‘The Propagandist’: IDFA Review

Dir: Luuk Bouwman. Netherlands. 2024. 112mins

In the early 1940s, pioneering Dutch film director Jan Teunissen became an enthusiastic producer of propaganda material for the Nazi occupiers of his homeland. While this slow-burn documentary about Teunissen may be have more immediate local appeal, it is also a timely watch for anyone interested in how brutality and repression is justified by its perpetrators, and how short memories and the desire not to dwell on the traumatic past can sow poison seeds.

 Simmers with contemporary relevance

Consisting largely of extracts from a long 1960s audio interview with an entirely unrepentant Teunissen, The Propagandist follows in the wake of Andres Veitel’s recent documentary Riefensthal, which dipped into the controversial German director’s own archives to challenge her post-war obfuscation of her Nazi narrative. Premiering in IDFA’s competition, Bouwman’s unflashy, step-by-step unmasking of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’ will be a niche-interest film, yet its championing of patient research as a corrective to historical amnesia gives it a wider appeal than its World-War-2-footnote subject might suggest.

Two Dutch academics become the unassuming heroes of The Propagandist. One, Rolf Schuursma, is the historian who, in 1964 and 1965, interviewed Teunissen (who died in 1975), the surprisingly forthcoming former ‘film czar’ of Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and came away with hours of audio footage. The other, Egbert Barten, has been meticulously charting Dutch film production during the war years and attempting – not always successfully – to question the cinema professionals who lent their services to the regime-aligned national film department headed up by Teunissen.

Passages that show the 93-year-old Schuursma listening to the tapes he recorded decades earlier are interleaved as chapter dividers and a reality check: we see the historian grimace as Teunissen spins his narcissistic tale about how he signed up for the Dutch fascist party NSB and its SS wing out of a burning desire “to get the Dutch film industry back on his feet”. Occasionally, Schuursma removes his headphones to issue a quiet but passionate corrective, as when Teunissen objects to the Holocaust on the grounds that it was not ‘elegantly done’ before commenting that, all the same, if Jews went on ostentatiously sitting outside Amsterdam cafés even after the Nazi occupation, what did they expect?

Mostly, however, The Propagandist consists of the Dutch Nazi film czar’s self-justifying drawl laid over outtakes from his own pre-war films and home movies, and scenes from the propaganda films he helped to make, as well as archival photos and celluloid footage of Teunissen going about his job. He emerges as a frustrated filmmaker with grudges who reinvents himself as a bossy bureaucrat; one who uses his new role, among other things, to take revenge on the critics who dissed his one and only feature, 1933’s national epic William Of Orange – the Netherlands’ first full-length talkie and a resounding, much-derided flop.

With his ruddy complexion and easy, clubbable manner, Teunissen comes across as a small, vindictive man with big ambitions – one who was ready to use whoever was in power to advance them. His lack of passion for the Nazi cause becomes one of the covert messages of a film that simmers with contemporary relevance, applicable as it is to all those who suppress their reservations to jump on the bandwagon of distasteful autocrats.

Building gradually – sometimes a little too gradually – from careful scene-setting to the unmasking of an everyday monster, Bouwman’s documentary answers the “how could anyone do that?” question by showing just how little it troubled its subject – who was in many ways a typical, privileged, casually racist Dutchman of his generation. Paired effectively with a soundtrack of austere recent works by contemporary Dutch classical music composer Mathilde Wantenaar, The Propagandist underlines the sombre undertow of its central character.