ABSTRACT

The sixth chapter addresses so-called passages à l’acte, when characters lose their symbolic consistency as a consequence of the violent outbursts they have committed. The chapter starts with the notorious opening scene in Rademakers’ BECAUSE OF THE CATS, which recalls Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. There are many more examples of violent acts in Dutch cinema as a result of an uncontrollable urge, ranging from a more or less calculated blackout to the dark impulses of well-to-do citizens, from the mechanisms of group pressure to irrational outbursts. Several of these films are deliberately atemporal, and in the most intriguing one, VAN GOD LOS, the internal narrator exists in the gap between his symbolic death and his biological death, punctuated by his posthumous voice-over.

KEYWORDS

Passage à l’acte – Murderous acts lacking proper actors – (No) chances for redemption – Atemporal films – Posthumous voice-over

In August 1967, Freddy Heineken—who had financed Rademakers’ ALS TWEE DRUPPELS WATER—wrote to the director that he did not want to invest money in an adaptation of Nicolas Freeling's detective novel Because of the Cats (1963), since he preferred ‘de stille kracht’ [the hidden force] to ‘de stille verkrachting’ [the hidden rape]. The brutality in the novel did not put off other potential investors, such as Paramount's Bud Ornstein, but the production history of this international picture would turn into a litany of postponements and aborted negotiations. Hugo Claus had already suggested in 1967 that the novel be shot in the vein of TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, 1958), and Welles himself confirmed that he was highly interested in playing the protagonist, Inspector Piet van der Valk. In addition to his enthusiasm, Welles worked in mysterious ways, however; to cut a long story short, the collaboration between Rademakers and Welles came to a dead end. Instead of shooting the film in the late 1960s, Rademakers had to curtail his ambitions, and so he went back to Claus in 1972 to ask him to write a screenplay for an English-spoken Dutch- Belgian production. When BECAUSE OF THE CATS premiered in March 1973, this was bad timing for two reasons.