Calvinism, the Ghost That Haunts Dutch Cinema

In the perpetual domestic debate on the state of Dutch fiction film and the conditions for filmmaking in general, we keep on seeing the return of more or less the same themes and grievances that were raised in the beginning when the first Dutch feature films were made in the 1920s and 1930s. This has tended to foster a prevailing sense of cynicism and negativity, leading to a common sentiment that’s characterized by a lack of faith in Dutch fiction films. The historically small market share of Dutch film in domestic movie theatres reflects this sentiment; it will probably never exceed the 26% of 1973, which can be largely ascribed to Paul Verhoeven’s Turks Fruit (Turkish Delight). Market share hit a low point in 1994 of just 0,6%, and averaged until 2000 only somewhere between 2 to 4% (very rough estimate).¹ There have been significant and structural increases of these numbers since then, as a result of essentially neoliberalist cultural policy strategies, raising the market share to a 13% on average since 2000 and never dropping below 10% since 2006, but this hasn’t greatly improved the domestic reputation of Dutch fiction film, and has clearly gone at the cost of international success. While the 2000s saw the rise of commercially viable romantic comedies and youth films, which caused market share peaks in 2011 (21,9%) and in the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic (20 to 23%), only three Dutch films were selected for the main competition of a prestigious international film festival since 2010.² This seems to indicate that the domestic successes of the many homogenous formulaic romantic comedies that were made in the last 15 or so years, which have reshaped the face of Dutch film, has been to the detriment of the international appeal of Dutch fiction film and its reputation as a form of art. 

In grappling with situations like these, Dutch people are often quick to take refuge behind their relative cultural insignificance on the world stage, while they are no strangers to boasting their feelings of national pride when it comes to other aspects of culture such as sports or art history. Yet smallness in size can be, even for filmmaking, especially combined with a favourable geographical location, just as well be an advantage rather than a limitation—recent scholarship on Danish film for instance suggests that ‘part of the explanation is that Denmark is not a successful film nation despite her size, but because of her size.’³ This can make it all the more puzzling that countries that are even smaller and might be looked down upon by Dutch people manage to produce films that resonate with international audiences and award committees. A recent international benchmark study shows that smaller neighbouring countries such as Belgium and Denmark might have produced fewer feature films between 2010 and 2022 (respectively 264 and 272) compared to the Netherlands (487), but these were films that achieved way more in the areas of prestigious international prizes and global audience numbers.⁴ This has again raised the question that was asked in the beginning days of Dutch film: what is it that the film industry and culture of exemplary countries like these have that the Netherlands does not? Is it because they have more talent, because the conditions for filmmaking and policy strategies are more effective, or is there something in the water they drink that just makes them love film more?

Something in the Water

As a consequence, the history of Dutch fiction film has so often been told by pointing out the things that are wrong with it. One of the root causes is commonly found in the persistent lack of a robust economic infrastructure to sustain consistent film production. Unique to the Dutch situation, however, is the monopolistic position long held by the Dutch Cinema Association, a cartel-like alliance of major cinema owners, distributors, and producers that dominated the film market between 1921 to 1992. This made it more difficult to produce and distribute films domestically. Correspondingly, cinema attendance in the Netherlands consistently lagged behind that of Belgium and larger European countries, at least between 1930 and 2000.⁵ In addition to economic and structural factors, cultural and political explanations have also been factored in. One recurring point is the consistently modest state budget allocated to film production, which has been ascribed to the lack of appreciation for culture and art in general in the Netherlands. This element of ‘how things usually go around here’ also extends to the fact that Dutch funding institutions, like many other public institutions in the Netherlands, traditionally have had to operate within the boundaries of a deeply ingrained model of procedural consensus-based decision-making, often resulting in fairer shares of funding for more productions, rather than the investment of more time and money in fewer productions and filmmakers. Notably, the Netherlands Film Fund has been cast as a central antagonist within this narrative, playing the role of a shadowy institution that is prone to extensive interference in the creative process, risk-averse decision-making, and an inability to support talent or to accommodate new projects from established filmmakers, leading some of Dutch cinema’s greatest talents to seek opportunities abroad.

