‘The Propagandist’: IDFA Review

Dir: Luuk Bouwman. Netherlands. 2024. 112mins

Within the early Forties, pioneering Dutch movie director Jan Teunissen grew to become an enthusiastic producer of propaganda materials for the Nazi occupiers of his homeland. Whereas this slow-burn documentary about Teunissen could also be have extra instant native enchantment, additionally it is a well timed look ahead to anybody eager about how brutality and repression is justified by its perpetrators, and the way brief recollections and the need to not dwell on the traumatic previous can sow poison seeds.

 Simmers with modern relevance

Consisting largely of extracts from an extended Nineteen Sixties audio interview with a wholly unrepentant Teunissen, The Propagandist follows within the wake of Andres Veitel’s current documentary Riefensthal, which dipped into the controversial German director’s personal archives to problem her post-war obfuscation of her Nazi narrative. Premiering in IDFA’s competitors, Bouwman’s unflashy, step-by-step unmasking of what thinker Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘the banality of evil’ will likely be a niche-interest movie, but its championing of affected person analysis as a corrective to historic amnesia provides it a wider enchantment than its World-Struggle-2-footnote topic may counsel.

Two Dutch lecturers turn into the unassuming heroes of The Propagandist. One, Rolf Schuursma, is the historian who, in 1964 and 1965, interviewed Teunissen (who died in 1975), the surprisingly forthcoming former ‘movie czar’ of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and got here away with hours of audio footage. The opposite, Egbert Barten, has been meticulously charting Dutch movie manufacturing through the battle years and making an attempt – not all the time efficiently – to query the cinema professionals who lent their companies to the regime-aligned nationwide movie division headed up by Teunissen.

Passages that present the 93-year-old Schuursma listening to the tapes he recorded a long time earlier are interleaved as chapter dividers and a actuality test: we see the historian grimace as Teunissen spins his narcissistic story about how he signed up for the Dutch fascist occasion NSB and its SS wing out of a burning need “to get the Dutch movie trade again on his ft”. Often, Schuursma removes his headphones to problem a quiet however passionate corrective, as when Teunissen objects to the Holocaust on the grounds that it was not ‘elegantly performed’ earlier than commenting that, all the identical, if Jews went on ostentatiously sitting outdoors Amsterdam cafés even after the Nazi occupation, what did they anticipate?

Largely, nonetheless, The Propagandist consists of the Dutch Nazi movie czar’s self-justifying drawl laid over outtakes from his personal pre-war movies and residential films, and scenes from the propaganda movies he helped to make, in addition to archival images and celluloid footage of Teunissen going about his job. He emerges as a annoyed filmmaker with grudges who reinvents himself as a bossy bureaucrat; one who makes use of his new position, amongst different issues, to take revenge on the critics who dissed his one and solely characteristic, 1933’s nationwide epic William Of Orange – the Netherlands’ first full-length talkie and a powerful, much-derided flop.

Along with his ruddy complexion and simple, clubbable method, Teunissen comes throughout as a small, vindictive man with massive ambitions – one who was prepared to make use of whoever was in energy to advance them. His lack of ardour for the Nazi trigger turns into one of many covert messages of a movie that simmers with modern relevance, relevant as it’s to all those that suppress their reservations to leap on the bandwagon of distasteful autocrats.

Constructing steadily – generally a bit too steadily – from cautious scene-setting to the unmasking of an on a regular basis monster, Bouwman’s documentary solutions the “how might anybody try this?” query by exhibiting simply how little it troubled its topic – who was in some ways a typical, privileged, casually racist Dutchman of his era. Paired successfully with a soundtrack of austere current works by modern Dutch classical music composer Mathilde Wantenaar, The Propagandist underlines the sombre undertow of its central character.