Introduction

Apart from the art-house cinema Het Ketelhuis, the self-declared ‘canteen of Dutch film’ founded in 1999, Dutch film is only consistently celebrated during the ten days of the annual Netherlands Film Festival (NFF), which started as the Netherlands Film Days in 1981. In the 2007 festival, a jury chaired by Jeltje van Nieuwenhoven presented the Canon of Dutch Cinema (Canon van de Nederlandse Film) in order to stimulate an interest in national productions. The jury decided to restrict the list to only 16 titles, covering a huge diversity of types and genres: shorts, documentaries, black & white, silent films, box-office hits, comedy, animation, experimental films, film festival successes and youth cinema. On the one hand, the canon bows to popular entertainment – the ‘low-class’ humour of Flodder (Dick Maas, 1986) and the ‘parochial’ comedy Fanfare (Bert Haanstra, 1958) being the most obvious examples. On the other hand, the canon includes (‘serious’) artistic cinema – with the experimental shorts Ik kom wat later naar Madra [That Way to Madra] (Adriaan Ditvoorst, 1965) and Living (Frans Zwartjes, 1971) at the other end of the spectrum of commercial endeavours. Except for some critical remarks about a few missing titles – such as Paul Verhoeven’s Soldaat van Oranje [Soldier of Orange] (1977), George Sluizer’s Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (1988) or Mike van Diem’s Karakter [Character] (1997) – the Canon of Dutch Cinema has met remarkably little controversy. ¹