The Empire project

Empire is coming to America

And guess what? We won’t be making anything about the Henry Hudson-led VOC mission that brought New York City into existence. Instead, we’re headed to the West Coast to learn about Southern California’s twice-displaced “Indo” community.

In the 1940’s, 50’s, and even 60’s, some 300,000 people of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent left behind the conflicts of their newly independent tropical homeland and relocated to The Netherlands. Not all of these new immigrants felt comfortable with the cold winds of Northern Europe, and so a small number immigrated to the States and settled in warm climates like Florida and California.

Despite encountering some early setbacks—including various straight up racist, quota-driven immigration policies—the US’s Indo population integrated and assimilated rather seamlessly into American culture. In the US, as in The Netherlands, they were considered to be a “model” immigrant population, with all of the baggage that that label implies.

For the new Empire story in California we’ll be investigating how multi-generational families in the Indo community resolve the friction between the congruent Dutch, Indonesian and American parts of their identity. With any luck, we may even meet the most American of Indos, Mr. Zack Morris himself, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (pictured above after a blond dye job).

View high resolution

EMPIRE & MÜÜRILEHT

This article by the independent Estonian culture publication MÜÜRILEHT starts with a review of IDFA and is then followed by an interview with the EMPIRE team. The translation goes something like this:

Q: How this kind of experimental multi-screen work has been received so far?

A: We started producing and exhibiting EMPIRE in 2010 and we’re now almost 3 years later, so the project has been very successful so far. Young people across the world are extremely receptive. They have grown up in globalized world, so they understand the subject matter intuitively. They also accept the multi-screen format easily. Older generations seem to gravitate mostly to the historical element of EMPIRE, which is great as well because EMPIRE uncovers ‘hidden’ histories and unknown subcultures.

Q: Why did you choose your way of storytelling and what has been your experience with the outcome?

A: We chose to structure EMPIRE as a series of video installations that are exhibited simultaneously in one room. We refer to it as an ‘exploded’ feature film: viewers wander from installation to installation, from story to story. As a viewer, you create your own narrative and come to your own conclusions about what it all means. We want viewers to pick up on the thematic threads that exist in several installations. Themes like the sense of dislocation that comes from having a mixed Asian/European or African/European background run through many of the pieces, and there are also strong threads about labor, power and the exploitation of natural resources—it’s not a coincidence that we have one story about gold mining in Suriname and another about granite quarrying in India. So there are a lot of recurring elements, but there are also situations that are unique to one country/piece, which contributes to this feeling that EMPIRE is more than the sum of its parts. A frayed history asks for a frayed way of telling the story.

Q: And more general to inspire and encourage (or the opposite) Estonian young people interested in film -what are the possible channels to market this kind of documentary?

A: The EMPIRE video installations themselves can travel physically via the regular channels. However, in order to show the full scope of the project: platforms for this kind of work are currently being invented. EMPIRE cross-references several disciplines: documentary film, video art, journalism, transmedia. There is no fixed model out there, so it’s really going to depend on technological inventions to get the work out there in its intended form. We’ve just been invited to participate in the POV Hackathon, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that.

Q: Does the experimenting with the form so much actually makes sense?

A: Ha ha ha! What DOES make sense? We believe that this way of working and combining media is still in its infancy. People are trying to figure out how to communicate information, stories, visuals, data, etc, while using new technologies wisely. It’s exciting. We’re in a Wild West period, which is good, because our heroes have always been cowboys. And Indians.

Q: You worked in so many different cultural contexts, which all had something that connected them, but still totally different cultures. What was the most enlightening and most devastating experience of all these travels and series of mini-projects in each country?

A: Well, we worked in every country in the context of EMPIRE, so that already limits your scope. For the first four installations, we collaborated with local arts organizations in the countries that we visited. That way we could have a small safety net and meet incredible people. That was definitely one of the highlights. You can file witnessing the environmental destruction in the gold camps of Suriname under devastating.

 Q: How did you cope with adjusting with so many totally different cultures within relatively short period of time?

 A: We didn’t. You can’t. You just try to roll with it and focus on the work that you’re doing.

Q: What did you learn?

A: That the world is so incredibly small and the people in it are connected in more ways than they know. But you can find that out on Facebook as well.

(by Terje Toomistu, published in February 2013)

EMPIRE at The New School in New York

We came, we saw, we talked.

Photos by Topaz Adizes

View high resolution

Calling, Career and Commitment:

EMPIRE presentation at The New School

On Thursday March 14th we will be presenting EMPIRE at the inaugural event of the annual The New School/Eugene Lang College religious studies series “Calling, Career, and Commitment,” presented by Prof. Katherine Kurs.

