Vincent van Gogh wrote many letters during his life (well obviously, not after it), and to me, they represent the best of Dutch literature (which hasn’t produced that many internationally known writers). His revealing letters, written in an elegant and personal style, in fact are the reason we know as much about his life as we do; together they form an autobiography of sorts.
They also are interesting for another reason: many of them are graced with sketches, a few of which you can see here.
Drawings by Ton van de Ven (above) and original designer, Anton Pieck (below) for Dutch theme park, Efteling—an enchanted place remembered very fondly by the present author. It’s not a park that relies on one or two big fairground attractions and the rest is filler and souvenir shops: it’s a deep, dreamlike world and there is magic in every corner. Even the trashcans talk to you, and say “Thank you” when you throw something in them.
If my love of dark fantasy and folklore has its origins somewhere, it has to be there, among the high, whispering trees, haunted clock towers and mysterious, shimmering lakes of Efteling. I used to envy the birds that lived there.
The 80-foot wire statue of a sitting man in Flevoland, the Netherlands. Because we are culturally highly sophisticated, the sculpture by Antony Gormley soon became known as “pooping man”.
Illustrations by Dutch designer, Kees Kelfkens (1919-1986), including his covers for the 1956 Dutch edition of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS, and THE HOBBIT, 1960.
First off: it’s available on YouTube, in English, so you can watch it for yourself if you want.
THE LIFT was my first horror film. My mother was quite nonchalant when it came to stuff that my brother and I weren’t supposed to see; having become a mother at a very young age, she always seemed more like one of us, rather than a parent that laid down the rules. She grew up with us. Dutch cinema at the time was known for its gloomy, harshly realistic sex-and-death films, and we’d watch them all indiscriminately, exploring the world of cinema together. I don’t think there’s a single 1980s film that we didn’t see.
THE LIFT though was one of the very few Dutch horror films, and probably the best one. JAWS had its shark, CHRISTINE had its car, THE LIFT has its lift. What I love about the film, after all these years, is how pure 1980s it is. Watching it is like wandering through the surroundings of my early childhood. I recognize the interiors, the fashion, the brands, the logos, the car models, the gritty neons, the robust electronics, the people. In Holland, everything looks alike, one town is like the other, with the same stores, the same chains, the same architecture. THE LIFT could have been filmed in my own hometown, the actors in it all look familiar, their faces are those of my childhood.
But this of course also made the film even scarier for me. Horror on my own doorstep. The elevators looked exactly like the elevators at my local mall. Elevators were unnerving things to me, anyway; they had the lethal allure of a Venus flytrap. I am what Carl Jung calls an “introverted sensation type”, which means that to me, behind every object there is a different, more mythical object, and the irrational relation between those two objects purely exists in my own mind. To me, the sound of a distant train can be the comforting voice of a friendly giant, or the lone howl of a wind demon. Of course I didn’t know all this as a kid—I just regarded elevators as unpredictable beings that you shouldn’t provoke. The fear of elevators actually is a nice combination of two other fears: claustrophobia and acrophobia, the fear of closed spaces and heights respectively. And I had heard stories, you know. This was before the age of cell phones, when you could get stuck in an elevator without anyone knowing, and die. Anyway, I usually took the stairs.
THE LIFT added an extra fear: that an elevator would become sentient and develop an urge to kill. I love the scene where the protagonist, Felix, a maintenance man, discovers the elevator actually has a pulsating heart, covered with this organic, luminous goo. It’s perfectly executed horror. The elevator’s cables are its muscles, its processor is its nervous system. It can scream. Felix nearly gets killed uncovering all of this, and the actual culprit behind it all, but is saved just in time by his reporter friend, Mieke.
It’s an effective, suspenseful film. There is no evolution in art of course, otherwise we’d now have writers greater than Shakespeare and sculptors better than Michelangelo, but THE LIFT holds up to any modern horror, and surpasses those that try hard to capture that 1980s aesthetic. Here, the creepy synth music is authentic, as are the candy-colored neon lights and the practical special effects.
The director, Dick Maas, would later make a string of commercially very successful films before moving to Hollywood, where he’d direct an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and, much later, a dreadful remake of THE LIFT, starring a then-unknown Naomi Watts. Huub Stapel, who plays Felix, and Willeke van Ammelrooy, his reporter friend Mieke, both went on to have long careers; Van Ammelrooy had the lead role in ANTONIA (1995), which won an Academy Award.
Who though, when I was a wee kid watching this film, could have predicted I’d be telling you about it, here, some 35 years later?
1960s/70s illustrations from Dutch children’s series, Paulus the woodgnome. By Jean Dulieu (1921-2006).
Starting out as a newspaper strip in the 1940s, Paulus appeared in children’s novels, TV puppet shows, radio plays, et cetera, and all by this one guy, Jean Dulieu. Great artist.
I read many of the books when I was a kid; the woods were never quite the same after that. I loved the atmosphere: there was always a kind of autumn dread in the air, Paulus had animal friends, but usually he was alone, just roaming about, hoping not to run into anything bad. The woods were dangerous, or rather, indifferent. The witch, Eucalypta, might seem kind of genial in these illustrations, but she was a real terror. Running into her meant trouble: the black kind.
I’ll do a post about the puppet shows later on, because seeing is believing.