While many of these claims remain under-researched, they do have a basis in fact and prompted calls for concrete policy changes aimed at improving cinema attendance and funding structures. The most recent policy plan of the Dutch Film Fund offers a reflection on this type of criticism.⁶ Yet beyond the economic and institutional, there exists a more intangible, almost mystical tradition of diagnosing the struggles of Dutch cinema. This narrative is shaped from within the field, by filmmakers, festival directors, journalists, critics, and film historians alike. Here, facts are often outweighed by bold claims and artistic statements that nevertheless tell us something about the trials and tribulations of filmmaking in the Netherlands. One of these presuppositions is that the Dutch, by their very nature, were never inclined to have a taste for cinema at all, given that they are a Calvinist people and are therefore deeply suspicious towards entertainment in general, especially towards dramatic forms. This is meant to explain why filmmaking in the Netherlands is like flogging a dead horse, and why there has been a historical lack of interest on the part of Dutch audiences toward native fiction films.

In 2006, a time where resurgent neoconservative populist nationalism took root in Dutch politics, the late media historian Karel Dibbets referred this notion to the land of fairytales, as did many other progressive-liberal historians and intellectuals. He proposed a different, more nuanced framework for looking at Dutch film history by considering the impact pillarisation had on the development of film culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Pillarisation divided Dutch society into separate ideological spheres (liberal, socialist, Catholic and Protestant) from the late 19th century until about the 1970s. During this period, every pillar had its own societal institutions, such as political parties and media outlets, to even schools and hospitals. Movie theatres however were part of the public space where all societal groups could intersect, and were therefore heavily subjected to regulation and compromise. With the Cinema Act of 1926, a Board of Film Censors composed of representatives from each pillar was established to ensure that films were agreeable to all pillars. The Dutch film industry in turn responded by organising itself into a cartel-like formation and by assuming a position of strict neutrality to maintain access to the broadest possible market, which gave rise to what is known to some as a cinema of consensus and homogeneity.⁷ 

Der zee ontrukt

This is a context that complicates the notion that Dutch Calvinism alone led to the underdevelopment of Dutch cinema. Still, Dutch Calvinist communities did maintain a strong aversion towards cinematic entertainment, which has carried on well throughout the post-war period. Calvinists generally avoided cinematic entertainment based on religious, moral and social grounds and were opposed to pictorial representations as well as theatrical performances and commercial entertainment in general.⁸ This is indicated by the scarcity of movie theatres in parts of the country with a high concentration of Orthodox Protestants. Yet even within these circles, non-theatrical grassroots film screenings took place, where exceptions were made for viewing scientific films, animation and fairy tales, under the condition that no professional actors were featured.⁹ As long as non-fiction dominated the programming, Protestant audiences were not all that strictly opposed to the medium of film itself.¹⁰

Probably unaware of these insights that only recently have come to light, for some of the prominent voices of post-war Dutch cinema, Calvinism became a majorly conventional, kind of clichéd, scapegoat to explain the lack of a thriving film culture. Many of them drew from their own experiences of growing up in Calvinist climates, which became a point of friction in a society that became increasingly secular and liberal after World War II. Their argument also drew on a more widespread set of stereotypes about Dutch national character, that due to nation-building efforts of the 19th century were closely tied in with Calvinism. In the 19th century, during a period of economic decline and weakening of the nation’s international position, the 17th century was mythologised as a golden age of national prosperity and cultural achievement, regardless of the fact that this republic of regents and merchants had a long way to go in becoming an actual nation. Powerful Protestant elites attributed the success of that period to Calvinist values, even while the Calvinists back then counted as a minority in society, even a small minority.¹¹ As a myth and blueprint of national character more so than a religion, it was closely tied to Dutchness itself, encompassing traits that are mostly self-serving like individualism, frugality, modesty, and a strong work ethic, which even extends onto (implicit) notions of moral and white superiority. In this way, it became an umbrella term to mean many other things whenever suitable for the context, showing it to be some sort of ideological shell, deployed to flexibly and often inconsistently support narratives of national identity.

