American Eyes on the Netherlands, 1943-74

American Eyes on the Netherlands adds another chapter to the question: how have and do
Americans perceive the Netherlands? From 1943 to 1974, more than six million Americans
throughout the country saw one or more of some two hundred Dutch documentary films
distributed by the Dutch government as part of a thirty-one-year propaganda and promotion
campaign. This marked the first time that films about the Netherlands and its overseas territories
were made available to a broad American public by means of country-wide diplomacy. It added
films to other available visual media with Dutch content, such as paintings, drawings, and
photographs; a new visual medium gave new momentum to increasing Americans’ knowledge
about the Netherlands.
The circulation records kept by the Netherlands Information Service, the government
agency that ran this public film diplomacy program, reveal who viewed individual films, where
they were screened, and how many came to screenings of individual titles—many (impactful) or
few (little influence). The viewership records are mapped and analyzed and matched to
quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the films. This helped construct a changing
knowledge palette of Americans’ knowledge about the Netherlands as the country moved from
wartime/colonies (1940s) to reconstruction/nationalism (1950s) and to internationalism/affluence
(1960/70s). A thread throughout is the geography of the Dutch information on offer in the films
(centers and peripheries of attention in the Netherlands), spatial patterns that, in turn, became
fixed in Americans’ knowledge of the country.
The last chapter situates this film diplomacy backward and forward into a survey of the
history of Dutch visual media available and circulating in the United States from the 17 th century
to the present. In the age of video on demand (VOD), it ends with ideas for sharing and
distributing Dutch documentary and feature films (past and present) internationally more broadly
and seamlessly.