April 22, 2023
Editorial Note
In conjunction with the exhibition Felix de Rooy—Apocalypse, art historian and curator Veerle Poupeye surveys De Rooy’s creative interconnections with artists and curators in the Caribbean during his early formative years. Her examination of this specific cultural background and De Rooy’s networks in printmaking and the graphic arts highlights the conceptual and thematic aspects of his work that would emerge in his later film and stage practices.
Felix de Rooy (b. 1952) has created a rich and diverse film oeuvre. This is evidenced as much by the formats of his productions (everything from feature films and video art to news reports) as by the subjects of these works (slavery, queerness, spirituality) and the contexts of their creation. The locations from which he has operated over the course of a fifty-year career have been almost as varied—Curaçao, Suriname, New York and Amsterdam—and his films are allied with various art and film movements. These works have garnered awards at festivals around the world, but have also attracted criticism from telling quarters. And though De Rooy’s greatest cinematic achievement, Ava & Gabriel, was released all the way back in 1990, his films have retained their capacity to engage the mind, both intellectually and imaginatively, thanks to their unique set designs, their Antillean point of view, and their uncompromising commitment to social criticism.
One of the many notable things about De Rooy’s career as a filmmaker is the incremental manner of his entry into the discipline. Trained at the Vrije Academie in The Hague, he first worked as an art instructor and visual artist, but in the process also managed to master the art of filmmaking. The impetus for this development was his hunger for new forms of expression, as well as a desire to reach the widest possible audience. As he stated in an interview in 1988, “I am a self-taught filmmaker who took steps to professionalize himself.”[1] This essay traces the contours of this professional journey and outlines the context in which De Rooy developed as a filmmaker.
Every Picture
Felix de Rooy’s first hands-on experience with the medium occurred in the late 1970s in Curaçao. This was in relation to the short film Every Picture Tells a Story (1977), shot in collaboration with his artist friend René Metsch. By this point, clues as to the multidisciplinary nature of De Rooy’s eventual career were already in evidence. Still in his mid-twenties, he’d established himself as an art instructor in Curaçao and as an exhibiting artist. And to occupy himself during school vacations, he and a group of students had set up the theater group Illushón Kosmiko (Cosmic Illusion), and were already achieving success with their self-written and -designed productions, most notably with Mama Kòrsou y su yu sin trabow (1977)—a play about the island’s future that was shot through with symbolism.
Fig 1. Felix de Rooy, Mama Kòrsou y su yu sin trabow (1977). Photo: Hubert Derkx
Every Picture Tells a Story followed a year later, seemingly by chance. The work is an ode to Hollywood productions from the silent film era of the 1910s and 1920s, complete with period-appropriate set design and soundtrack. Set in a fictional art world, the dialogue-free film chronicles the fortunes of Dolores Lamar (Rosemarie van Hoop), who works her way to the top through various boyfriends and is on the verge of becoming a bona fide movie star on account of her first leading role when she is shot to death by a jealous ex at the film’s gala premiere.
Fig 2. Set photograph from Every Picture Tells a Story (1978). Photo: Carlos Tramm
Fig 3. Set photograph from Every Picture Tells a Story, (1978). Photo: Carlos Tramm
De Rooy co-directed the film with Metsch, whose recent acquisition of an 8mm camera prompted its making. It bears some of the hallmarks of a first film, but was nonetheless broadcast in Curaçao by TeleCuraçao. “A triumph,” wrote literary critic Jos de Roo in the Amigoe newspaper, following the screening, “if you catch the hidden meanings.” In the same review, De Roo calls attention to the interesting game of fact and fiction that De Rooy plays with his audience by means of irony and anachronisms, a stylistic device he will return to on a regular basis throughout his career, as he will his penchant for casting “distinctive Curaçaoan personalities” such as art patron Chris Engels and painter Cliff San-A-Jong.[2]
The Vrije Academie
Every Picture Tells a Story does not, however, constitute the true genesis of De Rooy’s interest in the medium. The expressive possibilities of film had been on his mind for years, providing food for thought when he was still but a budding filmgoer. De Rooy had been a regular at cinemas since the 1960s, initially in the company of his dad René de Rooy, an experience he would later draw on as a film curator.[3] And his appetite for film continued unabated following the family’s move to Mexico. Orfeo Negro (1959) by Marcel Camus, which recounts the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice with Afro-Brazilian actors, was among the handful of films that made a lasting impression on the young De Rooy.
