Sound And Vision: Steffen Haars And Flip Van Der Kuil

In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at several music videos directed by Steffen Haars and/or Flip van der Kuil.

Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil are two Dutch directors prone to controversy. They like to stir the pot. So much so that their English-language debut Krazy House, flopped mayorly, and got scathing reviews from critics, including our own Mel Valentin. This is not a new thing for them. New Kids Nitro (2011) ended with an incredibly tasteless Auschwitz-joke, that ruffled feathers left and right, and New Kids Turbo (2010) before that was also of questionable taste according to some critics.

The two films itself were spin-offs of the series New Kids (2007), again a controversial series, due to its celebration of low-brow Dutch culture and deliciously offensive language and sight gags. New Kids was a fairly low budget affair but became a phenomenon, hence the two more expensive feature film spin-offs. The series as a whole also got several music videos, two of which were directed by Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil. Two songs by the Dutch hip-hop-band The Opposites tied in to the series: Broodje Bakpao (below), a braggadocious hip-hop song about a Chinese-Dutch street food and Me Nikes (also below), an aggressive song about not touching someone's sneakers.

Steffen Haars has directed more music videos by himself not related to the New Kids series, including another one that proved to piss off the wrong people, and that came before all the other controversies. Wealthy Beggar's Reminder from 2004, erroneously credited by the uploader on YouTube to director Bobby Boermans (of the recent Netflix-hit iHostage).

It is a gentle plucky indie-song, with a less than gentle music video, seemingly inspired by the likes of Reservoir Dogs. Several band-members are bound and gagged in a ship-wharf, and lightly tortured and threatened by a group of mobsters. The scenes where one of the latter burns someone's face with a cigarette, and another where a person is threatened with a chainsaw, proved to be too much for the Dutch classification board NICAM.

The NICAM (Nederlands Instituut voor de Classificatie van Audiovisuele Media, or in English, the Dutch Institute for Classification of Audiovisual Media) is similar to the MPAA, but less evil and more transparent. They deemed the music video too hot for prime time. For Dutch television that meant that it couldn't be shown before 11 at night on MTV, and the now-defunct but once very popular Dutch music video broadcaster TMF. Only the now equally-defunct The Box, whose censorship was less tight, was still debating to show the video, according to a contemporary article on the influential Dutch music site 3voor12. At 3voor12 there are a lot of other nice tidbits for those who read Dutch: the music video itself cost 40.000 euros (which is quite similar to the same amount in dollars), not adjusted for inflation. That is a lot of money, for the fairly low-budget Dutch music video industry, so not having access to primetime meant a huge loss for the record label.

Steffen Haars is quoted in the article: "The music video is less brutal than I initially imagined. I first wanted to have guns there, but I realized that they wouldn't show it on music television in that case."
The article goes on to say that Haars didn't calculate that the violence still would be considered too harsh, and subsequently hints at a difference in opinion between the band and the director. A band member starts talking about blurring the violence or seeking a budget for a new edit. Haars is quoted right after: "the story is built on violence. If you adjust it, there is no story anymore. And if you blur it, it still will stay violent."
Eventually 3voor12 did release the video with another contemporary article, which is more critical of the video, and in which Steffen Haars is shining in his absence.

Haars and Van Der Kuil have been marching to the beat of their own drum since the beginning. Something like Krazy House, which I love for its scathing send-up of American culture through a decidedly Dutch sense of humor, also can't be edited down to suit more mainstream tastes. And while I personally wasn't a fan of Get Away, it still packs a punch in its violence. Tasteless as it may be, I am glad they keep finding budgets and audiences for their bloody freak-fests, and the censorship for Wealthy Beggar's Reminder stayed a one-time thing.