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

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 f... Mehr ...