Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade

Front matter

i bs

N v iR w and the ks -— Early Dutch Film Trade — 8 ses, IVO BLOM

AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

Preface

Abbreviations, Unidentified Films and Historical Currencies

Introduction 1. TheStory Behind the Collection: A Career and Its Perspectives 2. Film Distribution as the Missing Link

3. The Career in Perspective l. La Cométe Belge

Jean Desmet's Travelling Cinema, The Imperial Bio (1907-1910) i. Desmet's Debut in Dutch Film Culture 2. Lutte pour la Vie: Jean Desmet on the Fairground

3. The Imperial Bio Grand Cinematograph

Il. In The Beginning...

Film Distribution in the Netherlands Before Desmet 1. Nóggerath 2. Pathé

3. Fresh Developments

Ill. Gold Rush In the Throes of Cinema Mania (1909-1914) 1. Desmet in Rotterdam 2. Desmet Goes to Amsterdam The Hierarchy of Permanent Cinemas 4. New Desmet Cinemas Outside Amsterdam: the Gezelligheid in Rotterdam, the Cinema Palace in Bussum

IV. Film Market Europe Buying Films Abroad (1910-1914) 1. Second-Hand Films (1910-1912)

2: Between Brussels and Berlin. Desmet's Purchases

1912-1914

102 112

133 133

8 Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade 3. Survey of Desmet's Purchases 1910-1914 184 V. White Slave Girls and German Kultur

Film Rental and Distribution Strategies in the Netherlands

(1910-1914) 187 1. The Beginnings of Desmet's Distribution Business and the

Consolidation of His Clientele (1910-1912) 188 2. Films by the Kilometre 191 3. ‘Monopoly’ Films. Distributing the Exclusive Film in the

Netherlands (1913-1914) 199 4. Mature Clients. Desmet's Shifting Clientele (1912-1914) 206 5. Expansion. Distribution in Belgium, the Dutch East Indies and

Elsewhere 212 VI. Onésime et Son Collègue

Competition (1910-1914) 217 i. Gildemeijer versus Desmet. The Tug-of-War for Asta Nielsen 218 2. Desmet versus Pathé. Competitor and Client 222 3. Nóggerath, Desmet and the Italian Costume Epics 227 4. New Competitors 232 5. The Ranks Close. The Trade Journals and Control of the

Cinemas 238 VII. Das Ende vom Lied

The Impact of the First World War (1914-1916) 243 1. The Impact of the Outbreak of the First World War on the

Dutch Film Trade and Film Availability in the Netherlands 243 2. Jean Desmet's Wartime Purchases 251

Desmet's Wartime Clientele 267 4. Mounting Competition 272 VIII. Quo Vadis?

Desmet's Film Rental and Cinema Operation During the

Great War (1914-1916) 271 1. The Exhibition and Reception of Desmet's Films During the

War Years 277

Table of Contents 9

2. Desmet's Cinema Operations and Dutch Cinemas (1914-1916) 291 3. New Cinemas in the Desmet Family 298 IX. Afterlife

A New Career and the Beginning of a Collection 305 1. The Dutch Film World from 1916. The Demise of Desmet as a

Motion Picture Exhibitor 305 2. Desmet's Activities after 1916 314 3. The End of Desmet’s Film Distribution Business 318 4. Jean Desmet's Career after the First World War: Cinema Royal

and the Flora Project 322 5. From Film Stocks to Museum Pieces 327 X. |n Retrospect

Jean Desmet's Place in Film History 337 1. The Netherlands in an International Perspective: ‘Open’ and

‘Closed’ Situations 337 2. The Institutionalisation, Internationalisation and Localisation

of Cinema 341 3. Who's in Charge? 343 4. Between Conservatism and Modernity 349 5. Business Archive or Trade Press? 353 6. The Perspective of the Present 355 Notes 361 Bibliography 437 Photo Credits 453 Index of Film Titles 455 General Index 463

Preface

It's fighting a losing battle. Even if I were able to decipher all the handwriting, even if I had a decent amount of Dutch and European history at my fingertips, I would still be looking through the keyhole of an otherwise sealed door, my vision confined to what the impassive keyhole deigned to show or conceal. Each of these letters is a keyhole like this.