This presentation will mark the first EMPIRE event in New York, so be sure not to miss it!

Address The New School: 66 West 12th Street, New York. The presentation is in ROOM 404. Please bring ID. 

From 6:45 PM until 8:30 PM (EST)

Open to the public and free of charge.

View high resolution

Space Colonialism is a thing now

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

With these words, spoken on the campaign trail in 2012, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich pulled off a hat-trick of self-sabotage. The line is a model of rhetorical economy: rarely have hubris, ignorance and jingoism sat so comfortably together in a single sentence.

Gingrich’s ideas about space exploration are not only deluded, but are also outmoded. His words appeal to a conception of Manifest Destiny that is rooted in idealism rather than economics. Despite his hollow talk of the lucrative scientific discoveries and tourist revenue dangling above the stratosphere, Gingrich is clearly a man who wants to boldly go where no man has gone before just ‘cause. This sense of adventure may be laudable, but it is unrealistic. Now, as in the 17^th century, we expand into new frontiers in pursuit of resources, not knowledge.

Enter Deep Space Industries. In January of 2013, almost exactly one year after Gingrich’s comments, DSI declared that it would become the first deep space mining company. DSI will focus on mining asteroids, which are chalk full of minerals like platinum, gold and in-demand elements like Iridium and Palladium.

DSI’s underlying business model of finding scarce resources in inhospitable places isn’t particularly original, but it does bring the international scramble for resources to a whole new level. Throw a few interstellar rockets into the mix and China’s mineral-grabbing efforts in Africa and South America seem positively quaint. Admittedly, DSI’s efforts are still in their infancy, but the company already has its a strategy laid out. In its first years, DSI will focus on unmanned, robotic mining. Manned missions come later, presumably after the earth becomes so thoroughly depleted of resources that space miners become a viable economic option. When that happens, colonies are sure to follow. By the end of our lifetimes, we may even see Gingrich’s prophecy of a moon base come true. But we seriously doubt that it will be American.

Image by Brian Versteeg Studios from the DSI website.

NEW AMSTERDAM & AMERICA’S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 

So we’ve just landed in New York (aka New Amsterdam), and we’re catching up on all the things that make the city special to us. Last Sunday that meant taking a walk through Brooklyn from Carroll Gardens to Fort Greene, and sitting for a while by this grimly beautiful monument in Fort Greene Park. 

The Prison Ship Martyrs’ monument wasn’t built until 1908, but the bones of the 11,000 bodies stuffed in its foundation are much, much older. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, get off our blog immediately and read the wikipedia page on the subject. 

Back? Pretty jaw-dropping, right? 

People sometimes forget that the United States is a post-colonial society. While we all know that settlers fought a bloody war against their British colonial overlords between 1775 and 1783, this struggle has since been rebranded as a bloodless folktale. In reality, both the violence and the geopolitical machinations behind the struggle were thoroughly modern: The Netherlands, along with the French (Britain’s arch-enemy at that time) and the Spanish (France’s ally) supplied arms and other supplies to the revolutionaries, in many cases using their colonies in the Caribbean as a base of operations. Imagine Iran-Contra or the US’s 1980’s Afghanistan policy, but with more tri-corner hats.

There are several connections between the American Revolution and the Netherlands, explains our friend Tristan Mostert, junior curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: “Benjamin Franklin corresponded with the leader of the ‘Patriotten’, Joan Derk van der Capellen. John Quincy Adams studied here for a bit. Before the French would have their Revolution a few years later, the Netherlands were the only functional Republic in Europe and the US looked at them for inspiration in these years. The Dutch loaned a lot of money to the US in the first years of its existence.” 

So the Dutch had their reasons for backing the revolution—and had they not, there may be even more bones entombed forever in Fort Greene Park. We do wonder, though, if the Dutch just wanted to get a belated revenge against the British for taking the New Amsterdam colony. Colonial empires can be petty like that.

View high resolution

WE WON!

We are proud to report that the EMPIRE prototype we made during the POV Hackathon was selected as the Participants’ Choice winner! 

Try the prototype here (NOTE: optimized for Chrome, may not work on other browsers and won’t work on mobile devices).

Also, read about it in our third blogpost for The Creators Project, Hacking the shit out of everything part 3.

Submarine Channel’s EMPIRE video report

Have you ever wondered what the hell the Empire project actually is? This video should clear that all up.