A Cycle That Repeats Itself

Analogously, it gave rise to a notion that the Dutch are too Calvinist of a people to either produce or appreciate their own visual and dramatic fiction. In the case of film, this translates to a proclivity for moral storytelling, sober cinematography and art direction, and restrained acting styles. Above all perhaps, Dutch film journalists and historians have identified a strong aesthetic preference for realism in Dutch cinema, sometimes to the extent of seeing it as a central or even its sole characteristic.¹² This view is reinforced by the sheer amount of moral or psychological realist drama films that were made throughout Dutch film history, compared to the lack of genre films such as fantasy, sci-fi and horror—notwithstanding the fact that some of these realist films may, upon further consideration, also contain strong ‘imaginative’ elements, implying how flexible the notion of realism really is.¹³ In any case, this turns a blind eye to the tradition and reputation Dutch filmmakers historically also have in animation thanks to the likes of Paul Driessen (b. 1940), an imaginative genre par excellence. Yet it remains a one-sided view that persists, which can be perhaps best explained by the international legacy of Dutch documentary filmmaking. By the 1960s, documentary filmmakers Joris Ivens, Bert Haanstra, and Herman van der Horst had become the most internationally acclaimed of the Dutch filmmakers, long before the production of Dutch fiction film picked up steam in the 1960s. Their successes shaped international perceptions of Dutch cinema and casted a long shadow over subsequent generations of filmmakers.

It is a narrative has not only been adopted by critics, journalists, and film historians, but is also echoed in the statements of successive generations of post-war Dutch filmmakers and industry professionals. The latter have arguably often taken it one step further for the sake of publicity and/or to take a polemic stance against the state of Dutch filmmaking. One of the more prominent proponents of this narrative today is director Martin Koolhoven (b. 1969), known for films such as AmnesiA (2001) and Brimstone (2016). Koolhoven has repeatedly argued that Dutch film is constrained by a Calvinist mentality, which, in his view, suppresses imagination and favours austerity, something which he claims is evident even in the brevity of Dutch film titles.¹⁴ In 1999, he sided with a collective of filmmakers that called themselves ‘The Fantasists’, who presented the ‘Manifesto for the Imagination’ to protest Dutch cinema’s preoccupation with realism. Through public appearances and his television series Koolhoven’s View (2018-2022), which examines film history through the lens of genre film, Koolhoven has continued to critique this supposed Calvinist legacy. His 2016 film Brimstone, a stylised and violent Western, was not only a personal contribution to the genre film tradition, but also a deliberate critique of the Dutch Calvinist roots in the history of the United States.¹⁵ 

Like other post-war cultural figures who continued to invoke Calvinism as a pervasive influence on Dutch culture, Koolhoven himself was raised a Calvinist. His stance however is in no way particularly novel; it aligns with sentiments held by his peers and predecessors. Director Mike van Diem (b. 1959), who won an Academy Award for Karakter (Character, 1997), invoked this dichotomy between Calvinism and film in a similar fashion. Ahead of the Dutch Golden Calves awards, he described his film as a “grand, lavish, Catholic” production, an aesthetic he feared might be met with scepticism by audiences shaped by Calvinist austerity. This reference to Catholicism was less about the film’s content than it was about positioning his aesthetic preferences as deliberately opposed to what he related to a typically Dutch, Calvinist sensibility. As a self-described “Catholic boy from the south,” Van Diem explicitly called for an end to this mentality in Dutch film culture.