Some writers may have to struggle with a lack of source material, but the principal source of this book — the business archive of Jean Desmet - is a wall of written paper. The keyhole metaphor is entirely appropriate, although there are, properly speaking, many keyholes. I looked in on Desmet himself, but also on his customers, suppliers and competitors. Hundreds of different stories, sometimes contradicting each other, yet all revealing the complexity of (film) history. In a Pathé farce called UN COUP D’OEIL PAR ÉTAGE (1904), a concierge peeps through the keyholes on each floor of his building and discovers a fire on the top floor. We come upon signs of damage by fire and water in Desmet's business archive as well. In 1938, a fire broke out at the top of the Cinema Parisien, his cinema in Amsterdam. Both Desmet's films and his business records were very nearly lost, and this book would never have been written.

My book is a condensed and reworked version of a dissertation, originally written in Dutch, which was awarded a doctorate by the University of Amsterdam in March 2000. The original idea of the study goes back to the end of the 1980s. In 1988 Nelly Voorhuis and I were organising a festival of Italian cinema before 1945 entitled ‘Il primo cinema italiano 1905-1945’, which marked my introduction to early Italian film, to the Giornate del Cinema Muto at Pordenone, Italy, and to the international community of film historians. I became fascinated by the ‘mainstream cinema’ of the decade 1910-1920. It was only then that I became properly acquainted with the Desmet Collection, and we selected several of Desmet's Italian films for the festival programme. Together with the film historian and festival programmer Paolo Cherchi Usai, I looked at unrestored Desmet films at the Netherlands Filmmuseum's auxiliary branch in Overveen. It was the first time I had seen nitrate films, with their bright monochrome tinting, or caught the stale odour of decomposing nitrate stock. I soon got used to this smell as it happened, for a month later I joined the archive staff at Overveen, where I spent the next five years looking at nitrate films. The task of conducting foreign visitors around the museum gave me the opportunity of viewing a large part of the Desmet Collection.

My long contact with the films and my aesthetic fascination with them made me curious about the story behind them. A limited account of Desmet and his world of film had already appeared in articles by Frank van der Maden and myself, but the full tale still remained to be told. The source at my disposal was truly unique: that ^wall of paper' or the Desmet Archive. Together with the films and publicity materials of the Desmet Collection, the archive forms the remains of a career in films. It was a career that lasted just ten years, yet the changes that took place during those particular ten years were enormous. The archive enables us to form a sharp and finely detailed image of both Desmet's career and the world of early cinema by which he was surrounded. Invoices, rental books, account books, sales lists, customs letters and telegrams show both the high level of professionalism of the pioneers of Dutch distribution and the hectic nature of the world within which they were operating. It is above all the correspondence with film companies, foreign middlemen and Dutch cinema owners that reveals the film scene of those years at its most intense. Reading this correspondence, the reader accompanies a cinema operator who watches his theatre going downhill as he struggles to keep going, or a distributive trader who sees his customers abandoning him for competitors with more attractive film offerings. Besides these misfortunes, we can also follow the rise of new cinema exhibitors, traders and film production companies. But most of all, we are absorbing the perspective of the Dutch film distributor. What were Jean Desmet's priorities? What was relevant and what wasn't? What changed for him in that short period of a decade? And what were the tokens of those changes? The Desmet Collection opens onto all kinds of stories: the story of cinemas such as the Amsterdam Cinema Parisien, a Desmet biography, a history of style, a history of representation. My own choice has fallen on the history of a business combined with a history of film, and my introduction will elaborate on this.

Both in the Netherlands and abroad I have received a great deal of help with the preparation of this book and I wish to record my thanks to a large number of people.

