In Memoriam Pim de la Parra: ‘No money? No script? Let’s go!’

Paramaribo-born director, producer, screenwriter and actor Pim de la Parra (1940-2024) was intensely involved in the production of some forty films – short and feature-length – from 1964. In Suriname, Pim de la Parra is venerated for the first Surinamese feature film, Wan Pipel (1976, available on Eye Film Player); the film was a flop in the Netherlands on release, but is now seen as a classic, and is still broadcast on Surinamese television every year to mark Independence Day. In 2009, when Eye restored Wan Pipel, De la Parra reflected in the newspaper Het Parool: “Wan Pipel is now part of the canon of Dutch cinema. Which means I’m something more than a layabout.”

Pim de la Parra is of course far more than a self-proclaimed layabout; we can say without fear of exaggeration that he was one of the major driving forces behind Dutch and Surinamese fiction films. In 1963, he and Wim Verstappen set up the production company $corpio Films. The pair, known as Pim and Wim, built an infamous reputation throughout much of De la Parra’s career.

De la Parra’s oeuvre is a roll-call of post-war Dutch film history: during the heyday of $corpio, he worked with actors including Hugo Metsers, Willeke van Ammelrooy and Sylvia Kristel, and as the tireless ‘godfather of the minimal movie’ during the eighties and nineties he picked up and promoted young film talent. By co-founding film magazine Skoop in 1963, he aimed to shake up the soporific world of Dutch film and open up new perspectives.

Energy and swagger

At the beginning of the 1960s, film academy students Pim de la Parra and Wim Verstappen both felt themselves outsiders in the film world in the Netherlands, but soon found that they shared a lot of ideas about film production. They believed not enough feature films were being made in the Netherlands, meaning it was impossible to gain the experience necessary to make better films. They decided to resolve this problem by making as many films as possible, with the minimum of resources. They hoped this would enable them to bring about the continuous production of fiction films. The pair then really shook up the Dutch film world with their energy and swagger, as well as with their successful attacks on film censorship and, above all, how their victories and defeats played out in the media.

De la Parra’s short film debut Aaah ... Tamara (1964) was immediately selected for the Cannes film festival. $corpio’s first big success was Obsessions (1969), a ‘sex-psycho-suspense-murder mystery’ (available on Eye Film Player), for which Hitchcock’s composer Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and a very young Martin Scorsese contributed to the screenplay. Pim and Wim themselves hardly profited at all, however. “That’s when we found out what a bunch of villains the film world is”, De la Parra told film journalist Harry Hosman.

Obsessions heralded the ‘Dutch sex wave’, pointing ahead to the $corpio production Blue Movie (1971) – the first Dutch feature film to show an exultant erection. The $corpio duo, who had now stopped modelling themselves on the French nouvelle vague, switched to an unashamedly commercial approach. This resulted in a hit film that brought coachloads of Belgians across the border to cinemas in Sluis and Maastricht. Wim Verstappen’s Blue Movie, a film about a man newly released from prison discovering the delights of the sexual revolution in Amsterdam’s Bijlmer neighbourhood, finally brought the pair recognition.

At first it looked like Blue Movie, which can be seen on Eye Film Player, would fall foul of the film censor. In his extensive objection to the censor’s decision, Verstappen cited the essay ‘The future of religion’ by writer Simon Vestdijk. He argued that the film deserved a chance as a product with artistic integrity, and that safeguarding morals was a hypocritical argument on the part of the censor. His argument was effective and the film was granted a re-evaluation, following which it was approved for ages 18+. The Commissie voor de Filmkeuring (Dutch Central Film Censorship Committee) had been thwarted, and Blue Movie went down in the history books as the film that (briefly) made Pim and Wim millionaires.

Wild years

After Blue Movie, $corpio went on to produce films including VD and Dakota (available on Eye Film Player) as well as Rubia’s Jungle (available on Eye Film Player). This second feature film from Pim de la Parra was, in the ever-provocative words of the makers, ‘a film you have to see twice: first with your spouse, then with your lover’. In 1973, De la Parra’s explicit film Frank & Eva (also available on Eye Film Player) overcame initial resistance and reached the cinema screens, where it achieved good box-office sales.

$corpio’s wild years brought titles such as Rubia’s Jungle and Mijn nachten met Susan, Olga, Albert, Julie, Piet & Sandra. In 1976, $corpio Films got into difficulties however through De la Parra’s magnum opus Wan Pipel (1976), the first feature film to be shot in the newly independent Suriname. His understated depiction of the political and racial tensions of multi-ethnic Suriname, set against the backdrop of a recognisable love story, is still seen today as a good pointer for anyone wanting to learn more about Suriname. But the cost of making the film turned out to be far higher than expected, and audiences stayed away: the result was bankruptcy for $corpio Films, following which De la Parra and Verstappen went their separate ways.

In 1985, De la Parra returned to the Netherlands for a collaboration with producers Ruud den Drijver and Lea Wongsoredjo; he made a series of low-budget relationship dramas, Paul Chevrolet en de ultieme hallucinatie (1985), Als in een roes (1986) and Odyssee d'Amour (1987). The latter was the most expensive feature film De la Parra ever made, and a very rare example of a contemporary drama shot in the Antilles. In 1986 and 1987, the number of Dutch films made with subsidies declined strongly. Cinematographers and sound recordists found themselves out of work. Around this time, De la Parra also decided to leave behind the kinds of films he had admired until then. “I found I was stuck in a particular idiom. Striving for quality was smothering film production in the Netherlands. I say: quantity is quality”, he told Harry Hosman.

With Fransjoris de Graaf, Paul Ruven, Erik de Bruyn and others, he rapidly developed ‘minimal movies’ under the unofficial motto: ‘No money? No script? Let’s go!’ Films shot on a shoestring, such as Lost in Amsterdam (1989) and De nacht van de wilde ezels (1989), a satire about a filmmaker whose film project is plagued by financial problems and whose private life is also a mess – featuring lots of spicy nude scenes. 1995 brought his final film in this genre, De droom van een schaduw. De la Parra then went back to Suriname, where in 2005 he was one of the driving forces behind the foundation of the Surinamese film academy, the Fundasi de Surinaamse Film Academie. The first feature to emerge from the academy, Het geheim van de Saramaccarivier, was released in 2007.