Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis

This editorial offers an introduction to the current issue.

A systematic quantitative research of the Flemish press of the 1930s shows how the medium of the comic strip suddenly became quite widespread in this crucial decade. Comics had of course already been published in Flandres before the 1930s, but from the 1930s the number of published comics suddenly grew enormously, becoming typical features in various publication formats (dailies, illustrated journals and children’s magazines). Although the large majority of the comics was still published in black and white, those in children’s magazines were sometimes in colour. The sequences predominantly had a horizontal layout (although 17% of the comics in illustrated journals were published in a vertical column). Balloons were still little used (only in about one in five comics) but this changed in the course of the decade. Each publication format also had a preference for a specific type of comic, with the dailies publishing far more serial stories than the illustrated journals and children’s magazines did. Newspapers and illustrated journals would use at lot of foreign material. Dailies got their comics predominantly from the Netherlands, while the illustrated journals usually published Scandinavian wordless gag comics. Children’s magazines, on the contrary, mostly worked with Belgian artists.

The Sephardic Belinfante family have produced at least two dozen prominent journalists in six or seven generations since around 1800, which is unique in Dutch press history. The majority of these journalists specialized in the specific branch of parliamentary journalism, or at least received thorough training in this field. It was around 1844 that, primarily for their own calculated benefit, the Belinfantes started to cooperate with the Van Dias family of journalists, also of Sephardic descent. In 1869 the two families formalized their cooperation by establishing the Nederlandsch Correspondentiebureau voor Dagbladen (the Dutch Correspondence Bureau for Newspapers). During at least 70 years (from 1830 till 1900) Belinfante & Vas Dias were if not monopolizing the field of Dutch parliamentary journalism than at least leading in it. Increased competition caused their monopoly position to weaken gradually after 1900. They lost many long-time customers, who started to employ their own correspondents in The Hague. Finally, in 1935, they lost the battle against the association of newspaper publishers and its Algemeen Nederlandsch Persbureau (General Dutch Press Agency).

In addition to the now well-known and well-restored early Dutch Biograph films, Ivo Blom presents another series of early ‘views’ of the Netherlands, which have hitherto hardly been studied by Dutch film historians. These films include streetview shots of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and recordings of media events involving Queen Wilhelmina and Paul Kruger. Blom examines the visual material as well as the historical context of its production and reception. As a result, he discovers that the films were made by Anton Nöggerath Sr. He then traces the afterlife of these films to the Nederlandsch Centraal Filmarchief (Central Dutch Film Archive), a private initiative that was established in the 1920s, and a forerunner to EYE (Filmmuseum) and the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld & Geluid (Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision).

After the Second World War, films destined to be shown in the classroom were increasingly used by primary and secondary schools in the West. These shorts were used as didactic aids in additionto regular teaching of compulsory curriculum subjects, such as geography, biology or history. The main producer and distributor of such items in the Netherlands was Stichting Nederlandse Onderwijs Film (n.o.f., or Dutch Foundation for Educational Film). In this article, Eef Masson gives us an impression of the rhetorical breadth of the material which the foundation distributed. In particular she focusses on the ways in which the textual strategies of the films relate to the didactic matter which they were meant to (help) pass on. Starting from the assumption that texts, in their rhetorical aspect, are always geared towards bringing about or maintaining a communicative exchange, Masson claims that a distinction can be made in terms of whether talking films, in this process, focus their viewers’ attention on facts or skills that are academically ‘relevant’, or instead divert or temporarily divert their attention, thus ‘sugar-coating’ the metaphorical ‘didactic pill’.

Over 100,000 collaborators were imprisoned in internment camps after the liberation of the Netherlands on 5 May 1945. During the first few months many wrongs happened in these camps, which is why this episode was very soon characterized as a ‘black page’ in Dutch history. More than sixty-five years later this image of a ‘black page’ has hardly changed, quite the contrary. Repeatedly the internment camps have been rediscovered as a taboo in Dutch history. Films, documentaries and publications about the internment camps that were made in recent decades gave them an even worse image, that of a ‘black book’. Remarkably, these representations of the internment camps were always based on the same source: a highly biased 1949 pamphlet by a former collaborator disclosing the abuses in the camps for the first time. In this article Grevers discusses how different actors persisted in using this image in the media during six decades and what they tried to achieve by doing so.

Dutch newspapers have extensively compared the initial period of the financial crisis of 1929 to that of 2008 as well as their corresponding characteristics. This article shows that there are indeed many similarities in the framing and representation of both financial crises in two selected Dutch newspapers, the popular De Telegraaf and the reliable Algemeen Handelsblad. One similarity is that both newspapers in both periods mostly used the economic consequences frame. The types of sources on which they relied, however, were different. Further study of the sources and a qualitative analysis of the most popular frame revealed important differences between the representations of both financial crises.

In this contribution the author reviews Willy Forst. Ein filmkritisches Porträt by Fransesco Bono.

In this contribution the author reviews Digital Material. Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology by Marianne van den Boomen e.a.

In this contribution the author reviews Propaganda en spektakel: vroegmoderne intochten en festiviteiten in de Nederlanden by Joop. W. Koopmans, Werner Thomas (red.) [author].

In this contribution the author reviews Gedrukte chaos. Populisme en moord in het Rampjaar 1672 by Michel Reinders.

In this contribution the author reviews Realisten en reactionairen. Een geschiedenis van de Indisch-Nederlandse pers 1905-1942 by Gerard Temorshuizen.

Publications about history of media and film.