Can there be a more rewarding suffering subject than Kees Torn? Comedian, poet, draftsman, pianist, songwriter, although in the depths of his mind he prefers to see himself as a composer. Shall I say something bad? I didn’t know him. No not at all. Maybe he had his glory days when I had other things to do, maybe it’s a generation thing even though he’s only 55, I don’t know. But the good news is that I got to know Kees Torn through the documentary André van der Hout made about him, One in a thousand, the slow life of Kees Torn (NTR).
The opening of the film is the opening scene from one of his performances. Kees Torn comes up, stuttering, shyly, student-like and asks if the people in the room don’t want to applaud too loudly later. Or laugh. He asks the technician on duty if the light can be dimmed a bit. A little more, a little more. “Ah, take it off completely too.” This is a comedian who wants to disappear. For twenty years he performed on stages throughout the Netherlands, in 2012 he stopped. The great erasure, he calls it. He has covered everything on stage, he says in the film. Moments later, he says he doesn’t know if he can afford to spend six to nine months in isolation to write cabaret for an hour and a half. The viewer now doubts whether he can still do it, given his alcohol intake. The day starts with a morning beer – he neatly pours the can into a glass. Then whiskey. All day long: fat cigars.
He lives on his savings, in one house with his wife José. Unless she gets it on her hips and wants to put things right, then he flees to the garden house she bought for him. This is the kind of man you don’t care about. He types and types letters to friends on the typewriter. He cuts out pictures, saves them in an album, and carefully chooses one for an envelope. He plays piano. Study a dead fly with a magnifying glass, then suck it up with the petty thief. He draws cartoons, paints, stares at the sky. Everything equally conscientiously and without haste.
He has not lost his glasses. He can articulate like no other what it is like to be him. And if he doesn’t say it in front of the camera, André van der Hout shows a fragment from a performance in which he plays what is going on. About quitting everything: “To stop doing more and more things that don’t make you happy, you need perseverance.” The ‘great erasure’ started much longer ago.
bumblebees
Kees Torn’s peace is interrupted twice with questions that mainly raise questions. About his father, whom he only met when he was an adult. He could have recognized a kindred spirit in him—though Father Torn had an angry drink and he a weepy one—but then he died. The filmmaker also has to leave it at the song Kees Torn once wrote about that father.
More mysterious is what Kees Torn tells about the housing association that thought he no longer lived in his house and proceeded to evict. His music, records, books, drawings, correspondence and the heirlooms of his recently deceased mother. Everything gone. “Destroyed by bumble bees in an office.” Since then he has not had the motivation to create anything again.
How could this happen? How long has this been? Was it a mistake, a crime, or just bad luck? Was this the impetus for the ‘great erasure’? Maybe he’ll write a book about it someday, Torn says. Maybe a show. He doesn’t rule out anything. But first he must rise above matter. And he’s not that far yet. “At the moment I think I’m too pathetic.”