The White Slave E-Book

Rene Daalder

• Herausgeber: CulturBooks Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 140

Beschreibung

The young filmmaker Rene Daalder and the architecture student Rem Koolhaas wrote the screenplay to Daalder’s 1969 film De blanke slavin (The White Slave) in 1967/68. Taking inspiration from B-movies and Luis Buñuel, it is a hall of mirrors that toys with clichés and inverts them into campy provocations. A few years after the Eichmann trial, a man named Günther Unrat arrives in the Netherlands looking for “good Germans” who helped fight the Nazi occupation. He quickly gets mixed up in a nefarious organization that inspires him to follow in the footsteps of the consummate “good German” Albert Schweitzer by setting up a camp for young Dutch women who think they are training to work in Africa as nurses. Blinded by idealism, he fails to see that his shady partners are scheming to sell them into sexual slavery. The screenplay soon develops into an absurd morality play, challenging all notions of political correctness, then and now. It has been translated from the Dutch by Laura Martz, while Rene Daalder has contributed a preface about the origins and background of the film.

Leseprobe

Credits

First published by

Fiktion, Berlin, 2016

www.fiktion.cc

ISBN 978 3 95988 034 3

Project Directors

Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann (Publishing Program)

Henriette Gallus (Communications)

Julia Stoff (Management)

Original title

De Blanke Slavin

Translation from the Dutch

Laura Martz

Editors

Carel Struycken

Alexander Scrimgeour

Proofreader

Sam Frank

Design Identity

Vela Arbutina

Web Development

Maxwell Simmer (Version House)

The copyright for the text remains with the authors.

Fiktion is backed by the nonprofit association Fiktion e.V. It is organized in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and financed by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Fiktion e.V., c/o Mathias Gatza, Sredzkistraße 57, 10405 Berlin

Chairs Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann

Contents

Rene Daalder

Preface: An Army of Florence Nightingales

Rene Daalder and Rem Koolhaas

Rene Daalder PREFACE: AN ARMY OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALES

Everybody in the film industry knows that professional movie people abhor reading screenplays. Even in Hollywood, where scripts are considered to be the lifeblood of the profession, most executives are remarkably reluctant to actually read them and often resort to just telling the author that the first act still needs some work (which can just as soon be said about every draft of every script since Gone with the Wind). Even in the unlikely event that an executive will find a moment to glance at the beginning, middle, and end of a script’s obligatory three-act structure, most screenwriters are well aware that industry people only gloss over the dialogue and skip the “wordiness” of the more descriptive parts.

So you may be asking yourself, if there’s so much reluctance to read a screenplay even among the people who actually make movies, why should anyone read—let alone publish —the script for a film that was released in 1969 in a small country with no film culture to speak of, where nothing dramatic ever seems to have happened except the ravages of World War II?

Moreover, although The White Slave was the most expensive movie ever made in the Netherlands at the time, it was a box-office failure. It did, however, attain some sort of cult status, thanks in part to its youthful authors’ flirtation with comic-book culture and the subversive ideas of the German philosopher Oswald Spengler, author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), in which he postulated that any civilization is a superorganism with a limited and predictable life span, which we considered an important leitmotif in The White Slave’s plot. But who were these young cinéastes who had been offered the opportunity to turn such heady ideas into what was supposed to become their country’s first commercial feature film?

As it happens, I was one of them, and my partner in crime was the future architect Rem Koolhaas—two precocious high school dropouts sharing an uncanny grasp of the zeitgeist and a deep-seated desire to reinvent the world accordingly. It turned out that the first time we laid eyes on the future was at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958, which, unbeknownst to each other, both of us visited as teenagers. Rem was accompanied by his grandfather the architect Dirk Roosenburg, and I was traveling in a Citroën 2CV with my idealistically inclined father, who was interested in the fair from a utopian perspective.

For me, Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis’s immersive Philips Pavilion became the impetus for a lifelong pursuit of digital technology, electronic music, and virtual reality, whereas the structure’s impossibly interlocked shapes may well have influenced the architectural balancing act of Rem’s design for the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, not to mention the Swiss architect’s lasting impact on Rem’s creative practice, informing his great interest in media and the visual arts, and, later, the research publications of his architecture firm OMA’s think tank, AMO.

But it would still take a few more years before Rem and I met as high school students at the Montessori Lyceum in Amsterdam, where we became close friends, and ultimately went on to be writing partners on various film projects in Europe and the US. From the very beginning, there was no question that the two of us would eventually be looking for a larger podium than the staid provincialism of postwar Holland. In fact, as our Greek teacher disdainfully observed, what we really wanted was “to go to the moon.” After all, Russia had just launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and it wouldn’t be long until America put the first man on the moon. Little could our teacher have known, however, that we’d soon be giving up our formal education altogether, dropping out of high school to take inventory of the real world!