The Vrije Academie in the Netherlands put on film workshops for its students. These were organized in the spirit of the New American Cinema movement, an approach to filmmaking inspired by the work of New York artists such as Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, in which the line between professional production and amateur film was deliberately blurred. De Rooy was a regular at these workshops, which were overseen by experimental Dutch filmmaker Frans Zwartjes. Speaking later in an interview, De Rooy remarked that the workshops hadn’t made much of an impression, but that they had opened his eyes to the possibilities of the medium.[4]
During this period of study, De Rooy also had his first experience of working on a film shoot. This was on the experimental film Running 8/45, by an Israeli art couple and fellow students Anthony and Germaine Binstead in 1970, with De Rooy as the sole actor. In the B&W film, we see 18-year-old De Rooy running through The Hague on a sunny day, shot from different camera angles and in a variety of emotional states. The 16mm film experiments primarily with rhythm and form, and rapidly alternates close-ups of De Rooy’s face with slow-motion scenes and nature shots.
Karma after Curaçao
The idea of being the subject of a profile arose only after his return to Curaçao, with the making of Karmá na Korsow, a documentary about De Rooy by Curaçaoan filmmaker Wilbert Tecla, shot in 1975. The format of the now-lost film is a two-way conversation about the artist’s return to his place of birth and his “Eastern spiritual views” on life, which were uncommon in Curaçao. The film was shot inexpensively on 8mm film stock and later converted to video for broadcast on TeleCuraçao.
Wilbert Tecla was one of a handful of filmmakers who benefited from a reversal in STICUSA’s subsidy policy in the 1970s. The development fund had been established in 1948 to facilitate cultural cooperation between the Netherlands, Indonesia, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles, but was in fact largely used in its early days to facilitate the export of Dutch culture to colonial territories. This was reflected in its film policy, which offered subsidies for the importation of European (and especially Dutch) art films for local screenings.
That changed in the 1970s, when the policy was amended to include the subsidizing of local film production.[5] The shift was a catalyst for the development of a modest Antillean film industry, which eventually included De Rooy and his first experimental productions. Thanks to STICUSA, local filmmakers such as Tecla, Anthony Douglas and Oswald Specht, were able to explore their Afro-Caribbean identity in short (documentary) films, while Dutch documentarists René van Nie and Peter Kreutzberg, who lived in Aruba and Curaçao, respectively, used the funding to shoot nature documentaries about the islands.
Apo-clypse
De Rooy’s first film, Every Picture Tells a Story, was, however, a failure. Metsch decamped to New York with the footage before they’d even finished shooting, where he had it developed and edited as he saw fit. As a result, a frame narrative devised by De Rooy, in which the main character Dolores reflects on the dramatized events later in life, did not make it into the film. This omission reduces the production to a stylistic exercise, whereas the frame narrative widens its scope by introducing the idea that the viewer may be witnessing an examination of psychological memory processes and the fragility of identity.
To keep closer control of his next production, De Rooy began operating through Cosmic Illusion. To his end, he teamed up with poet and clinical psychiatrist Norman de Palm, with whom he would experience his greatest artistic triumphs in both theater and film. The two formed a lasting bond, and in addition to their creative partnership also developed a personal one. They shared an interest in the psychological consequences of various forms of oppression (colonial, spiritual, sexual) and in their liberation—which, according to Jean Antoine-Dunne, is the thematic key to their feature films.[6]
Fig 4. Felix de Rooy, Apo-clypse, kas di stranjo (1979). Photographer unknown
As with Every Picture Tells a Story, their first cinematic collaboration Apo-clypse, kas di stranjo (1979) was shot with a group of kindred spirits on a cheap 8mm camera, but this time with De Rooy firmly at the helm. The B&W film, which is layered with symbolism, follows a civil servant (played by De Palm) whose sexual orientation clashes with the parochial views of those around him. The film contains strong echoes of De Rooy’s visual art, and sees him employing a strange, erotic visual language composed of symbols derived from local mythologies and Catholicism. Such was the oddity of the imagery that the selection committee for a 8mm film festival in Venezuela suggested the filmmaker see a shrink.
