Crimes of Opportunity: Luuk Bouwman on His Portrait of a Nazi Official, ‘The Propagandist’

In The Propagandist, Luuk Bouwman walks us through how Jan Teunissen, a wealthy Dutch scion, went from directing the first feature film in the Netherlands to Nazi collaborator and propagandist. Bouwman’s ace in the hole is a long oral history with Teunissen from the mid-1960s in which he holds forth with smarmy candor about his life as a civilian and then as a Nazi official in the Netherlands. Excerpts are nimbly interwoven with other vividly preserved materials—home movies, letters—and the reactions of the historian who conducted the interview, Rolf Schuursma.

It’s a jaw-dropping story of morally bankrupt opportunism that also gradually shows how Teunissen’s own prejudices fit quite comfortably with Nazi views. An especially surreal moment comes when a film Teunissen made about Jewish life in Amsterdam, as a civilian, is later repurposed for a notoriously vile piece of Nazi propaganda. Bouwman’s film also addresses Teunissen’s punishment after the war, such as it was; he died in 1975.

I watched The Propagandist at its packed world premiere at IDFA, where the mostly Dutch audience sat rapt (and kept scoffing at Teunissen’s shamelessness). Bouwman spoke with me about what made the archival materials work for the screen, and the moral questions framed through Teunissen’s exploits. After we spoke, The Propagandist won the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film, yet the film holds valuable messages for any number of countries facing authoritarian regimes. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: How did you choose Jan Teunissen as your subject?

LUUK BOUWMAN: He’s not some public figure that you would encounter in school. For me, it was through making another film called All Against All (2019) that was about the rise of fascism in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s. I came across the propaganda films of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB [where Teunissen became head of film]. Just after finishing that film, I came across a document online that stated that there should be an audio recording of an interview with him, which you saw in the film. But we didn’t know at first that there would be physical tapes or if they were preserved. Luckily we were able to find them at the National Sound and Vision Archive in the Netherlands. And they were so helpful to digitize them. 

The other starting point was the home movies of Teunissen, which we then quickly found: 35 millimeter films from the 1920s and 1930s. What you see is a very well-off Dutch family, because otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to film at that time. It’s fascinating just to see these 100-year-old family images that are like a time machine—for example, his wife taking a nap in the garden.

D: How long was the audio interview, and what was your strategy to working with the material? 

LB: It was seven hours, 45 minutes. He has this really posh voice in which he tells stories, a tone that you wouldn’t hear so often anymore, also like a primal mansplainer. He’s quite proud of what he did, and you feel that he’s boasting about his contacts, being friends with Goebbels and Himmler. But for them, he must have been a small fish. That set in motion the idea of making a film in which you could follow the experience of the war through the eyes of one of these film collaborators.

I worked together with a researcher, Rik Binnendijk, and when we started listening to the tapes, immediately there was a lot in there. So for example, the story of his sons that joined the SS, I heard that early on, and thought, okay, there is this family angle. And other things, like his view about film critics. He made the first big Dutch feature film before the war, which was completely devastated by the reviews, but later on he says, no, I always had great reviews. And it’s almost as if he is talking about his life as if it’s a big adventure in a movie, because he doesn’t feel attacked in the interview. Rolf Schuursma, the old historian, was very decent and very detailed in the interview. But in the meantime, he is getting closer to this question of “why did you collaborate.” 

At first Teunissen will say a lot of times “we weren’t racist, I wasn’t in it for the racism, I felt bad about it.” But then in the end you get to see his true character. So it was really listening to the interview that gave all the ingredients for the dramatic structure. 

D: What other archival materials were key?

LB: The propaganda films that he was involved with. I think that was also my first fascination for the subject, that he was a propagandist for this authoritarian regime. Apart from the psychology, it’s also about what did he make and what techniques did he use. And once in a while we would see him in the films, but a lot of them weren’t archived in a way that you could actually see in the metadata that he is there. We just had to watch a lot of these propaganda films, which for a large part are also quite boring—endless visits of the party leader to villages and this kind of thing. 

Another big find was the cassette tapes of interviews with colleagues of Teunissen. Some had quite big companies after the war, and they went into commercial films. The way they talk about it in their letters, it’s interesting that they used the term propaganda, that it is in a way a continuation of what they started during the war and were good at. Already during the war, Reinier Meijer was creating these nationalistic cliché images of the Netherlands, like the windmills and the colonial seafarers. These images after the war were used in a different context just to sell the Netherlands. 

D: What has been the Dutch reaction to the film?

LB: A lot of the reactions have been “how is it possible that we didn’t know about this?” The other thing is that it’s kind of an interactive movie in the sense that there are so many mechanisms that resonate with the present. You get this feeling of a guy who went over dead bodies to achieve his goals. The ambition and the quest for power are very recognizable today in politics. 

