ABSTRACT
Each and every episode of the television series Kreatief met Kurk [Creative with Cork], directed by Pieter Kramer and broadcast on Dutch public television in the years 1993 and 1994, contained a remake of some fragment from a well-known film. The two performers Arjan Ederveen and Tosca Niterink imitated segments from a huge variety of titles: the silent film The Sheik with Rudolph Valentino; the Julie Andrews vehicle Mary Poppins; Hóstsonaten [Autumn Sonata] by Ingmar Bergman; Blue Velvet by David Lynch. Though the majority of remakes was no more than mere mimicry of a fragment (albeit displaying a keen eye for the smallest of details), the humour resided in the fact that Ederveen performed as Rudolph Valentino in a movie scene with flicker effects in one week, as Ingrid Bergman with a phoney Swedish accent the next week and as an hysterical Dennis Hopper in the week thereafter. The outlandish effect of such persiflages is that there seems to be an Ederveen – or a Niterink – behind every great performance in film history. You happen to be watching Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone in Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), but suddenly, a thought crosses your mind: Could this be Ederveen and Niterink in another disguise? Such an anti-immersive hypothesis, if perhaps only for a brief moment, is the potential short circuit produced by their remakes.
