Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Celui-ci est abondamment illustré
avec des reproductions d’affiches et
des photogrammes, dont une section
couleur qui témoigne éloquemment
du travail remarquable du
Netherlands Film Museum dans la
conservation de la couleur.
Hombre de espectáculo, distributor de
películas, exhibidor, Jean Desmet fue
un personaje importante de la
industria cinematográfica de los
Países-Bajos, antes de la Segunda
Guerra Mundial y durante la misma.
En 1957, la hija de Desmet legó al
Netherlands Film Museum el
patrimonio cinematográfico de su
padre. Este comprendía centenares de
películas, el material publicitario y la
documentación correspondiente a la
explotación de las películas
comercializadas o distribuidas por la
empresa familiar. El fondo de
películas, proveniente de todos los
grandes países productores de aquel
entonces, constituían un verdadero
regalo que ningún conservador
hubiera menospreciado.
While reading this book, I pictured him as a kind of spider sitting in the
middle of his web, weaving complicated networks all over the country
and the region – and crisscrossing the webs of his competitors. He was
an independent man who ran a family business, a successful
businessman, neither at the top nor the bottom of his profession, and
in the end, wealthy not from the residue of his film career but from his
acumen as a real estate magnate.
If Desmet was representative of the early film tycoons, his experience
differs in some ways from those elsewhere. A detail interesting for me
was the fact that beer drinking formed a normal part of going to
cinemas in Amsterdam at that time. In the United States, the proudest
boast of the progressive movement was that cinemas drew men away
from the saloons and into the nickelodeons, together with their
families. The production of Dutch films was small and apparently of
little interest for Desmet. He depended on a film supply from other
countries, at first largely on the production of the dominant French
company, Pathé, as was the case in most of the world. His business
grew with the expansion of production in all the film-producing
countries. Although he got drawn into the demand for the long feature
films, he also continued to trade in the short film all through his film
career. The Netherlands remained neutral during the war. The film trade
was booming there, although, of course, not without many difficulties
due to shortages, especially the films to keep the cinemas supplied.
Conditions affected Desmet’s work as a distributor, too. He could no
longer get films from Belgium, for example, formerly the central
supplier of films from other countries. Britain, at first a major
international distribution center, became less able to send films to a
country which at the same time received films from Germany. Older
films got shown and worn out, and new sources of supply had to be
found, including Italy and the United States. Such patterns of
distribution and their disruptions determined which films the public
would see and influenced the course of production throughout the
world.
The book is organized in chapters on various aspects of Desmet’s
experiences that overlap in time, yet follow a certain chronology as
Desmet’s profession changes its nature. It follows that there is some
redundancy, perhaps unavoidable, yet the details are so specific, the
research so extensive, as to make this work valuable as a reference as
well as a history. Many of the films mentioned in the text still survive in
the Desmet collection at the Netherlands Film Museum. The book is
well-illustrated with posters and frames from films, including a color
section, a tribute to the Netherlands Film Museum’s excellent work in
preserving color
Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, Ivo Blom
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003
461 pages, illustrations
76 Journal of Film Preservation / 67 / 2004