For the period during which I was preparing my material for submission as a doctoral dissertation, I would like to express my thanks to the University of Amsterdam, and particularly to Karel Dibbets for his invariably constructive and stimulating comments on the text. Our long and speculative conversations on how and why Desmet and his film world took the particular shape they did greatly helped to clarify Desmet's story. I also wish to thank my two

Preface 13 doctoral supervisors, Professor Thomas Elsaesser and Professor Evert van Uitert; the research school Huizinga Instituut and the staff and assistants of the Department of Film and Television Studies. Three travel bursaries from the Nederlands Instituut voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), supplemented by financial assistance from the Faculty of Arts, enabled me to make research trips to Berlin, Frankfurt, Koblenz, Brussels, Paris and London. Mustafa Ozen made a database of Desmet's acquisitions registers during his period as an intern at the Filmmuseum of which I have made grateful use.

Special thanks are due naturally to the Netherlands Filmmuseum, to its present director Rien Hagen, and to former director Hoos Blotkamp, who gave me the opportunity of embarking on this study. Both encouraged my work and were generous with their help in enabling me to complete and publish it. I would also like to thank the staff who assisted me during the research, especially Rommy Albers for his information on travelling cinemas in the Netherlands and film exhibition in Amsterdam. Thanks to Arja Grandia; to the non-film departmental staff, particularly Jan-Hein Bal, Soeluh van de Berg and Piet Derks; to the staff in Overveen, especially Giovanna Fossati, Mark-Paul Meijer and Ole Schepp; and to the museum's library staff, who prepared videotapes for me and fetched countless boxes from the cellars and vaults. Thanks also to Bastiaan Anink, Don Bierman, Peter Delpeut, Daan Hertogs, Paul Kusters, Bregtje Lameris, Frank van der Maden, Henk de Smidt and Peter Westervoorde, all formerly of the museum staff, and to former directors the late Jan de Vaal and Frans Maks. Thanks finally to local and regional archives in Amsterdam, Den Bosch, Leiden and Rotterdam.

The two research seminars organised by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Utrecht and the Department of Film and Television at the University of Amsterdam were a great source of stimulation. In this setting, I was able to present my work and develop and exchange ideas, especially in the area of early film and film in the Netherlands but also at the more general level of theory and history. William Uricchio, Frank Kessler, Eva Warth and Thomas Elsaesser were particularly exciting discussion leaders, but I also owe much to other members of these seminars. I should also like to thank the University of Utrecht for access to dissertations on local Dutch film history and for digital information on Dutch film journals.

In the Netherlands, I am particularly indebted to Jenny Reynaerts for inspirational discussions of our respective dissertations; to Sabine Lenk for a look at her material on the German film world and the First World War; to Rob Du Mée for his material on Nóggerath father and son; to Bernadine van Royen-Fontaine, and the late Lo Schuring for their reminiscences of 'film-going in the 1910s' and to the late Geoffrey Donaldson for generous access to his archive. Thanks also to Ansje van Beusekom and the Dutch Union of Cinema Owners and Film Distributors (NFC).

Finally, I have pleasure in acknowledging the tireless and generous support of Jean Desmet's granddaughter, Ilse Hughan. The warmth and openness with which she has received and helped me over the years has made my work that much easier, more pleasurable and more engrossing. Ilse introduced me to descendants of Jean's brother, Theo, and of their sister, Rosine. She placed whole boxes of family archive material at my disposal and regaled me with her own memories of her grandfather, her mother and the Dutch film world.

Film historians and archives in other countries helped me to situate Desmet in an international context. For more than ten years, Paolo Cherchi Usai has impressed upon me the vital importance and value of the Desmet Collection. I would like also to thank Richard Abel for regular discussion of my approach to the material, and for reading and commenting on the chapters of my dissertation; André Gaudreault for his support as former chairman of the Domitor Society; Roland Cosandey for fruitful conversations on film collections, versions of films and film-historical research; Guido Convents for information on Belgium; Aldo Bernardini and Vittorio Martinelli for information on Italy and Italian film; Tony Fletcher for details of the British film trade; Michael Wedel, ‘my man in Berlin’; Heide Schlüpmann for reading ‘abstracts' and proposals; Martin Loiperdinger for invaluable information and stimulating dialogues; and the organisers of the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone/Sacile and the Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.

