SIFF Dispatch. 3.

Filmmaker Dan Ireland (The Whole Wide World, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont) returned to the festival he co-founded in 1976 to pay tribute to Fons Rademakers, the Oscar-winning Dutch director who died earlier this year, with a revival screening of Max Havelaar (1976), the film many consider to be Rademakers's masterpiece. In the process, Ireland threw a spotlight on perhaps the most important legacy of the Seattle International Film Festival: its support and discovery of new Dutch cinema in the 1970s and earlier 1980s.

In a way, Max Havelaar, shown at the second annual SIFF, started it all. The festival had shown Paul Verhoeven's Katie Tippel in the inaugural festival, but this production established a legacy of seeking out films from the Netherlands. Founders Ireland and Darryl Macdonald helped get the film distributed in the United States (it played for 22 weeks straight in Seattle alone) and formed a lasting friendship with director/producer Fons Rademakers. By 1979, SIFF was launching the American premieres of films by Rademakers and other Dutch directors, among them Paul Verhoeven's Spetters and The Fourth Man, and in 1986 SIFF audiences awarded the Golden Space Needle award to another Rademakers film making its American premiere. The Assault went on to win the Academy Award for Best foreign Language Film.

The epic drama Max Havelaar (170 minutes), set in 19th Century colonial Indonesia, remains unavailable in the US in any video format and is all but impossible to see on film (SIFF reportedly got a print direct from the Netherlands). More than just a poignant tribute, the screening was a rare opportunity to see a forgotten classic, just the kind of revival that festivals should be nurturing. Based on a 19th century novel by Multatuli, the film follows the idealistic (if naïve) efforts of Dutch colonial officer Max Havelaar (Peter Faber).

The filmmaking itself direct and simple. The opening images, of Dutch soldiers on a simple raft poled down the river by Indonesian peasants, evokes Werner Herzog in its portrait of Europeans striding into an alien landscape, but without the mysticism or the grandeur of the wild untamed world. They are not adventurers, merely colonial conquerors blithely policing their conquest, but they are just as out of place.

Havelaar is a civil servant with a conscience and a calling in a job that requires functionaries to keep the system running. He takes his oath to protect the natives against abuse, exploitation and tyranny seriously and when he's promoted to an impoverished province (which he's convinced he can "heal" with his enlightened ways), he's all shocked (shocked!) to find that abuses of the local native leaders are actually condoned by the Dutch government.

I'm usually frustrated that most films about colonial oppression view the drama from the position of the lone moral European (invariably a white male) who stands up against his own race to defend the native peoples. It's as if the privileged white man's defiance is more heroic because he risks position and wealth where the natives merely risk their lives in the face of tyranny and crippling poverty.

Max Havelaar works because it's not about Max's heroism - it's about how his idealism is shattered and the hypocrisy of his entire service is laid bare. Havelaar is a well-meaning naïf and his willful naiveté makes him hard to take at times. He's full of reckless courage and righteous indignation, yet he's utterly impotent, unable even to shield the peasants he vows to protect from retribution if they only give evidence against the corrupt Regent and his tyrannical chiefs. Those few that dare resist are quickly targeted and handled. The rebellions are snuffed out, the peasants are pillaged, and the cycle continues. The outrage of Rademakers's film comes through not in emotional melodrama, but in the systematic peeling away of layers of lies behind the hollow rhetoric of justice and spiritual responsibility.

To the best of my knowledge, SIFF's tribute to Rademakers is the first such in the country since his death. Here's hoping it isn't the last.

SIFF runs through June 17. For more coverage, see the Siffblog, the Stranger and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Posted by dwhudson at June 10, 2007 3:55 AM