Then again, films like Spetters and De Vierde Man were a long time ago: Verhoeven went to Hollywood sometime in the 1980s (and did good work there, for a while at least). But hey, that Renee Soutendijk when she was young ...

And I'm not even counting films produced by Kees Kasander, who's kept Peter Greenaway in business for nearly 30 years and has also been involved with other interesting films (an Irish oddity from the 90s called Crushproof was one: set around Dublin, Irish cast, with an English director, Dutch producer, and a dash of the Euro-pudding effect that comes with funding from several TV stations and film boards and arts councils).

I remember writing about it at length, circa year 1999/2000. I felt it at least *tried* to break out of the typical naturalistic method used in 99% of mainstream cinema, including Hollywood and much of European and Asian cinema. Bollywood musicals are also an exception, but they're conservative in a different way.

That's my bottom line, I suppose. Getting beyond naturalism. Movies are 100 years behind theatre in this regard: Beckett, Pinter, Artaud, anyone who matters (without being elitist - popular plays can be formally quite adventurous).

William Burroughs, around 1960, said that "writing was 50 years behind painting". Do such comparisons make sense? Is chess ahead of tiddly-winks but behind go? Is there a year-on-year chart in an office somewhere, showing the writing/painting and film/theatre temporal curves?

"We were 50 years behind in 1960, but then painting dropped back as writing soared. People like JG Ballard comes in, and pulverizes Warhol ... suddenly writing is only 40 years behind, then 30, 20, 10, biff, it catches up, forges ahead. Meanwhile chess is under pressure from synchronized swimming which has the advantage of olympic exposure ...."

click for larger view

"Put your lips together and Blow"
An abstract chess painting inspired by Bogart and Bacall, fine Dutch names ...

Never mind what they say. Apples and oranges can be compared. The main difference is that the House of Apple is just getting started and the House of Orange - or Oranje - is in decline.

Somebody should make a movie called *Soldier of Apple* set in Silicon Valley. Will the Nederlandic geek hero win the heart of the Irish beauty Kathleen Ni Silicon? And will America notice that Cork and Amsterdam aren't in Nebraska?

Same here, we call it the <cultural cringe>, even though some Aussie films are absolutely magnificent, like <Animal Kingdom> and <Priscilla Queen of the Desert>, and niche movies like <Ten Canoes>, <Lantana> and <The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith>, <Samson and Delilah> and especially <One Night the Moon>.

<No mere nation can compete with Hollywood's top-end effects and stars>

Alas, alak, and a lack of lasses and lackeys...I was morbidly ruminating over this very issue and found it hard to find a country that doesn't make better movies than Hollywood.

Are there any do you think?

Regarding Dutch spoken (I'll limit it to that for the moment) and produced films getting a bad rap most of the time by "some of us Dutch", the issue is quite a simple one:

- Delivery of the lines, tone, pronunciation

- the unnatural dialogue, lack of quality in the writing

I've been going on about it quite ferociously, heh - informally - to friends, family, fellow students, at the time -- and to be perfectly honest I think I have been proven right, as there are a number of dutch films in which the script and dialogue were simply mouthwatering and exceptionally written. Of course it depends on the genre, but as soon as you simply forget that you are watching a film in your "own" language, then it's thumbs up in my opinion.

I run short of superlatives for this film: Familie (Family, 2001 -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280660/ )

Director: Willen van de Sande Backhuyzen
Screenplay: Maria Goos

This is the real deal, superior writing and acting, and <Dom>, if you haven't seen it you should try and get your hands on it, or rip it from the web if possible...

One brilliant- and key line:

"Mother, please do us all a very big favor, and die as soon as possible."

Now, you can deliver that line in so many ways and shades of tones, but getting that exactly right is of course the trick and the big secret of good writing and acting.

Apologies for going on this long about it, but I was desperate to make this point.

Interestingly, if you type <Michiel Romeyn>, whom I praised in my previous post, in the YouTube search box, you'll immediately get a link to a clip from a short interview with Romeyn, in which he shows precisely how unnatural both the writing and delivery are in most dialogues from Dutch films.

Practically all films and english-spoken programs are broadcasted in the original language with subtitles -- no dubbing. So when I see a Dutch movie the language itself is non-standard; if you combine that with less-than-optimal writing and dialogue-delivery, then there is a good chance you will only notice that - not the story.

Perhaps it might, indeed, help to pretend the movie is non-Dutch.. I don't know - I guess I will try <not> paying attention to the language next time I was a Dutch movie. Whenever that shall be.

<the typical naturalistic method used in 99% of mainstream cinema, including Hollywood and much of European and Asian cinema>

By 'naturalism' I meant simply a set of conventions seen in writing, film, theatre and art -- where the idea is to convey an image of normal/natural 'real life' ... in fact it's heavily stylized, full of cliches and conventions -- but people try to forget this. Or even actively praise it, as something called 'suspension of disbelief'.

I think. When I see 'suspension of disbelief' actually written down it reminds me of those who say unbelievers should be hanged. Bad, deluded, wrong-headed, childish people -- especially childish, with that mix of violent tantrums and the need to be right right right ...

