ABSTRACT

The introduction addresses why the unfortunate history of the war picture ALS TWEE DRUPPELS WATER (Rademakers, 1963) was a bad omen for attempts to establish an ‘art cinema’ in the late 1960s. Whereas pictures with artistic and international ambitions failed to attract viewers, Dutch cinema began to enjoy increasing popular success at home in the early 1970s largely due to a ‘hyper-realistic’ depiction of sex scenes. Rather than confirm the assumption that Dutch cinema has a realist orientation, I propose—inspired by the work of Slavoj Žižek—to explore the domain of desire and fantasy. By adopting the perspective of a cinephile, I aim to highlight on what grounds we can learn to reconsider—or even to appreciate—the many underrated Dutch films.

KEYWORDS

Repressed key film – ‘failure’ of Dutch art cinema in the 1960s – The Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real – three cameos by Rademakers – cinephilia

When Fons Rademakers decided to adapt De donkere kamer van Damokles [The Darkroom of Damocles], the critically acclaimed novel by Willem Frederik Hermans published in 1958, for the screen, the signs were favourable. Within the span of only a few years—between 1958 and 1961—Rademakers had directed three little gems, each quite unlike the other,1 and an adaptation of Hermans’ book set in World War II about a mysterious secret agent and his doppelgänger promised to be something else again. In fact, by 1962, when he started preparing the shooting of this film, he was the one-eyed man in the country of the blind who is king in the domain of Dutch fiction feature films, for that other household name, Bert Haanstra, had returned to making documentary films. Haanstra was disappointed that his FILM DE ZAAK M.P. [THE MANNEKEN PIS CASE] (1960) did not come close to the success of his comic debut fiction film FANFARE (1958). The press had been less positive about DE ZAAK M.P., and it attracted ‘only’ 746,302 viewers versus the more than 2.6 million for its predecessor.

Initially, Hermans had been very supportive of Rademakers’ project, and they agreed that a few changes were required for the screen version, such as a different ending.