Spectacles of Conspicuous Consumption: Picture Palaces, War Profiteers and the Social Dynamics of Moviegoing in the Netherlands, 1914-1922

Abstract

This article examines the sharp increase in cinema attendance in the Netherlands during the First World War and its long-term impact on Dutch film culture. The authors argue that a rise in youth wages, a coal shortage that forced people to look for entertainment outside the private sphere, and the emergence of a new upwardly mobile class of nouveau riches which had made their fortune with war profiteering, were responsible for the sudden popularity of the cinema in the Netherlands. Rather than a drive for respectability on the part of cinema owners, it was this growth in demand that accounts for the construction of picture palaces, which were partly financed by war profiteers. Because of their association with war profiteers and nouveau riche taste, picture palaces were criticized and shunned by the nation's cultural elite and vested middle classes, who continued to see the cinema as a fairground entertainment. Hence, in contrast with developments elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, the emergence of picture palaces in the Netherlands did not facilitate but rather hampered cinema's integration into the cultural mainstream