed, Sana Valiulina herself is the finest example of it. Her face remained in the fold, even in all those moments when she laughed or cried. These were many, but she gave us at home the chance to see, and think with her. And thus to see something of hope, though she herself said she did not know exactly where it was hanging about.
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