My first comic book love was FRANKA. Written and drawn by Henk Kuijpers (b. 1946), the popular series features a daring and clever sleuth—the title character—who always finds herself in the middle of an intriguing mystery or some violent dispute, and sets about to make things right. Debuting in the 1970s, Franka was a strong female character, but she wasn’t designed that way: like Ripley in ALIEN, she could have been male, or without gender, or anything, but she just happened to be female.
To me, a kid from Holland, the series had something that many other popular comics didn’t: Franka was Dutch. Unlike Batman or Spider-Man, X-Men, or Tintin, or Asterix, or Donald Duck, Garfield, the Pink Panther, whoever—her town was my town, the characters were my neighbors, and I only needed to look out of my window to see the signs, brands, fashions, storefronts, and cars that formed the backdrop of her adventures. When you’re a kid from a small country, that’s big. That’s like living next door to a celebrity.
You have to realize I come from a small place. A nothing place that has never produced any name worth mentioning. A nothing place in a small country you probably associate with dykes (no not those dykes), tulips, and windmills, and that may or may not be somewhere near Denmark. Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men, and all the big heroes were aliens—they wowed me like aliens—but Franka was my secret friend. She was someone I might run into.
In later years the comic changed, and frankly, it lost me a little. Small towns and petty swindles made way for luxurious holiday destinations and international high crimes. Glimpses of Franka’s breasts—so exciting back then—became money shots: they became blatant and, well, cheap. She became voluptuous, a Venus. Her head shrank and shrank. Her character changed too: the smart and sometimes flustered young girl became a rather pedantic WOMAN, a winner, forever drawn to fast cars, rich players, exotic locales. Not so much interested in the people involved in the crime she was investigating as in the chase itself, and the adventure, the glitz and the glamour. To put it bluntly: she became less human.
Don’t get me wrong though: FRANKA is still a strong comic. It didn’t turn bad all of a sudden. Its style and tone just changed; they became further removed from my own interests. And, of course, I’m not that kid anymore.
First off: it’s available on YouTube, in English, so you can watch it for yourself if you want.
THE LIFT was my first horror film. My mother was quite nonchalant when it came to stuff that my brother and I weren’t supposed to see; having become a mother at a very young age, she always seemed more like one of us, rather than a parent that laid down the rules. She grew up with us. Dutch cinema at the time was known for its gloomy, harshly realistic sex-and-death films, and we’d watch them all indiscriminately, exploring the world of cinema together. I don’t think there’s a single 1980s film that we didn’t see.
THE LIFT though was one of the very few Dutch horror films, and probably the best one. JAWS had its shark, CHRISTINE had its car, THE LIFT has its lift. What I love about the film, after all these years, is how pure 1980s it is. Watching it is like wandering through the surroundings of my early childhood. I recognize the interiors, the fashion, the brands, the logos, the car models, the gritty neons, the robust electronics, the people. In Holland, everything looks alike, one town is like the other, with the same stores, the same chains, the same architecture. THE LIFT could have been filmed in my own hometown, the actors in it all look familiar, their faces are those of my childhood.
But this of course also made the film even scarier for me. Horror on my own doorstep. The elevators looked exactly like the elevators at my local mall. Elevators were unnerving things to me, anyway; they had the lethal allure of a Venus flytrap. I am what Carl Jung calls an “introverted sensation type”, which means that to me, behind every object there is a different, more mythical object, and the irrational relation between those two objects purely exists in my own mind. To me, the sound of a distant train can be the comforting voice of a friendly giant, or the lone howl of a wind demon. Of course I didn’t know all this as a kid—I just regarded elevators as unpredictable beings that you shouldn’t provoke. The fear of elevators actually is a nice combination of two other fears: claustrophobia and acrophobia, the fear of closed spaces and heights respectively. And I had heard stories, you know. This was before the age of cell phones, when you could get stuck in an elevator without anyone knowing, and die. Anyway, I usually took the stairs.
THE LIFT added an extra fear: that an elevator would become sentient and develop an urge to kill. I love the scene where the protagonist, Felix, a maintenance man, discovers the elevator actually has a pulsating heart, covered with this organic, luminous goo. It’s perfectly executed horror. The elevator’s cables are its muscles, its processor is its nervous system. It can scream. Felix nearly gets killed uncovering all of this, and the actual culprit behind it all, but is saved just in time by his reporter friend, Mieke.
It’s an effective, suspenseful film. There is no evolution in art of course, otherwise we’d now have writers greater than Shakespeare and sculptors better than Michelangelo, but THE LIFT holds up to any modern horror, and surpasses those that try hard to capture that 1980s aesthetic. Here, the creepy synth music is authentic, as are the candy-colored neon lights and the practical special effects.
The director, Dick Maas, would later make a string of commercially very successful films before moving to Hollywood, where he’d direct an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and, much later, a dreadful remake of THE LIFT, starring a then-unknown Naomi Watts. Huub Stapel, who plays Felix, and Willeke van Ammelrooy, his reporter friend Mieke, both went on to have long careers; Van Ammelrooy had the lead role in ANTONIA (1995), which won an Academy Award.
Who though, when I was a wee kid watching this film, could have predicted I’d be telling you about it, here, 35 years later?