This was shortly followed by a commission from STICUSA for a documentary series on art in the Caribbean, which saw De Rooy visit the Dutch Caribbean islands with Wilbert Tecla to document the practices of various artists, resulting in Cultureel Mozaïek (1980). De Rooy would maintain this practice of documenting Antillean culture for the rest of his career, producing a series of artist profiles whose subjects included the Surinamese painter Armand Baag (Armand Baag, 2001), the ceramist Ellen Spijkstra (Roest & koraal, 2013, in collaboration with Kirk Claes) and the surrealist Tony Monsanto (Mundu Mistoko, 2017, also in collaboration with Kirk Claes).
NYU
During the run of an exhibition in Jamaica, De Palm and De Rooy became acquainted with the American writer Ntozake Shange, known for the free-form choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1976), who persuaded the pair to come and study in New York. Supported by scholarships from STICUSA, De Palm and De Rooy promptly enrolled at New York University (NYU) to study educational theater and film directing, respectively.
De Rooy appears to have been among the handful of gifted students on the course, and, thanks to his film production experience, was duly ushered into the second year of the program. There he found himself in the company of fellow student and future film director Spike Lee (for whom De Rooy would later serve as art director on his graduate school thesis film Joe’s bed-stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads) and cameraman Ernest Dickerson (later known for his groundbreaking work on Do The Right Thing). De Rooy would go on to shoot all of his feature films with Dickerson, and serve as a production designer on the latter’s 2017 feature film Double Play.
De Rooy’s studies yielded two film projects: the playful documentary Tur Kos bon na New York (1981) and the feature film Desiree. The former portrays De Palm and De Rooy’s experiences as students in New York. In the opening scene, De Palm chalks the opening credits on a dilapidated wall in the shadow of Manhattan’s high-rises. He cuts a tiny figure against this towering backdrop, the corresponding feelings of apprehension reflected in his voice-over. What will life in New York be like? And how will he, an Aruban, find his place in this immense city? Only upon meeting Bonairean dancer Myrena Sint-Jago does he feel himself on sure ground once again, and the pair begin swapping stories of their experiences.
Fig 5. Theater poster, Desiree (1981). Design Felix de Rooy
Desiree
The feature film Desiree is a unique work in many respects. The story is based on an August 11, 1980, New York Post item that ran with the headline: Mother Who Burned Baby to Death is Pregnant Again. The item informs its readers about one Patricia Abraham from Harlem, who had set her two-year-old son alight two years before in an attempt to perform an exorcism. She was now pregnant once more, and a team of psychiatrists was trying to decide whether the authorities should grant her custody of her soon-to-be-born child, given that she’d been judged to have recovered from her previous mental illness.
De Palm was fascinated by the case and wrote a theatrical monologue exploring the woman’s mind. What thought process or situation could have led a Black woman to burn her own child to death? It was plausible to assume she’d been under the influence of a cult, but it was equally plausible that she’d internalized conflicting ideas about sexuality from her mother along with prevailing Eurocentric ideas about beauty. Palm’s monologue is written in the style of NYU’s Creative Arts Team, a collective that uses theater and interactive drama as a catalyst to address social issues and with whom he did an internship during his studies. It was here that De Palm also met the American actress Marian Rolle, who plays the lead character in the resulting theater production by Cosmic Illusion, which met with resounding critical success when it opened in 1981.
Fig 6. Felix de Rooy, Desiree (1981). Photo: Hajo Piebenga
The play also formed the basis for the later eponymous film, which constituted De Rooy’s graduate thesis in 1983. This was an extraordinary feat, as students rarely set out to make films with a long running time for their thesis. It featured Rolle once again as the lead character, and opens on the confused woman mumbling to herself as she wanders the streets of East New York, cradling a box with the body of her dead baby. Unlike the theater monologue, the film uses flashbacks to reveal the series of events leading to this moment, which include a morally dubious mother, racist employers, an emotionally unstable boyfriend, and indoctrination by the extreme, conservative Christian group The True Confessors.