Shortly thereafter, we broke the news about this radical plan to our liberal parents, announcing that we planned to leave Amsterdam—often referred to as the “Venice of the North”—to visit the city’s counterpart in Italy. While we were at it, we decided that we would embark on a comparative study of the different means of transportation in postwar Europe, whereby Rem would take the Trans-Europ Express train and I would depend on the kindness of strangers, hitchhiking my way across Hitler’s network of Autobahnen while carrying Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in my back pocket to culturally reference a similar network of highways in the US. I seem to remember that Rem also took along one of his favorite books, Hadrian the Seventh by the gay British writer Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo, himself a longtime resident of Venice. The book is a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the main character, an alter ego for the writer, is unexpectedly picked to be the next pope.

A few days on the road and many adventures later I reached Venice, three hours ahead of the train, just in time to welcome Rem as he elegantly stepped onto the platform, suitcase in hand, like a European envoy on an important mission. It was spectacular to arrive at the Santa Lucia railway station. Few experiences in the Western world are as exhilarating as the moment the traveler leaves terra firma and floats down the Grand Canal: It is a sensation not unlike the temporary weightlessness of an astronaut touching down on another planet. I remember how Rem’s extensive knowledge of the city suggested that he had been there before. He took me on a grand tour of the city that ended up in the shadows of St. Mark’s Basilica, where the spirit of deity is invoked by the cathedral’s sheer architectural dimensions and reinforced by the overwhelming theatricality of its iconography along with other auditory and visual stage effects.

Even though many architects proclaim a great interest in the cinema, few of them have been as conversant with the medium’s essential suspension of disbelief as Rem, be it marveling at the divine presence in the world’s great cathedrals, studying the rush of the gravity-defying amusement parks at Coney Island, or rewriting the rules of architecture in cinematic books like S,M,L,XL (1995).

Flashing back, I remember the honking yellow cabs floating through the dark canyons of Manhattan merging with the memory of the noisy rush-hour traffic of water taxis on the Grand Canal, both evoking a delirious experience of operatic grandeur. Having worked extensively at the intersection of music and film, I have often marveled at the theatrical potential of Rem’s 1978 book Delirious New York, which I am sure could have been successfully adapted for the Broadway stage, especially in the 1980s when Manhattan was down in the dumps and in dire need of a more effective advertising campaign than the “I ♥ New York” logos emblazoned on thousands of T-shirts and coffee cups. Rem’s singular book title Delirious New York would have made for a much catchier slogan all by itself, promoting the city with just one poetic gesture.

But back in Venice, such wistful musings about the theatrical potential of these urban visions would serve only as frustrating reminders to Rem that a potential career as an architect might be hanging in the balance due to his lack of a high school diploma, which would soon prompt him to head home and assess the repercussions of his aborted education. (Little could he have known that a few decades later he would be welcomed back to Venice with some of the pomp and circumstance that Baron Corvo had dreamed of—when he was selected for the “papal” job of presiding over the 2014 Architecture Biennale.)

When Rem returned to Holland, I pitched my tent on the Lido island to attend the Venice Film Festival, where, as luck would have it, Luis Buñuel was the guest of honor. He was presenting his masterpiece Belle de Jour (1967), starring one of Rem’s favorite actresses, Catherine Deneuve, whose character comes to a turning point in her life when she discovers some exclusive Paris brothels where middle-class housewives like herself work in the afternoons.

While I lingered in Venice, Rem had lucked into a job as an apprentice journalist in the culture section of the Haagse Post, a weekly magazine. In this capacity, he soon began exercising his own brand of New Journalism, influenced by the American style of first-person news writing and fictional techniques that allowed journalists to behave more as novelists, sociologists, or even psychoanalysts. Writers such as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe were juggling fact and fiction to great effect, as Rem did in an interview with Federico Fellini, during which the Italian maestro never said a word to him, leaving it up to the young journalist to paint his own picture of the director through the eyes of his freakish entourage, much as the filmmaker himself might have scripted one of his own backstage circus scenes.

When I eventually made it back to our rainy fatherland, it was my turn to face the challenge that I had forfeited my high school diploma. I came to the conclusion that the best way to close this gap in my education was to apply to Amsterdam’s fledgling film academy, which was at the time crammed into a few old buildings adjoining the red-light district. I was readily admitted with the assistance of Rem’s father, who taught scriptwriting and would eventually become the school’s director. Anton Koolhaas was known for his literary fiction; his relationship with film had been limited to writing and occasionally directing conventional documentaries about Holland’s struggle to hold back the sea or its attempts to rebuild the country in the aftermath of World War II. By contrast, most students at the time were trying to imitate the French Nouvelle Vague, a movement Rem and I dismissed for its shallow intellectualism. A typical example was Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), starring Anna Karina as a would-be actress who prostitutes herself by talking about philosophy with the johns she picks up in local bars to finance her acting career, which was definitely an unheard-of strategy among the “working women” plying their wares around the corner from the Film Academy. (By the way, although Rem’s biographers may tell us otherwise, he was never formally a student at the school. As far as I remember, he hardly ever entered the building, nor did he much approve of his father’s taste in movies, but the school’s administration was rather easygoing and didn’t keep much track of the students’ comings and goings or the equipment they let us use.)

