Flourishing Period
Although Haanstra continued to make internationally acclaimed documentaries, the "school" more or less faded out by the late sixties. By this time, the first generation of Dutch filmmakers who graduated from the Dutch Film Academy began to make a name for themselves. The most famous director of this era is undoubtedly Fons Rademakers, who received domestic and international critical claim with a number of films between 1959 and 1963. Rademakers learned the business from Vittorio De Sica and Jean Renoir and brought his newfound knowledge of foreign art films with him. Contemporaries include Academy-laureates Frans Weisz, Pieter Verhoeff and Frans Bromet, another documentary maker. Slowly, fiction films become more and more popular in The Netherlands.
A more lasting success for Dutch film came in the 1970s, mostly under the influence of one man: Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven's five films of the decade - Business Is Business (Wat zien ik?, 1971), Turkish Delight (Turks Fruit, 1973), Katie Tippel (Keetje Tippel, 1975), Soldier of Orange (Soldaat van Oranje, 1977) and Spetters (1980) - were box-office hits; they are still in the top-twenty most successful Dutch films ever. Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange were successful abroad as well and eventually led to Verhoeven's Hollywood career. In 2006 Verhoeven returned to his own language and made Black Book (Zwartboek), his first Dutch spoken film since The Fourth Man (1983).
Other successful directors from this era are Wim Verstappen and Pim de la Parra, whose movies were more commercial than those of their colleagues in the 1960s. In his book Van Fanfare tot Spetters, film historian Hans Schoots argues that the flourishing period of Dutch film lies between these two films, ending with the controversial Spetters, after which the happy era that was the seventies was over, and a more down-to-earth approach to filmmaking kicked in. Indeed, after 1980, few Dutch films managed to bring crowds of millions to the cinemas, partly due to a decline in interest, partly due to home video systems which resulted in an overall drop in cinema attendance in the Netherlands.
Read more about this topic: Cinema Of The Netherlands
Famous quotes containing the words flourishing and/or period:
“He could walk, or rather turn about in his little garden, and feel more solid happiness from the flourishing of a cabbage or the growing of a turnip than was ever received from the most ostentatious show the vanity of man could possibly invent. He could delight himself with thinking, “Here will I set such a root, because my Camilla likes it; here, such another, because it is my little David’s favorite.””
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)