Many of the themes addressed in Apo-clypse also appear in Desiree. The repression of sexuality, the dubious morality of the church, the binary thinking that sets different cultures on a collision course. But unlike the Pier Paolo Pasolini-inspired erotic imagery of Apo-clypse, Desiree is shot in a more traditional documentary style, compared in one review to the social realism of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.[7] That said, cameraman Ernest Dickerson bathes the closing scene in a poisonous green hue that draws the viewer into the mind of a lunatic.
Caribbean films
Upon graduating, De Rooy found himself in a bit of a dilemma: remain in the United States and work in the straitjacket of the “Black filmmaker,” or return to the Netherlands to work as an “immigrant director.” But despite being among the pioneers of “multicultural theater” in the Netherlands, thanks to their work with Cosmic Illusion, De Palm and De Rooy decided to base their film operation in Curaçao. In addition, they sought inspiration for their first major Caribbean feature film, Almacita di Desolato, in the traditional Curaçaoan myths and legends documented by anthropologist Elis Juliana and Father Paul Brenneker in the 1950s.
In doing so, they effectively became part of a wave of Caribbean filmmakers who’d been working in a similarly independent vein since the 1970s. Recalling this period in Ex-Iles (the first in-depth study of Caribbean cinema), film scholar Mbye Cham writes: “The islands were moving from a colonial situation to a postcolonial one. Political groups were demanding freedom from colonial structures and were met with violence at times.” It created, according to Cham, “new currents of political awareness in all strata of society and a new social reality.”[8]
Culturally, says Cham, this led to “a rediscovery and appropriation of the diversity that is the Caribbean.” Public intellectuals such as Édouard Glissant began using the term “creolité” to describe the unique cultural mix that is the Caribbean. There was also a rediscovery of oral storytelling traditions and the African cultural influences that had arrived on the islands with enslaved people.
These changes and discoveries, says Cham, set the stage for “the emergence of a fledgling practice of film production” with a “drive to rescue the Caribbean from visual misuse as exotic backdrop to Euro-American romantic narratives and local spectacles.”[9] Cham sees in De Rooy the same attempt to expose “the soul” of his island as he does in directors such as Perry Henzell (The Harder They Come), Euzhan Palcy (Rue Cases-Nègres) and Rassoul Labuchin (Anita). Others such as Raoul Peck, Christian Lara, Horace Ové and Suzy Landau are also part of this wave, which would formally establish itself as an organization of film professionals in Curaçao in 1992 under the name Caribbean Film and Video Federation.
Almacita di Desolato
Almacita di Desolato does indeed reflect this vision. Discussing his motives for making the film, De Rooy says he had the desire “to capture the beauty and vitality of Antillean culture and nature and present it to the world,”[10] which is in marked contrast to the Western film industry’s approach to colonial history. “The problem with productions like Max Havelaar and A Passage to India,” says De Rooy, is that “…they are made from colonial genes,”[11] whereas he would much rather make films that celebrate the resilience and diversity of culture.
Produced on a modest budget courtesy of the Production Fund and STICUSA, Almacita di Desolato is set at the intersection of fairy tale and reality. The story takes place in Curaçao in the wake of the abolition of slavery but before the arrival of oil company Shell. The inhabitants of Desolato are thrown into a state of panic when priestess Solem (Marian Rolle) falls pregnant, having been seduced by a stranger (Yubi Kirindongo), for the success of the village’s annual harvest depends on Solem remaining a virgin. But now she is pregnant, and drought and misfortune must surely follow.
When Solem gives birth to baby Almacita, she is ostracized by the entire village and wanders into the wilderness with her companion Lucio (Gwendomar Roosje). With no one but themselves to rely on, they embark on a quest to find the magical cave where “Curaçao’s ancestors” are meant to dwell. As they search, they are subjected to a series of tests by a procession of spirits, culminating in a reunion with the man who seduced her, who turns out to be the devil and wants his child back. Only by completing three near-impossible tasks will Solem be allowed into the cave: she must create a sandstorm, bring forth thunder, and make a heart of stone cry, all of which she accomplishes, the lattermost with a devious ruse.