Peter Greenaway -- who's extremely English but has lived in Holland for nearly 20 years -- talks about <dominant cinema> (ie, Hollywood and all who try to copy it, which is most filmmakers everywhere, at some level) and <non-dominant cinema> which is everything else.

Production values and language aren't the issue here. It's the assumption that film means 'feature film', between 70 and 240 minutes but mostly a bit under 2 hours. With a plot. With actors playing fictional characters (or supposedly 'real' ones, as in biopics - which is often worse).

It doesn't have to be this way. Those rules and conventions just growed - some of them lifted from theatre and shows 100 years ago. Others then dependent on technical limits of cellulloid, cameras, sound technology, what movie theaters were geared up to show, commercial 'realities' (precisely as real as the magic ice-cube said to inhabit the heart of the sun, protected by alien force fields).

I like to see films where documentary gets tangled up with fiction and actors break in and out of character. Where rules get broken. Where people play with new technology, explore it, rather than just to mimic old tech.

There's a type of stuff that gets shown in art galleries - art performance video - often really boring. That's not what I mean.

There are films by Godard, Greenaway, Ken McMullen that break the rules ... they're closer. The key point for me is that *it doesn't have to be this way* ... same applies to books, to science fiction or detective stories, or literary stuff, or theatre. Too many people stifle their creativity and do things the way they're always done. It just gets tedious, y'know?

I have files about territories that don't exist, from independently squatted former oil rigs to Aussie valleys and purely notional virtual spaces. Most of them don't qualify as countries yet they beat Hollywood hands down.

Aha. Hold it. The Vatican issues coins and stamps (really - Euros with a pope head on the obverse side). It sends ambassadors to other countries, called 'papal nuncios'.

I can't recall any actual output from the Vatican Film Industry -- they may have a couple of documentaries on astronomy and much papal bull. Is it better or worse than Hollywood?

Is hegemony without power to be sneezed at? Is the bear catholic? Do popes defecate in the woods?

Only on the feast of Saint Ursula Minor, it seems.

Some of the medieval schoolmen thought it the most dangerous of the seven deadly sins - it has gluttony for breakfast and beats lust into a cocked hat. But screw that.

I might include Anomie as well, if I can be, as it were, arsed.

Grace, elegance, fluidity of effort, that's the principle, o wise one.

It occurs to me that there is another reason for this dislike, apart from the lack of Hollywood SFX & spit'n'polish. It's the fact that no film is ever authentic, and gets the feel of the location country or city wrong. But only natives notice.

Truth is, every film - whether set in Minsk, Hengelo, Cork or the planet Zypfook - takes place in an imaginary space, built up out of shots which are themselves a mixture of data capture and various kinds of tweaking. Film directors go with what works -- and if that means your hero lives in a house whose front elevation is 'really' 1000 km from the view out the window, so be it.

I remember one thriller, set in Dublin, where the protagonist ran into a bar -- easily identifiable as a place on the northern fringes of the city. Then ran through the bar, which Dubliners knew to be in the city centre. And then out the back door, emerging on the southside 20 miles from where he started out.

This fake geography seems to unsettle those who see it for what it is. Even though we know how films are made, it still calls the veracity of the whole thing into question.

There's a term in quantum physics, a possible outcome of Bell's inequality: *Locality Fails*. When locality fails in a movie, everything looks false and artificial.

We don't see this effect when we watch films made in places that we don't know well -- so I can enjoy Dutch or Finnish films because I don't see the dislocations.

There are two reasons for marking a 2nd date, just three days after the first. One is that many would-be celebrants are too slothful to notice the first date, and thus need a reminder. The second reason is that some of those who did observe the first date are still in torpor mode, and need a kick from behind to jolt 'em out of it.

All this year, I've been hearing about death. My contemporaries - aged between 45 and 55 - have been dropping like flies.

I think, weirdly enough, that it *is* some distant cousin of survivor's guilt. Normally I avoid the word 'should' - far too normative. But I 'should' be more dead than several people who are. And deadness is so very binary.

I'm catching up with some disordered fragments of life, meanwhile, on the assumption that it will persist indefinitely (ie, I'm *not* 'putting my affairs in order', which would be quite impossible, even with a strict definition of affairs and alphabetical order).

There's a subjective argument that life persists ad infinitum, as there ain't no afterwards - but I find it spurious ... subjectively, time accelerates after the age of 30. Or is it three?

I just did some writing, some work-related info-churn emails, and I'll write to you this weekend. One way or another.

Snap.

Ain't no 'should' about it.

<And deadness is so very binary.>

And overrated. :p

<ie, I'm *not* 'putting my affairs in order', which would be quite impossible, even with a strict definition of affairs and alphabetical order>

LOL!!

<You take care too, okay?>

An unexpectedly sharp response, unless I have misread it. Have I inadvertently annoyed you? If so, apologies.

<Once> I don't believe <Dom> meant anything "sharp" by that. :)