Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade

by Ivo Blom
Amsterdam University Press, Prinsengracht, The Netherlands, 2003
480 pp., illus. b/w, 22 col. Trade, euros 51.90; paper, euros 35.90
ISBN: 90-5356-570-1; ISBN: 90-5356-463-2.

Reviewed by Tom Gunning
University of Chicago

tgunning@uchicago.edu

When I was rather young, I had a strong desire to be an archeologist and read a number of old and rather classic books on the subject. I recall one discussion in which a professor of ancient literature had said with some disdain, "After all we aren’t looking for the laundry lists of the ancient Egyptians!" and an archeologist had replied, "Indeed that is precisely what we are looking for! Laundry lists will tell us things about a culture that loves poetry or philosophical speculations never will." Film history has moved from the confines of appreciation and glorification of the few films that had risen above the tides of mass culture and the demands of commerce and trials of censorship to become Art. We are in some ways like archeologists, looking not only for masterpieces (which can never cease to provide a principle, but hardly exclusive, motive for our endeavors) but for the film culture they came out of and fed back into. In this important new work, an authoritative survey of the Jean Desmet collection at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, scholar Ivo Blom has not only provided us with a detailed "laundry list " of early cinema but with a wealth of other things, as well.

Jean Desmet, a Dutch film exhibitor, then distributor, in the decade from 1907 to 1917, accomplished something for film history that far outweighs his (as Blom confesses) fairly minor role as an innovator in either aspect of the film industry that he practiced: He threw relatively little away. Instead of simply discarding——as so many film pioneers had a habit of doing——his stock of over 900 films as well as his business records and publicity material, Desmet preserved them for decades. In 1957 his heirs presented this treasure trove to the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Although it may have taken film historians some time to fully appreciate the uses that could be made of this mass of material, it was carefully preserved. Now, after more than a decade of work with the collection, Ivo Blom presents us with a synoptic account of the film career of Jean Desmet based on the collection.

The task of film history includes not only the description and analysis of film texts, but also——increasingly——an account of and analysis of the contexts of their production (technological, industrial, financial) and their reception (which depends essentially on their distribution and exhibition). The study of production——the history of film technology and the set up of the studio system, for instance——has made great strides over the last decades. Scholarship on exhibition is somewhat more recent but already impressive. But film distribution remains, for the most part, an under-researched area of film history even though it formed the topic of the most recent conference of Domitor (the international scholarly organization for the study of early cinema) this summer in Utrecht, and Kristin Thompson’s pioneering work on international distribution of American cinema around the world, Exporting Entertainment, has provided an important model. This new work by Ivo Blom combines a detailed account of a particular film exhibitor, with perhaps the first thorough discussions of a film distributor, revealing how exhibition and distribution interacted during a specific period of time, within a specific culture (the Netherlands). However, this description sells this extraordinary work of scholarship short. Better, I should state that it provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive studies of early film history, focusing on the Netherlands but covering the international scope of the film industry in this era, extending not only through all of Europe but also from the United States to the Dutch East Indies (although illuminating only specific aspects of these last two areas).

Blom’s close observation of the account books, correspondence, bills, and receipts of Desmet’s film business, as well as his publicity, allows him to deliver to us a fine-grained account of one of the most volatile periods in film history. What Blom’s account makes clear is not only the many transformations that occurred in the film business during this period but the need to realize the various aspect of film history each have their own history. Although our ultimate task must be to interrelate these elements, we must also acknowledge their relative independence and their differences from locale to locale. Just as radical changes occurred in film form during its first two decades, transformations in the business side were equally intense. In the United States the early period is dominated by exhibition of films in vaudeville houses, while in Western Europe the traveling fairground exhibitor held sway. Distribution was handled mainly by the direct sale of prints to exhibitors with the extent of vaudeville circuits or the changing venues of the traveling exhibitor supplying constantly renewed audiences for the stock of films owned.

In the U.S the major transition in exhibition came with the growth of the nickelodeons: cheap theaters, mainly urban with initially a primarily working class clientele that began appearing about 1905-1906. In Europe the parallel transition would seem to be the transition to fixed permanent theaters. Desmet’s career (and therefore the collection) covers this transformation. Desmet began as a fairground entrepreneur graduating from his fairground attraction, the Canadian Toboggan slide, to motion pictures in 1907. He then moved into permanent theaters around 1909, gradually phasing out his traveling exhibition. As in the US, the switch to fixed exhibition sites prompted the growth of film distribution as entrepreneurs moved into the position of middle men between producers and exhibitors, purchasing films from the production end and then renting them to the theater managers. Desmet also began purchasing films from a number of sources, as cinema moved from French (mainly Pathé) domination to a less centralized more broadly European business, doing business with firms in Germany, Belgium, France, England, and even, at points, the US.

Perhaps the most novel information Blom gathers from Desmet’s documents comes with the details about the film programs he offered. After the establishment of permanent theaters, the next major transformation is the increasing importance of longer films. Blom’s discussion of the role of the long film in Desmet’s career supports research recently undertaken by Ben Singer about exhibition in the US, revealing that feature films did not necessary immediately replace a program made up of many shorter films. Longer films became common in Europe a bit earlier than in the USA (which did however begin importing these longer foreign films) and for several years the programs that Desmet bought, distributed, and exhibited included both short and long films, with short films carefully programmed to lead up to the long feature film. It also may be that the growth of "elite" cinemas, catering to a higher class of audience may have occurred earlier in Europe (although it is striking that fairground exhibitors often charged higher prices for certain showings, and always had a graduated pricing scale for seats, whereas American film theaters more often had a one price policy).

However, it was Desmet’s lack of realization of the importance of longer films on their own, his reluctance to pay top price for them, and to recognize that the producers or their agents who controlled such films increasingly held the most powerful role in the film industry that led to his gradual extrication from the film business. Other distributors beat him out for the most popular films and increasingly the production companies or their own agents handled distribution. Although Desmet recognized and adapted to such innovations as exclusive control over a single film for a set area (the "monopoly" policy) or the switch by producers from selling prints to leasing them (occasionally willing to pay the new high prices), his way of doing business remained more in tune with an era where distributors called the shots. Ironically, it was his somewhat anachronistic policy of buying film prints and keeping them as his own stock for distribution that made his collection of films so valuable for film historians, whereas production companies often saw little value in preserving old prints.

Blom’s’ book is as filled with striking and vivid details as a painting by a Dutch Master. At points the reader can lose the thread and become overwhelmed by all the accumulated facts, but Blom’s excellent sense for what is both significant and intriguing, as well as his engaging style, brings us back on track. There are repetitive aspects to the book, often going over the same point in Desmet’s career several times from different viewpoints, and more careful editing might have streamlined it a bit. However, it is precisely the richness of information that makes this a book every film historian must-read.