Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations, Unidentified Films and Historical Currencies
- Introduction
- I La Comète Belge: Jean Desmet’s Travelling Cinema, The Imperial Bio (1907-1910)
- II In The Beginning…: Film Distribution in the Netherlands Before Desmet
- III Gold Rush: In the Throes of Cinema Mania (1909-1914)
- IV Film Market Europe: Buying Films Abroad (1910-1914)
- V White Slave Girls and German Kultur: Film Rental and Distribution Strategies in the Netherlands (1910-1914)
- VI Onésime et Son Collègue: Competition (1910-1914)
- VII Das Ende vom Lied: The Impact of the First World War (1914-1916)
- VIII Quo Vadis?: Desmet’s Film Rental and Cinema Operation During the Great War (1914-1916)
- IX Afterlife: A New Career and the Beginning of a Collection
- X In Retrospect: Jean Desmet’s Place in Film History
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Photo Credits
- Film Culture in Transition
- Index of Film Titles
- General Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations, Unidentified Films and Historical Currencies
- Introduction
- I La Comète Belge: Jean Desmet’s Travelling Cinema, The Imperial Bio (1907-1910)
- II In The Beginning…: Film Distribution in the Netherlands Before Desmet
- III Gold Rush: In the Throes of Cinema Mania (1909-1914)
- IV Film Market Europe: Buying Films Abroad (1910-1914)
- V White Slave Girls and German Kultur: Film Rental and Distribution Strategies in the Netherlands (1910-1914)
- VI Onésime et Son Collègue: Competition (1910-1914)
- VII Das Ende vom Lied: The Impact of the First World War (1914-1916)
- VIII Quo Vadis?: Desmet’s Film Rental and Cinema Operation During the Great War (1914-1916)
- IX Afterlife: A New Career and the Beginning of a Collection
- X In Retrospect: Jean Desmet’s Place in Film History
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Photo Credits
- Film Culture in Transition
- Index of Film Titles
- General Index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade , pp. 11 - 15Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2003