Needless to say, Rem and I couldn’t resist taking on the Francophile contingent among the students by writing an anti-auteur film manifesto and recruiting some of our friends to join our Film Group 1,2,3—a filmmakers’ collective in which all of us would eventually take turns as writers, directors, cameramen, and stars in a series of short films. The endeavor was roughly based on the idea that classic Hollywood movies revolved around the personae of stars such as Gene Kelly, Greta Garbo, Buster Keaton, etc., who in many instances might be considered the actual auteurs. Likewise, one could maintain that Film Group’s practice was somewhat reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Factory, with its own roster of so-called Superstars, emulating low-budget and often campy versions of Hollywood glamour.

As architecture critic and essayist Bart Lootsma put it in the magazine Hunch in 1998, “Film Group 1,2,3 mocked whatever was considered fashionable in the sixties—especially anything that was considered personal, artistic, idealistic, or intellectual, like art-house cinema or the literary ambitions of the French cinéma d’auteur.” It was our opinion that for a film to have only one Author in order to qualify as Art was a nineteenth-century idea. Instead, we operated like a band, and everyone did everything: financing, acting as our own cast and crew, as well as looking after production and distribution, all without the subsidies that other Dutch filmmakers depended on. Our movies were of such a renegade nature that they were constantly turned down by the government’s cultural committees. For example, in one of the episodes shot for our first anthology,  The 1, 2, 3 Rhapsody (1965), Rem starred as the personal servant of a look-alike Queen Elizabeth, in which capacity he seriously overstepped his boundaries, unceremoniously retrieving a pearl necklace that he had “accidentally” slipped into the cleavage of her majesty’s décolletage, prompting the Dutch censors to prohibit future screenings of the “obscene” short film in order for the government to distance itself in the unlikely event that the British royal family would be offended by our pranks. This controversial film was followed by a sequence in which I played a female nurse who was picked up after work by her boyfriend, played by Rem. In yet another segment, Jan de Bont acted the part of a photo model showing off male underwear in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark.

I regularly worked with Jan as cameraman, and he and I gradually moved away from our handheld style of shooting and became the first in the country to make a “mini-blockbuster” using Hollywood’s top-of-the-line CinemaScope format, shot on a dime with the school’s equipment. Using the same anamorphic projection techniques, we went on to make a couple of stylish low-budget shorts called Body and Soul 1 and  2 (both 1966), the first of which was a visual homage to one of Amsterdam’s most charismatic bodybuilders, who flexed his considerable muscles in front of our wide-screen camera while confessing that he was overcome with the fear that one day his body might outgrow his mind. This short was followed by a longer film featuring our favorite actress, Andrea Domburg, the grande dame of Holland’s national theater, whom we fancied as our local equivalent to Greta Garbo. (She would eventually be cast as the leading lady of The White Slave.) In short order, these movies were shown at a number of festivals, winning several awards that finally made us eligible for more substantial Dutch funding to develop our first full-length feature film. But it soon became clear that to realize our ambition we were going to need resources that were in short supply in Holland, like experienced producers and stars with international name recognition, as well as a full-blown feature-length script!

Unfortunately, the lack of a thriving local film industry had left the Dutch producers we approached riddled with insecurities that weren’t easily resolved in our small, self-conscious country, where everyone was constantly looking for precedents and validation from abroad. This led us to think that an internationally successful book unlike anything that had been written in Holland might be the only answer. Looking around for a prestigious English-language novel, I came across Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), which had great potential for Rem and me, as fledgling screenwriters, to hone our skills in character development while turning Nabokov’s prose into Pinteresque dialogue. We admired the British playwright’s penchant for putting a story’s characters under a magnifying glass to create what he eloquently called his “comedies of menace.”

A visit was arranged for me to meet with Nabokov over drinks at the bar of the Montreux Palace hotel in Switzerland, where, after a long drive from Amsterdam, I was served sherry by a midget who could barely look over the countertop but seemed to be the perfect servant for the Russian-American author, given his aristocratic personality. On the subject of Sebastian Knight, I told Nabokov how much I admired the conceit of using the protagonist’s biographer as the jumping-off point for a detective story. When I asked him for an option to adapt his book into a screenplay, he surprisingly agreed on the spot, mentioning his appreciation for the fact that we had picked the first novel he had ever written in English for our Dutch screenwriting debut. He may have identified with our challenge to dramatize his prose because just a few years previously he had worked with the director Stanley Kubrick on a film version of his most famous book, Lolita, starring Sue Lyon as the eponymous nymphet.

To our surprise, the Netherlands film fund declined to subsidize our planned adaptation of Sebastian Knight