Van Diem’s remarks touch upon a broader cultural divide that runs through the country: the historical split between the Protestant North and the Catholic South of the Netherlands. While some apply it as a framework for understanding Dutch cultural identity, it is also a well-worn rhetorical device. For filmmakers like Van Diem, who moved from the historically Catholic south to pursue a career in filmmaking in Amsterdam, such distinctions often carry personal resonance. Previously this divide was mostly stressed by Wim Verstappen (1937–2004) and Jos Stelling (b. 1945), who claimed that cinema is inherently a Catholic medium and that it is fundamentally at odds with the Calvinist ethos of their native Netherlands. Stelling, in particular, contrasts the literalism and dialogue-driven nature of Calvinist storytelling with the Catholic emphasis on symbolism and visual ambiguity. This is a framework, he argues, that’s more suitable forz film, which privileges visual over verbal expression, pointing to the greater success of his films in Catholic countries such as Portugal and Italy as evidence of this claim.¹⁶ While speculative, Stelling’s ideas are in line with other theories about the influence of Catholicism on cinema, not only in terms of content and representation, but also in shaping cinematic aesthetics.¹⁷ Only recently have scholars begun to reassess the role of Protestantism in the development of film. Contrary to the longstanding notion of Protestants as puritanical and iconoclastic to cinema, recent research highlights Protestant contributions to the development of the medium.¹⁸ This calls into question the assumption that Protestantism inevitably fostered a purist, austere, or anti-imaginative interpretation of cinema. Indeed, the diversity of work produced by Protestant filmmakers like Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Wim Wenders undermines any simplistic alignment of Protestantism with aesthetic minimalism or thematic narrowness. From this perspective, Koolhoven’s Brimstone, despite its genre trappings and visual intensity, might be seen not as a rejection of Calvinist aesthetics, but as a reinterpretation of them. Thematically, the film is explicitly Calvinist; yet stylistically, it is vibrant and violent, defying minimalist aesthetics. 

Conrad Blokker Huet

The oppositional stance that these Dutch filmmakers have taken against the perceived Puritan rigidity of Calvinism can be traced back to the beginning of the post-war period, when Dutch society went through an increasing process of secularisation and liberalisation. In that cultural climate, challenging religious authority, particularly Orthodox Protestantism, was tantamount to breaking societal restrictions and taboos. This rebellion found fertile ground in literature and popular culture, with writers such as Jan Wolkers (1925–2007) and Maarten ’t Hart (b. 1944) who emphatically rejected their orthodox backgrounds in widely read novels. These novels were later adapted into successful films like Turkish Delight and Een vlucht regenwulpen (A Flight of Rainbirds, Ate de Jong, 1981). Catholicism, by comparison, was at times embraced, albeit sometimes rather performatively, as did the author Gerard Reve (1923–2006), which contributed to positioning Calvinism as the primary religious antagonist to the new liberal values that the post-war generation embraced.

It was a generational conflict that was also played out within the field of filmmaking, particularly with the emergence of the first generation of students at the Netherlands Film Academy, founded in 1958.¹⁹ These young filmmakers set themselves apart from the previous generation, which had worked with little to no government support, and had therefore mostly been confined to documentary filmmaking. With the establishment of the Netherlands Film Fund in 1956, both groups now found themselves competing for the same limited pool of public funding. For the younger generation, differentiation became not just an artistic impulse but also a strategic necessity. These film students, including figures like Wim Verstappen, began publishing critical articles in Skoop, a journal for film criticism founded in 1963 and modelled after the Cahiers du Cinéma. In their writings, they were unapologetically harsh toward the previous generation, in particular with their singling out of Bert Haanstra as the scapegoat for what they saw as the ill state of Dutch cinema. Their criticism extended to nearly every established Dutch film critic of the time, except for one: Jan Blokker (1927–2010). Blokker had written the screenplay for Haanstra’s Fanfare (1958), the film that marked a new era for Dutch fiction cinema. Not long after that, Blokker would distance himself from Haanstra, bringing him more closely to the upcoming generation and their artistic ideals.

Jan Blokker

Like the young film academy students, Blokker’s frame of reference for fiction films was almost entirely shaped by international examples. Heavily influenced by Italian filmmakers like Fellini and Antonioni and by the French Nouvelle Vague, this new wave of Dutch filmmakers sought to transplant those stylistic and narrative sensibilities into a cinema of their own. In their comparative and often polemic view of Dutch film, the aesthetic and thematic characteristics of le cinéma de papa became natural objects of broad and antagonistic generalisation. Directors such as Bert Haanstra and Herman van der Horst were grouped together under the invented label of the ‘Dutch Documentary School’, a term used to evoke an image of austere realism, rural imagery, minimal dialogue, and an overall Calvinist sobriety. This label, while reductive, served as a rhetorical foil for the new generation’s ambitions.

