By the 1960s, although Adriaan Ditvoorst, Nikolai van der Heyde, Erik Terpstra and the duo Pim de la Parra and Wim Verstappen had managed occasional (international) success, attendance figures remained minimal. The Dutch cinema audience was therefore not an audience for auteur cinema, Frank Schaafsma concluded in Skoop in 1975. The audience consisted more of 'readers of Story and Panorama, rather than of the Haagse Post and Vrij Nederland.' A different audience from that for which Truffaut, or Chabroul, or Bergman made their films'.
Turkish Delight (1973) and the success of the Dutch feature film
Dutch cinema in the 1970s was dominated by competing producers: Rob Houwer, Rob du Mée and Matthijs van Heijningen. After efforts to set up an auteur cinema had failed in the 1960s, they took over and chose a different course. Thus arose before there was - the first since the brief revival of the 1930s - a genuine Dutch feature film industry, with continuous production, a cult of stars and its own audience.
A healthy dose of sex
What audiences did warm to were so-called sex films. From the end of the 1960s, sex films increasingly dominated Dutch cinemas. Initially, these were still fairly innocent films in which - female - nudity was mainly used as an extra attraction. But this soon changed. Serious films about liberated sexual morality came alongside more and more films which were explicitly about sex. Sometimes in the form of quasi-scientific educational films like the West German Oswald Kolle produced, other times in the form of pure exploitation. Consequently, the 1970s brought a new type of cinema on a large scale: the sex cinema in which pornographic films were allowed to be shown, as long as it was clearly announced to everyone in the showcase that it was 'hard’ porn.
Breakthrough
Pim de la Parra and Wim Verstappen were the first to seriously follow this development. In 1969, their film Obsessions was released. In it, sex was explicitly exploited. It marked their biggest success until then: almost 200,000 people came to see the film.
Obsessions was the first in a series of successful Dutch 'sex films'. In 1971, Paul Verhoeven's debut film Wat zien ik? was released and Pim and Wim signed on for Blue Movie. Two films that were each in their own way about more frank ways of talking about sex and how it could be portrayed. Both films were extraordinarily successful, attracting over 2.3 million viewers each. It marked the breakthrough of Dutch cinema. Until then, the annual percentage of visitors to Dutch film had never been higher than a few percent, but in 1971, one in six visitors went to see a film of Dutch origin.
The big success, however, was yet to come. It followed two years after Wat zien ik? with Turks fruit (released internationally as Turkish Delight), the most successful Dutch film ever with 3.3 million visitors and an Oscar nomination for best non-English-language film. For the second time, producer Rob Houwer, director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Gerard Soeteman made a Dutch blockbuster.
A wider audience
Dutch audiences had discovered homegrown feature films and flocked to cinemas in large numbers. Rip-offs of Turks fruit like Frank & Eva and Het jaar van de kreeft (both starring Willeke van Ammelrooy), but also farces like Help, de dokter verzuipt or comic crime films like De inbreker and Naakt over de schutting. These were heyday when Dutch feature films attracted a quarter of all cinemagoers at their peak.
Film stars
A sign of this newfound status was the fact that Dutch film could boast stars again for the first time in a long time. Van Ammelrooy and Van de Ven grew to become film stars - not least thanks to the attention they received from journalist Henk van der Meijden, who made plenty of room for Dutch film and television stars in his daily showbiz page in De Telegraaf.
Often contractually required by producers who could make good use of the free publicity for their films. For instance, De Telegraaf organised a poll around the film Een vrouw als Eva in which readers could indicate whether they thought lead actress Monique van de Ven was suitable to play the demanding role of a housewife entangled in a lesbian relationship in a mature way. Needless to say, readers were confident.
Not only the actors became familiar faces, directors like Paul Verhoeven and the aforementioned producers Houwer and Van Heijningen also boasted national fame. They profiled themselves publicly and did not shy away from polemics with each other or others in the Dutch film world. Like Pim & Wim a decade earlier, they knew that publicity - whether good or bad - had a positive effect on public interest in film.
However, their mouthpiece was not film magazine Skoop, but they opted for an audience of millions, which they reached through newspapers like De Telegraaf or appearances on popular television shows. With Houwer, Van Heijningen and consorts, the Dutch feature film came of age.
