Abstract
This chapter addresses questions of language and film popularity by showing different patterns in film programming between big cities and small towns in the Netherlands between 1934 and 1936. The analysis shows that although Dutch popular films penetrated to even the smallest towns, there was a diminished interest for those in the mining towns Geleen and Heerlen. The relatively high presence of German miners in Heerlen very likely explains the apparent preference for films that were not very popular elsewhere in the Netherlands. The results show clearly that in a choice between films spoken in different languages, audiences tended to choose mother tongue films. While the social aspect of cinemagoing is important, language mattered and cinemagoing cannot simply be reduced to a habitual social practice.
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Notes
- 1.
www.cinemacontext.nl. The Cinema Context Collection database contains information about films, film programmes, cinemas and their owners, distributors, and the rulings of the Centrale Film Keuringscommissie (Film Censorhip Committee) The programme information from 14 of 22 cities was collected from local newspapers in which the cinemas advertised. (Alkmaar, Apeldoorn, Culemborg, Dordrecht, Eindhoven, Haarlem, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Leiden, Nijmegen, Schiedam, Tiel, Tilburg and Zeist) For the remaining eight cities, the Cinema Context website offered the information for the weekly showings. (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag, Groningen, Maastricht, Heerlen, Geleen and Zierikzee.) We would also like to thank Karel Dibbets, the project leader of Cinema Context. The Cinema Context data were supplemented with the number of times a film was shown per week, as was done for the other cities. The information about the programming is found in newspapers in which the cinema operators advertised.
- 2.
I’m very grateful to Jaap Boter who performed the analysis.
- 3.
See, for a detailed explanation of the applicability of Latent Class Analysis, Vermunt (2004). A Latent Class Analysis leaves room for uncertainty and calculates the chance that something belongs to a certain class (cluster). There are statistical measures to determine the optimal number of segments and the quality of the solution. See also Wedel et al. (2000).
- 4.
Different from Sedgwick’s method, ticket prices were not included in the calculation as they were unknown. Also different is the calculation of number of screenings; instead of a week or half a week, the actual number of screenings per week was put into the data set. This made it possible to differentiate in the degree of popularity of films shown in small places where cinemas only opened their doors for a couple of days a week.
- 5.
The number of foreign workers increased from 17 per cent in 1905 to 32 per cent in 1930. There are no numbers available from before 1905.
- 6.
The movie Fürst Woronzeff was based on the novel with the same title by Margot von Simpson published in 1929.
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Pafort-Overduin, C. (2018). Language and Cultural Nearness: Film Programming Strategies and Audience Preferences in Big Cities and Small Towns in the Netherlands 1934–1936. In: Treveri Gennari, D., Hipkins, D., O'Rawe, C. (eds) Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66344-9_16
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