History
The first Dutch film was the slapstick comedy Gestoorde hengelaar (1896) by M.H. Laddé. Willy Mullens was one of the influential pioneers of Dutch cinema in the early 1900s. His slapstick comedy film The Misadventure of a French Gentleman Without Pants at the Zandvoort Beach is the oldest surviving Dutch film.
Although the Dutch film industry is relatively small, there have been several active periods in which Dutch filmmaking thrived. The first boom came during the First World War when the Netherlands was one of the neutral states. Studios like Hollandia produced an impressive cycle of feature films. A second wave followed in the 1930s, as talking pictures led to a call for Dutch-spoken films, which resulted in a boom in production: between 1934 and 1940, 37 feature films were released. To accommodate the rapid growth, the Dutch film industry looked to foreign personnel experienced with sound film technology. Mostly these were Germans who had fled their country as Hitler took power. Several renowned German directors who would go on to work in Hollywood directed films in the Netherlands in this period, most notably Douglas Sirk (Boefje, 1939).
During World War II, the private Dutch film industry came to a near halt. However, the German-led occupation government supported many small propaganda films in support of the Third Reich. The most well-known were De nieuwe tijd breekt baan (A New Order Arises, 1941), Met Duitschland tegen het Bolsjewisme (With Germany against Bolshevism, 1941) and Werkt in Duitschland (Work in Germany, 1942). After 1943, this funding came to an end, due to internal struggles within the Dutch Kultuurkamer and the lack of money of the occupational government.
Read more about this topic: Cinema Of The Netherlands
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)