Film was the most powerful means of propaganda there was. What television is today, in a sense. The other side could easily claim that it was dangerous.
The first sentences in Luuk Bouwman’s documentary are about the #National Socialist# message. The voice and the statements are from The Film Czar, the filmmaker #Jan Teunissen#, a very influential person in Nazi-occupied Holland. During the Second World War, he became the most powerful man in the Dutch film industry. As head of the Film Department of the #SS and the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, he became known as «the film czar» and «the Dutch Leni Riefenstahl.»
Filmmaking obsession
The master propagandist died in 1975, so the film tells his story through the Dutch historian Rolf Schuursma, who interviewed the war criminal in 1964 and 1965. It developed into an oral history project, and today, he listens to the recordings from their lengthy conversation. He still tries to figure out what made Teunissen do it? When they met, he was quite a sympathetic man, and «he didn’t look like a fascist, whatever a fascist looks like,» as he remarks.
Teunissen was the son of an extremely wealthy antique dealer from The Hague, so he could afford to be obsessed with filmmaking. He was an amateur, but still, he made the first Dutch sound film in 1931. He created several more films and built himself a name, but his first feature film was less successful. That coincided with the immigration of a considerable number of German filmmakers that were fleeing Nazi persecution. They were all pals, and that sidetracked Teunissen in the Dutch film industry.
Then came May 1940, when the Germans occupied his country. He was still keen on returning to filmmaking, and even after the war, he was convinced that at least 70 percent of the Dutch supported the Germans. In his conversations, he claims that looking up to the victor is a primal instinct. He describes in detail how he approached the Nazis and, in the end, got a direct connection to #Goebbels, the German propaganda minister.
He wanted to restart Dutch filmmaking; he was obsessed with the idea, and according to the findings of Schuursma, the historian, that was his only reason to get himself involved in politics.
«he didn’t look like a fascist, whatever a fascist looks like»
Space for capitalism
This is interesting, and it is an important piece of insight into the human mind. Teunissen joined the Dutch Nazi party in August 1940. He did consider National Socialism a good intermediate form: socialist, and still with plenty of possibilities for capitalistic entrepreneurs like himself. He certainly gave the propaganda films a qualitative lift, and he created a romantic dream world to get the masses to buy into it.
«Maybe I am too humane,» says Teunissen at some stage in the documentary. He helped a lot of people, but he also navigated cleverly in the numerous intrigues of party politics. And for him – and probably most of the other people in the business – he turned a blind eye to a lot of outrageous developments. Like in 1941, when all Jews were excluded from Dutch cinema.
After the war, Teunissen was prosecuted and punished. He nevertheless continued to boast about his shrewdness and his connections with the higher-ups of the #Nazi regime. It seems that he never really grabbed the immense damage he had done during the war – while it certainly looks like a logical explanation, he continued to live in denial.
Manipulative power of film
This excellent documentary is about unlimited ambition, and the manipulative power of film questions the boundaries between documentary and propaganda. Teunissen certainly was a wounded ego and a cynical manipulator; those timeless themes still resonate today. Goebbels praised him by saying that the true propagandist must play the human soul like an instrument.
Of course, the Nazi regime and their crimes stand out in their deep depravity. Comparisons are difficult, but taking aside the sleek propaganda part of this gruesome chapter, there are lessons to be learned from Teunissen’s actions. Especially in these times of raw populism, several leaders act as propagandists. Take #Putin and #Trump as good examples – not to mention Israel’s #Netanyahu and the #Hamas movement in #Gaza. All clod their goals and intentions in declarations and explanations that serve to cover human suffering and the breakdown of morals and values.
The Propagandist is a cleverly made film that tracks the rise and fall of Jan Teunissen, who cast aside all moral standards to follow his personal ambitions. He was a hell of a propagandist, extremely smart and extremely ruthless behind his almost likeable façade. It is a long film that would have conveyed a clearer message by being a bit shorter, but all in all, it is very well made. And digging up the story of Teunissen serves as solid historical documentation, but most of all, it gives us an excellent tool to analyse the many wrongs in our present world.