Blokker was one of the first to cultivate the image of this faux-movement, which due to his influence went on to become a persistent myth of Dutch cinema in film historiography. In his film reviews and later his widely popular columns, as well as in frequent appearances on radio and television, he propagated the pessimist image of a culturally deprived, Calvinist Netherlands that was fundamentally at odds with cinematic imagination. In his polemic 1960 review of Van der Horst’s film Faja lobbi, Blokker described the filmmaker as “the most Dutch of all,” because of his inflexibility and his relentlessness, his desire to convert and convince, and “because of his almost intolerant belief in his own rightness and his typical Dutch orthodoxy.”²⁰ He concluded the review by calling the film “a testimony of a Dutch ‘Calvinist’,” placing the term in quotation marks by way to stress that it referred not to religion but to a broader cultural mentality.

Throughout the 1960s, and well into his later work in the 1970s and 1980s, Blokker continued to sharpen this line of critique. In one piece he spoke of “Calvinist Netherlands with its innate distrust of everything that is an image, and by extension, also everything that is imagination,” and in another he names it “our (Dutch) Calvinist imagination.”²¹ To Blokker, Calvinism stood for an aesthetic fixation on theme and morality; he writes: “this typical preoccupation with ‘content’ must again be attributed to Calvinism—not only the need for a Message, but especially the essential need for looking: when it comes down to it, the eye is a more sinful sense than the nose.”²² Near the end of his life, Blokker was prominently featured as the main authoritative film critic in the multi-part documentary series Everything Film (2007) about Dutch film history. In this documentary, a chapter is devoted to the ‘Dutch Documentary School’, in which Blokker once again defines this cinema as a realist, empirically and thematically driven Calvinist cinema, or in his own words: “A kind of reformed principledness, which Bert Haanstra had but also Herman van der Horst, namely that you could make films with reality, with the things that Our Lord offered, as it were. The moment you put an actor in it or thought up a story, you lost your faith. And that very much belonged to the Netherlands actually (…) it was a genre that was not made anywhere else. No words, no dialogues, no commentaries, no stories except an image, literally and figuratively a figurative image (…) it was unique.”²³

Blokker himself, while a famous and original voice, wasn’t all that unique himself when it came to this way of thinking. He took clear influence from cultural critics of the 19th century, most notably Conrad Busken Huet (1826–1886), a Calvinist preacher turned journalist who became one of the most prominent Dutch literary critics of his time. In his articles, Blokker explicitly referred to Huet as a source of truisms about Dutch culture and identity. In his influential cultural history of the Netherlands, The Country of Rembrandt (1884), Huet had argued that the decline of Dutch cultural life stemmed from the loss of religion, specifically Calvinism, which he viewed as a historical engine that drove economy, society and painting to greatness in the 17th century.²⁴ In Blokker’s film reviews in particular, there’s an echo of Huet’s belief that every form of art, in his case film, revealed a people’s cultural temperament and innate national character in different historical periods, as if it carries the essence of their spirit across time. And while Blokker did not necessarily share Huet’s religious or nostalgic views, one could see in him a kind of 20th century successor, one that relentlessly examined that century’s great art form in relation to the ailments of Dutch culture; even in his fierce and rather long-winded style of writing is reminiscent of Huet’s, as well as the posture Blokker adopted as a prominent national critic and public figure.

Yet the historical irony of it all has been that Calvinism, as a at times vague at times particular interpretation of film aesthetics, as carried out by Blokker and other filmmakers, actually led to great contributions to the development of Dutch fiction film, oftentimes by those who had Calvinist upbringings themselves. What begins to emerge, then, is the realisation that such essentialist tropes, powerful as they are, do not necessarily say something about the nature of Dutch cinema itself, but just as well about the cultural anxieties and identity struggles of those who have sought to define it. With the risk of turning pessimism and cynicism into a self-fulfilling prophecy when thinking about the possibilities of fiction film.

Endnotes