I have a movie camera with me and I will film everything that happens”. The year was 1949, and Michael Rogge, then 20 years old, made this promise to his parents before boarding a ship in Rotterdam, Holland, destined for Hong Kong – a journey that would take him no less than a month and a half to reach his final destination. And what started as a promise to keep in touch with his family long before the era of social media, soon became a lifelong passion that accompanied him all across Asia.
During the 1950s Michael, who is now 91 years old, filmed a Hong Kong that none of us would recognize nowadays: a city without its iconic skyline drawn by the skyscrapers that illuminate each night in a multitude of colours. A city with no skyscrapers at all, he emphasizes. Throughout the course of that decade, the banker-turned-movie director also visited Macau several times and encountered a “small village” where water buffaloes roamed freely in the streets; something utterly unimaginable in the tourist-packed Macau of today.
Rogge considers himself to be a lucky man. He was still a teenager when Germany occupied Holland during World War II, and he narrowly escaped being sent to the invaders’ country to work in the factories building bombs. Not long after the end of the most brutal conflict humanity had ever seen, Michael managed to avoid war again, this time being exempted from serving in the Dutch army that was sent to quell the anti-colonial liberation movement that was taking place in Indonesia. As an employee at a bank, his employer managed to get him out of his military service. In the end, he did go to Asia, but instead of fighting a war in the colony, he was sent to Hong Kong to work in finance.
“I was so fortunate because in Holland no one went across the border on holidays. Dutch people had been confined to their country for a decade. Dutch youth never went abroad and there was I being sent around the world,” Michael recalls, speaking to CLOSER from his home in Amsterdam. “It was a great thing. I was 20 years old”.
“I had just survived German occupation in Holland. For five years we were suppressed and I had just passed through a period when there was no food at all in Holland. Nothing was available and then I came to Hong Kong,” Michael remembers.
For the young man, Hong Kong represented unimaginable freedom in all possible aspects: “It was a giant metropolis and I enjoyed the freedom. The British and the foreign class had privileges I had never experienced. It was the sort of life people in Holland could only have dreamt of.”
However, such immense freedom did not come without a cost: “When I left for Hong Kong, my parents wouldn’t see me for six years,” Michael says. Hence his promise: “I have a movie camera with me and I will film everything that happens”.
And so he did, starting with the entire journey by boat from Rotterdam to Hong Kong. Arriving in the then-British colony, his camera accompanied him everywhere in an effort to show his parents glimpses of his new life: his office on Queen’s Road, Central, Hollywood Road, the New Territories “and everything that was interesting in Hong Kong”.
Soon after, the Hong Kong Amateur Cine Club was formed and a yearly movie competition was launched.
“I started to make special movies not only for my family in Holland. I made, for instance, ones about the rain in Hong Kong, the Yau Ma Tei typhoon, Sunshine Island. I started to film all sorts of activities and I won prizes in every contest, so I developed more ambition,” Michael, who eventually became the president of the Hong Kong Amateur Cine Club, explains.
One particular episode that impressed Michael happened immediately upon his arrival in Hong Kong, while he was still on board the ship. The director remembers hearing over the radio that Chinese troops were nearing the border with the former British colony, and he feared they might take over the city. “But they stopped at the border,” he notes. Again, the year was 1949, the last year of the civil war in China that forced thousands of mainland refugees into the city.
“One cannot imagine it anymore, but the refugees had no water supply. There was one tap somewhere, and they lined up to get a bucket of water. They lived in very poor conditions in cellars downstairs. For the Chinese refugees it was still better than staying in China,” describes the director, who filmed the perils of these refugees and turned the footage into movies shot both in Macau and Hong Kong, now available on his YouTube channel.
WHEN WATER BUFFALOES ROAMED FREE
Michael Rogge came to Macau for the first time in 1950. The occasion? “There was a Dutch hockey team visiting Macau. They always had an annual competition with the Macau hockey team. The Macau people always won the contest, but it was just for fun,” the director remembers. “I went with them just to cheer them up. I rented a bicycle because in Holland we’re used to always going by bike,” he adds.
Asked to describe the Macau he found seven decades ago, Michael recalls that, “Macau was quite primitive at the time. There were indeed these casinos, but you had to duck your head and enter downstairs through an opening. [I gambled] but just for fun. I suppose I lost everything,” he recalls.
All these memories of the Macau that today exist only in the minds of the elderly, were captured by Michael’s camera and can be seen on his YouTube channel where he has collected hundreds of short clips from his time in Asia, and has attracted a local audience who are seeing the city differently for the first time.
“For instance, from Macau, I had one young person telling me:
‘My grandmother always said that in Macau the water buffaloes ran in the streets. I couldn’t believe it with all those casinos that buffaloes could be running in the streets, but when I saw your movie I saw them indeed running in the streets’,” the director recounts.
When Michael sees images of the Macau of today, he says it is “unrecognizable”: “There were no skyscrapers. It was a small village. It was still a Portuguese colony and you could see the people that were mixed Portuguese and Chinese, but it was more Chinese culture with the Chinese temples”.
However, it was in Hong Kong that the changes impacted Michael the most. When the director last visited the city he once described as “Shangri-La”, he could no longer find a glimpse of that idyllic place.
“It makes me very sad. Even in 1990 when I returned, I did not recognize Hong Kong anymore after 30 years. I found the whole atmosphere had changed so much that it was not Shangri-La anymore. It had lost its charm,” Michael laments, longing for the “cosy and small place” that was once Hong Kong.
“I HAVE THE WHOLE WORLD AS AN AUDIENCE”
Back in the time of World War II, when Rogge was still a teenager, he fantasized about his future as a movie director.
“I thought that when I grew up I would have a very nice villa, and in the villa I would have a projection room and I would invite people from the village to come and watch my movies,” he recalls.
More than seven decades later, YouTube has made this dream come true, even if in a slightly different way. In 2006, Michael started uploading the hours and hours of film he had collected over his whole life on to YouTube, a project that is now complete.
“You can sit for a whole week watching my videos on YouTube,” he laughs. “So actually, in a transformed way, my fantasy has come true. I don’t have a projection room, but I have the whole world to project my films on to. I have the whole world as an audience,” Michael, whose channel has 276,000 subscribers, proudly declares.