Audiences everywhere were taken by the film, with its spiritual vibe and sumptuous setting. This held true for Dutch audiences as well, whose votes earned it a third-place finish for the audience award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 1986, where it had its Dutch premiere. The film attracted more than 20,000 viewers when it was screened in Curaçao. It received the Paul Robeson Award for best film by a director of the African diaspora at the Pan-African Film Festival in Burkina Faso and the Jury Award at the Images Caraibes Festival in Martinique, the most esteemed festival of its kind in the Caribbean.
The colonial legacy
The Dutch press was equally enthused (“an often lyrical and undeniably compelling film,” wrote De Volkskrant).[12] No such reception greeted their second Curaçao-based production, which examined the influence of Dutch colonialism in Curaçao. Ava & Gabriel: Un historia di amor (1990) weaves together various narrative strands in exploring this legacy. If the “Dutch presence” was missing from the previous film, here it was front and center, with Dutch characters ruling the roost as the governor and Catholic elite in the Willemstad of 1948.
Fig 11. Felix de Rooy, Ava & Gabriel (1990). Photo: Wim Hardeman
This bastion of power begins to fissure when the congenial Catholic priest Father Fidellius (played by playwright Theu Boermans) commissions a Surinamese painter (Cliff San-A-Jong) to paint a portrait for the church. Gabriel, the painter, chooses the Virgin Mary as his subject, whom he portrays as Black—a decision that receives only grudging approval from the church leaders. The film is based on an actual event that occurred in 1954, when the Limburgish painter Charles Eyck was commissioned to create something for the central post office in Willemstad and delivered Labor Panel, an ode to Curaçaoan people and their crafts, which did not go down at all well with the Dutch administration.
Ava & Gabriel was treated to an equally chilly reception by Dutch film critics, who took offense at the film’s revelation of the Dutch government’s culpability in maintaining and reinforcing structural inequality on the island, a state of affairs engineered under colonialism. De Rooy and De Palm were criticized both for the film’s content and for its style. The harshest of all the criticism was levelled by Hans Kroon, who ended his review in Trouw with the suggestion that the pair “Keep their mouths shut until they know what filmmakers are meant to do: develop a visual language of your own and use it to show everyone what moves you!”[13] Oddly enough, this was precisely what Caribbean critics and audiences cited in showering De Rooy’s films with praise.
Marival
People often group Desiree, Almacita di Desolato and Ava & Gabriel together as a trilogy.[14] But interviews with De Rooy sometimes paint a slightly different picture. Almacita di Desolato was arguably the starting point of a trilogy in which the relationship between Curaçao and the Netherlands would come under increasing critical scrutiny. News items from around the time of the films’ conception reveal the following two project ideas: a film about “Antilleans in the Netherlands” in which the chickens of colonialism would “finally” come home to roost,[15] and a project about the workers’ uprising of May 30, 1969, in which Shell employees in Curaçao took to the streets to demand fairer wages.[16]
But the third instalment never materialized, as the team’s producer, Norman de Palm, was left with a debt of 1.7 million guilders following the release of Ava & Gabriel. In addition, the producer and director’s personal relationship fell apart, which meant their production company, Cosmic Illusion, would henceforth need to operate somewhat differently. Thus, De Palm began focusing more on the collective’s business matters while De Rooy turned his attention to other disciplines, such as exhibition curation, which, thanks to the groundbreaking 1989 show Wit over Zwart (White on Black) at the Tropenmuseum, made him a household name.
De Rooy’s productivity as a filmmaker did not wane following the split with De Palm, but his projects no longer shared a common theme. Nonetheless, highlights include the documentary Marival (1997), about a group of self-identifying Curaçaoan queers from Amsterdam Zuidoost taking part in the Antillean gay carnival, with whom he also staged a play of the same name.
Fig 12. Cast photo from Marival (1996). Photo: Jean van Lingen
He produced several artist profiles for Migrant Television Amsterdam, including a tribute to the Surinamese painter Armand Baag shortly after his death in 2001. There are also video documents of theater performances and a series of news items about various exhibitions, including one on The Legacy of Slavery (2003–2004), which he co-curated.
