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American Eyes on the Netherlands

This is a comprehensive study of Dutch films used to influence public perception and diplomacy, 1943鈥�74, including an historical survey of Dutch visual media in America.

鈥淗ere is an entirely new perspective on the history of the Dutch documentary film. Rather than concentrating on the film makers and their aesthetic aspirations, Henk Aay examines the distribution and exhibition of a particular selection of Dutch documentaries by the Netherlands Information Bureau/Service in the midsection of the United States between 1943 and 1974. Instead of measuring the success of these films by the awards won at film festivals, he analyzes their attendance figures and the geographical spread as regards exhibition. In the field of what has been coined 鈥榰seful cinema,鈥� this study presents a surprising approach by combining content analysis and social geography.鈥�
鈥擝ert Hogenkamp, Film and Media Historian

American Eyes on the Netherlands adds another chapter to the question: how have and do Americans perceive the Netherlands? From 1943 to 1974, more than six million Americans throughout the country saw one or more of some two hundred Dutch documentary films distributed by the Dutch government as part of a thirty-one-year propaganda and promotion campaign. This marked the first time that films about the Netherlands and its overseas territories were made available to a broad American public by means of country-wide diplomacy. It added films to other available visual media with Dutch content, such as paintings, drawings, and photographs; a new visual medium gave new momentum to increasing Americans鈥� knowledge about the Netherlands.

The circulation records kept by the Netherlands Information Service, the government agency that ran this public film diplomacy program, reveal who viewed individual films, where they were screened, and how many came to screenings of individual titles鈥攎any (impactful) or few (little influence). The viewership records are mapped and analyzed and matched to quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the films. This helped construct a changing knowledge palette of Americans鈥� knowledge about the Netherlands as the country moved from wartime/colonies (1940s) to reconstruction/nationalism (1950s) and to internationalism/affluence (1960/70s). A thread throughout is the geography of the Dutch information on offer in the films (centers and peripheries of attention in the Netherlands), spatial patterns that, in turn, became fixed in Americans鈥� knowledge of the country.

The last chapter situates this film diplomacy backward and forward into a survey of the history of Dutch visual media available and circulating in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. In the age of video on demand (VOD), it ends with ideas for sharing and distributing Dutch documentary and feature films (past and present) internationally more broadly and seamlessly.