View high resolution

Film Comment’s review of the Empire project

“Hovering around 10 minutes apiece, the uninflected loops don’t need to press the points of the complex human narratives they unearth, each of which short-circuits one’s usual conceptions of a history long laid to rest.”

This quote and more in a beautiful review from Film Comment (Film Society Lincoln Center’s publication) about the Empire installation at IDFA. Read it in full here.

View high resolution

REVENGE OF COLONIAL COCKTAILS (part 2)

Welcome to the second installment (of the second installment) of “Colonial Cocktails,” the interview series that combines hard drinking with hard truths.

On the last day of IDFA, we interviewed San Fu Maltha. San Fu was born in Rotterdam in 1958 to a Chinese-Indonesian mother and a Dutch father. He is currently one of the most powerful film producers in the Netherlands, and is the force behind such high-profile Dutch films as Blackbook and Suskind. We sat down with San Fu to discuss WWII-era Nazi sympathizers in the Netherlands, and ended up talking about immigration, Geert Wilders, and the Dutch-Indonesian experience.

Eline Jongsma: How do you like the cocktail?

San Fu Maltha: It’s a bit strong, but I’ll probably get used to it. Right now since I really haven’t had a decent lunch it’s pretty stiff. But it’s okay. There’s a taste in it that… I don’t know what it is. What is it? It’s spices or something.

Kel O’Neill: This cocktail is called the Banda Massacre and it was created to commemorate the massacre of 90% of the population of the Banda Islands by a combined force of Dutch and Japanese mercenaries. But you know, 400 years later, it’s just a cocktail.

SFM: That’s why it has to be stiff. It has to be a strong drink.

KO: We were speaking earlier about the NSB, and specifically about Indos [mixed-race Dutch-Indonesians] who were members of the NSB. Why do you think that the Nazi ideology appealed to some of them?

SFM: I’m not sure if it was completely the Nazi ideology that appealed to them. It was a combination. They felt, specifically at the beginning of the war, that their country was going into the wrong hands. The nationalist element of the NSB, I think was the strongest element. They wanted to be a strong nation again.

If you read this article about Wilders which was written, he comes from this kind of family that has all of these elements to it. Because they were thrown out of Indonesia, and they were feeling really bad about it. And so that’s why this nationalist element in them was very strong. It’s not particularly that they hated Jews. Most of them were mixed-race!

The funniest thing, if you look at Dutch Indonesians, is that even within that community, they don’t look at each other and try to find out what they have in common. They look at how they differ and how white they are. So the whiter they are, the more powerful they are. They try so hard to belong to this white society. It’s a really difficult thing.

EJ: I’m actually a member of that Wilders family.

SFM: You are?

EJ: I found out because of this [Empire] project we’re doing, because a cousin of my dad is a geneologist. And I was looking into the Jewish heritage in my Indonesian family, and I stumbled onto this website where he writes about Wilders and this genetic link. And I thought it was so perfect that I was related to Geert Wilders. When I told my father, he said “yeah, Wilders is from the intolerant branch.” And I’ll never know if my father was serious when he said that.

SFM: I’m not sure either. I do know that when people feel free to talk, then you see that a lot of that generation feels linked in with what he stands for.

I know, of course, a lot of older Dutch Indonesians. And Wilders appealed to them. They were thrown out of their own country. Some of them were almost killed. Some of their families were killed. And even though they were fleeing for their lives, they had to pay for their own tickets. And now they feel this resentment to the new immigrants. It’s of course also natural. I’m not saying it should be this way, but it’s almost natural. In fifty years the ones who will be against that time’s new immigrants are the ones who are today’s new immigrants. It’s a game that goes on and on and on.

I mean, you can’t deny that in Holland there are some young Moroccans who cause a lot of problems. You shouldn’t deny it, but realise that there are also many others that cause problems, and it doesn’t mean that the first Moroccan who comes in is bad because of that. And it’s not strange that if you’re only used to meeting white people that the first time you meet somebody who’s black that you’re maybe even scared. The problems come when it’s the third time or the fourth time, when you find out that this guy’s actually really nice and really decent but you are still scared.

KO: There are people who say that the era of Wilders is over, and that The Netherlands has much important things to worry about than the issues that arise from immigration. Do you think that’s true?

SFM: I hope it’s true, but I’m not sure. It depends on how long this crisis will last, and if it will last long enough for people to actually realize that Wilders has added to our economic crisis. If we believe in economic growth, then we need immigrants.

EJ: Do you think if all the immigrants in Holland—starting with the Indonesians or Indo’s, leading up to the Moroccans—do you think if all of these people came from Scandinavia we would be having this conversation?