D: An alternate title for the film could be The Opportunist.

LB: In the beginning, he is a very clear-cut opportunist, and then the question is, was he really an ideologue? This is classic Hannah Arendt. I think she was spot-on in describing this whole careerist elite who weren’t really the core ideologues maybe, but who just saw a chance to further their career through these systems. But then his children are true believers, I think. The stepdaughter writes things so racist that you fall off your chair when you read the letters. It’s like, how can anybody be that way? 

D: But that’s the moral question of the film: does it really matter if he is an ideologue or not? That it doesn’t matter if he “believes,” he was part of it.

LB: No, exactly. It starts out as a kind of whydunit, but in the end it’s his deeds, and that’s also how to build the film structure. At some point I felt, okay, even this interview and the home movies in a way are also propaganda, so he is in control of what he will say and what he won’t tell. So that’s why we also dove into the paper records of the trial, and there you get to see his deeds. The things that he did in the end are obviously quite horrible, like turning people in and this kind of thing. 

D: That’s a big part of your structural decision, that you really wait till later for some of the worst stuff he did.

LB: This is something that we were working on in the edit for a long time, because I think it’s also not so much the things that he says sometimes that make him an evil person. We wanted to be able to go along with this character who seems kind of charming because it feels like the way the things happen in reality, no? Then at some point you discover how opportunistic he was behind the scenes and the things he did. I like the idea of postponing the judgment a little bit—but not in the end being easy on him. 

D: It’s telling how comfortable Teunissen feels talking to Rolf Schuursma for this oral history.

LB: Yeah, I think you can feel that this is pre-1968, when a lot of digging into the history started later on. But even up until today the stories you hear about the war in the Netherlands are mostly about the resistance.  Of course, the real resistance in the Netherlands was actually quite small and the collaboration was actually quite big. From the Netherlands, more than 120,000 people were deported and more than 100,000 were murdered in the war. In a way, it was convenient maybe for us to think that the Germans and of course Hitler were the evil ones and to diminish our role a little bit in that.

D: There’s an interesting reflexive touch in that you show Rolf Schuursma listening to his interview and reacting. Why?

LB: When you listen to the tapes, it feels a bit like Teunissen is in control sometimes. So I was looking at a way to counter that, and this idea that we could look at Schuursma listening to the tapes came up. We didn’t need a lot of commentary every time we heard something from Teunissen. I think these faces of the two film historians [Schuursma and Egbert Barten] open the film up for an audience to have a voice of reason outside of the sometimes lunacy of what Teunissen is saying. I wanted to comment and not be like saying all the time “oh he’s evil”—we know this and we discover it in the film. But just to have some kind of humanity in the film.

D: The Propagandist joins a spate of movies that take advantage of audio archives in ways that I think 10 or 15 years ago, people maybe wouldn’t have tried. Why do you think that is?

LB: I think maybe it’s not so much about the audio but the visual side of it. The archive footage is becoming so much better just technically in the last few years. We were able to go back to the 35 millimeter copies of Teunissen [home movies], scan them in a really high quality, and also do some digital restoration.  So these images in the cinema feel really pristine and crisp. For example, Sergei Loznitsa makes these archival films that really work in the cinema. We had a whole generation of television documentaries about history, but they had quite low-quality images that made it feel much more like historical documents. Now, images feel to me like they add realism in a way: the quality of the images makes you see details and the story becomes much more timeless and universal. I think there is also an interest and an awareness that these things really take time to make. We were lucky to have the Netherlands film fund on board to have the time we needed to edit it. Already last year at IDFA, we started editing. 

D: Looking at your work, you seem to have an interest in bringing secret histories to light.

LB: I think half of the things I’ve made are heavy on history. This is something that has always fascinated me always. I am also a big fan of, for example, Hartmut Bitomsky and Harun Farocki, filmmakers who were really digging into Germany’s history. I saw their films when I was younger and thought, okay, something like this could be made about Dutch history too. When I was in film school, I think the dominant thing in documentary was more observational, and voiceovers were a bit out of fashion. I actually like the 1950s, this moment right before we get the new wave and more experimental cinema. For example, in France you had Georges Franju, a filmmaker that I really like a lot. But I’ve made quite different films. So the last one I did, which premiered last year at IDFA, Gerlach, is really much more in the direct cinema tradition, a portrait of a Dutch farmer. 

[The Propagandist] resonates a lot with the propagandists of our times where you really ask yourself, why are they doing this? How can it be that populist movements and really racist movements are gaining so much ground in Europe today? In my youth it felt like the remnants of the past, and it doesn’t at the moment.

Nicolas Rapold is the host of the podcast The Last Thing I Saw, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, and former editor-in-chief of Film Comment. He is editing a book of interviews with Frederick Wiseman.