Last year I wrote two blog posts about the acquisition and distribution of Nicole Vedrès’s Paris 1900 (France, 1947) by the Nederlands Filmmuseum in the late 1940s. These posts were based on the research I carried out at the Eye Filmmuseum as scholar in residence in the academic year 2017-2018. The material from these two posts have now been turned into a short article titled “’This is our first big experiment’: Paris 1900 (1947) and the Eye Filmmuseum’s early collection-building” for the journal Early Popular Visual Culture – a so-called Archive Piece which each issue of the journal features.

The title I gave the piece – “This is our first big experiment” – is a quote by Jan de Vaal, the Filmmuseum’s director between 1946-1987. He used these words to describe the role that the acquisition of Paris 1900 played in the institution’s early collection building and film distribution. In case the film would become a success for the Filmmuseum it would allow for acquiring more films and build a collection/distribution library. You can read more about this and much more in the piece that can be found here (open access!). The original blog posts can be found here and here.

I would like to thank Sarah Dellmann for suggesting to include this piece of research in Early Popular Visual Culture and for her diligent editing work.

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Excerpt from interview with Nicole Vedrès on Paris 1900 in L’Ecran Français – Paris-Cinéma, 2 Mars 1948, the full interview can be read on the sempre in penombra blog