SFM: I think so. I once tried to explain this to my son. We live in a very white environment. We are actually the foreigners, in the city where we live. One time he said “Oh, there are so many Moroccan people living here.” And I thought this can’t be true. Because there are only 300,000 and something Moroccans living in Holland. So the chances that they live in this very white city are slim.

So I said, listen, you have to see it like this: if you take a city of 40 or 50,000 people, and you take 1,000 people from one small village in Limburg, which is in the south of Holland, and you bring them over, then those people from Limburg will act even more Limburg than the people there. Because they want to keep up the tradition. They will cluster. They’ll go to the same bar. They’ll create their own identity. And everything will go well until some person from this community will get something that the people from the other community wants. Could be a woman, a job, anything. Then the problems will start.

Don’t forget that a couple of hundred years ago, when a lot of Dutch people immigrated to England, it was on the front of an English newspaper: “These awful Dutch, they take our jobs and they have bad culture and they don’t adapt.” They were talking about the Dutch then.

View high resolution

REVENGE OF COLONIAL COCKTAILS (part 1)

Hey kids! Welcome to the latest installment of “Colonial Cocktails,” the interview series that combines hard drinking with hard truths about the legacy of European dominance.

Before we reveal this week’s guest, let’s find out what he’ll be drinking.

The cocktail

The Banda Massacre is a potent mix of Dutch liquor and Southeast Asian spices. We named the cocktail after a 17^th century atrocity carried out under the orders of Jan Pieterzoon Coen, a “Great Explorer” from the Golden Century of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The details of the massacre are tough—in an attempt to gain a monopoly on the European-Asian spice trade, Coen and his force of Japanese and Dutch mercenaries brutally murdered of thousands of Bandanese islanders. Coen’s legacy remains controversial in the Netherlands today, and he is known colloquially as “The Butcher of Banda.”

The Banda Massacre

• 40 ml clove and black pepper infused Jonge Jenever
• 10 ml sweet vermouth
• 10 ml Orange Curaco or Grand Curaco (Grand Marnier)
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Preparing the Jenever

Two days to a week before making the cocktail, pour a small handful of cloves and a 5-10 black peppercorns into your bottle of Jenever. When the liquor turns a light brown, it’s ready to be mixed.

Making the drink

The Banda Massacre is essentially a martini with more spice and a hint of Orange Curacao (which, by the way, was a Dutch invention). So if you can make a martini, you can make one of these.

Pour all of the liquor into a cocktail shaker, along with as much ice as you can manage. Shake vigorously until the cocktail becomes cloudy.

Pour, drink and contemplate man’s inhumanity toward man.

Next up: hoisting a glass with San Fu Maltha, superproducer and Geert Wilders-hater.

"What is the broadest definition of film? Can we reflect that and help people embrace that?" →

We’d like to take a moment away from posting about Empire to share some words from Ted Hope, erstwhile indie superproducer and current Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society. Hope’s recent keynote address at the International Film Festival Summit is inspiring stuff, and should be required reading for filmmakers who want to reach beyond the rote and attempt to create work for today’s audience. A brief excerpt:

Audiences, artists, art and technology evolve far faster than markets, business, or infrastructure. In this era of infinite reproduction, audiences crave authenticity and customization. When people don’t get what they want, they move on. Film attendance has been dropping in this country on a regular basis; box office is maintained by price increases. The behavior patterns of our youth influence all we do going forward. My 12-year-old son has said he doesn’t like movies, although he loves most that he’s ever seen. He doesn’t see cinema as speaking to him – and if that doesn’t change, the audience and community he is part of will be lost to us forever… We should not contain our audience by the structure we have, but instead build the structures that carry them further. 

Hope goes on to list 12 questions that film festival organizers should ask themselves when organizing their slate. Our favorite is #10:

10. What is the broadest definition of film? Can we reflect that and help people embrace that? Have we forgotten what show business is and neglected the spectacle and event in favor of the practical and executable?

Find the two parts of Hope’s speech here and here.

View high resolution

Grolsch Filmworks interview

“Ultimately, the Dutch will have to let go of the blackface, whether they like it or not.” 

In this interview by Grolsch Filmworks we talk Dutch Christmas traditions and much more.

View high resolution

Grolsch Filmworks Review

You know what’s great? This review of EMPIRE at IDFA that Grolsch Filmworks just posted. If you like it, share it.

Who loves EMPIRE?

Since we’ve gotten to IDFA, we keep getting surprised by just how many people love EMPIRE. Find a few of our favorites on the right.