My thanks also to: Bibliotheque de l'Arsenale (Emmanuelle Toulet), BiFi (Marc Vernet), British Film & Video Council (Luke McKernan), Bundesarchiv Berlin (Evelyne Hampicke), Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Centre Georges Pompidou (Dominique Païni), Cinémathèque Frangaise (Laurent Mannoni), Cinémathéque Gaumont (Manuela Padoan), Cinémathèque Pathé (Thierry Roland), Cinémathèque Royale (Gabriëlle Claes), Danske Filmmuseet (Thomas Christensen), Deutsches Historisches Museum (Rainer Rother), Musée Gaumont (Corinne Faugeron), National Film & Television Archive (Elaine Burrows, Briony Dixon, John Oliver), Public Record Office, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, and Herbert Birett, Mats Bjerkin, Stephen Bottomore, Henri Bousquet, Eileen Bowser, Susan Dalton, Lili Debs-Justet, Marc Frey, Jeanpaul Goergen, Tom Gunning, Nicholas Hiley, Peter Krámer, Michele Lagny, Antonia Lant, Thierry Lefebvre, Jean-Jacques Meusy, Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus, Charles Musser, David Robinson, Eberard Spiess, Janet Staiger, Marianne Thys, Vanessa Toulmin, Yuri Tsivian, Casper Tybjerg, Jens Ulf-Meller, and Roel Vande Winkel. I should like to express very special thanks to Kristin

Preface 15

Thompson and Corinna Müller for the inspirational challenge of their books to my own and for their readiness to discuss them with me.

My thanks to my editors at Amsterdam University Press, in particular to Jaap Wagenaar, Anniek Meinders, Arnout van Omme, Suzanne Bogman and Saskia de Vries. Thanks also to the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek for subsidising the translation; to James Lynn for his translation, editorial advice and stimulating comments on the book; to the Netherlands Filmmuseum for illustrative materials; the Prince Bernhard Foundation for subsidising the printing; and finally to Paul van Yperen who has corrected the text through all its phases and lived with me and "Desmet for years, spurring me on with stimulating ideas at times when I thought it would all never end.

Abbreviations

AIH Archive Ilse Hughan, Amsterdam

BA Bundes-Archiv

B&W Burgemeester & Wethouders (Mayor and Aldermen = Municipal Executive)

DA Desmet Archive (Netherlands Film Museum), Amsterdam

GAA Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Amsterdam

GAD Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Dordrecht

GADL Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Delft

GADV Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Deventer

GAR Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Rotterdam

GARM Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Roermond

GAW Gemeentearchief (Municipal Archive) Wageningen

NAA Nederlands Audiovisueel Archief (Dutch Audiovisual Archive), Hilversum

NFM Netherlands Film Museum, Amsterdam

SDB Stadsarchief (City Archive) Den Bosch

Unidentified Films

Identified film titles are printed in small capitals with the English release titles in brackets. Asterisks indicate literal translations of titles for which English titles are unavailable. Unidentified Dutch and German release titles are printed in italics with literal English translations in brackets.

Historical Currencies

Unless otherwise indicated, conversions are based on exchange rates in the year 2000. In 2000, 1 guilder = c. 45 eurocents; 1 Belgian franc = c. 2.5 eurocents. With the exception of the euro, numbers have been rounded up to the nearest whole. These figures are merely approximate and should be treated with caution. The table indicates the factor by which a given historical sum should be multiplied in order to work out its value in 2000.

Abbreviations, Unidentified Films and Historical Currencies

* The conversion of the French franc is based on 1998 exchange rates; the franc-Euro conversion is based on the e. In 1999, 1 French franc = 6.5 eurocents.