He also appeared as an actor in the television film Boy Ecury (2003), which chronicles the life of an Aruban student, Boy Ecury, who played a key role in Breda’s resistance efforts in World War II. In 2020, he played one of the leads in Buladó, a Dutch-Curaçaoan production about the relationship between young Kenza (Tiara Richards) and her spiritual grandfather Weljo (De Rooy). Directed by Eché Janga, the film premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival, where it won the Golden Calf for Best Feature Film.
The Renny Show
De Rooy’s most recent major work is the experimental pseudo-documentary The Renny Show, which he shot in 2015 with cameraman Dolph van Stapele and René Metsch. The fifteen minute-film was made for the inaugural edition of the 48 Hour Film Project, initiated by the Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam (CIFFR) to encourage budding local filmmakers to go out and make films. Several threads from De Rooy’s oeuvre come together in The Renny Show, which is essentially a profile of his old friend René “Renny” Metsch, whom he has known since childhood, when the latter was one of De Rooy’s dad’s students. Metsch was also instrumental for De Rooy’s budding career in the 70’s: initiating film projects, providing sets for Cosmic Illusion’s plays and later for Desiree, among other things.
But the aging Metsch, we’re told, also lived a double life as a gay man, and once worked as a prostitute in New York. The Renny Show toys with this mix of fact and fiction. We see Renny (Metsch) taking stock of his life and celebrating his successes at a house party. Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Queen Beatrix, he’s known them all, some even intimately, and proceeds to divulge some of the secrets he’s been keeping to himself all his life. How seriously we’re meant to take any of this, however, is anybody’s guess, what with the unnatural bright lighting and masked party guests. What’s really going on here?
Figure 13. Still from The Renny Show (2015). Directed by Felix de Rooy. Courtesy Dolph van Stapele and René Metsch
The longer the camera lingers on Renny, the more we discern a figure clinging desperately to his former life of decadence, back when people genuinely welcomed his company. All that’s left now is a morbid protagonist slipping almost literally into loneliness and memories of past desires. In an ambiguous closing scene, Renny slips into the pool. Could this be suicide? we’re left to wonder. It’s a sublime conclusion to a body of work in which reality could easily pass as illusion, and illusion reality. In which oppression must be overcome in all manner of practice, but which in the meantime is driving one to despair. Is this the unveiling of a life story of genuine significance, or are we, the audience, unwitting participants in a game of smoke and mirrors?
About the Author
Guus Schulting is a film critic from the Netherlands. His specialty is film from the Caribbean, about which he publishes regularly. He also worked as a film programmer for the Black Achievement Month and Eye Filmmuseum, among others.
[1] Martinez, Karen ‘Interview with Felix de Rooy’ in Ex-iles (1992) ed. Mbye Cham
[2] De Roo, Jos, ‘Every Picture toont onbarmhartige liefde’, in Amigoe 22-03-1977
[3] Van der Put, Bart ‘Zwarthemd of zwartkijker? ‘ in Filmkrant 01-11-1995
[4] Interview met auteur 07-03-2023
[5] Timmer, H. ‘Fotografie, film en bioscoop’ in Cultureel Mozaïek van de Nederlandse Antillen, red. René Römer, 1977
[6] Antoine-Dunne, Jean, ‘Sex, Spirit and the Artist in the Films of Felix de Rooy’, 2017
[7] Heijs, Jan, ‘Dutch Black Cinema’, in De Filmkrant 15-12-1983
[8] Cham, Mbye, Ex-Iles, 1992
[9] Cham, Mbye, Ex-Iles, 1992
[10] ‘Felix de Rooy en de Antilliaanse film’, in Amigoe, 27-03-1986
[11] ‘Felix de Rooy en de Antilliaanse film’, in Amigoe, 27-03-1986
[12] Van Bueren, Peter, ‘Emoties laaien op in Caribisch sprookje’, in de Volkskrant 31-01-1986
[13] Kroon, Hans, ‘De Rooy en De Palm missen eigen stijl’, in Trouw, 08-11-1990
[14] See: Antoine-Dunne, Jean, ‘Sex, Spirit and the Artist in the Films of Felix de Rooy’, 2017
[15] Vos, Siebrand, ‘Antilliaanse filmmaker De Rooy: je wordt hier een randfiguur’, in Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 20-06-1991
[16] Zagt, Ab, ‘Pijnlijke historische parabel’, in Algemeen Dagblad, 26-09-1990
