Film City “Filmstad Wassenaar” – his film studio complex in Wassenaar near The Hague – is opened in 1935 by the dutch jewish cinema operator , film distributor and producer Loet C. Barnstijn (born in 1880 as Lodewijk Cohen) starting you might say a Hollywood in Holland. After first working in textiles, he sold his business to start in the film business as a cinema operator. He was a film distributor , an inventor with Philips of a synchronized sound system using records .. the Loetafoon, and introduced the sound film in Holland in the early 1930s. During the war Filmstad was confiscated, and became UFA Filmstadt Den Haag. The allies bombed the complex in 1944. After the war Barnstijn lived in the USA were he died in 1953.
Cinema newsreel, October 1935, from Polygoon courtesy of Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Open Images).
Sound (speeches) starts after arrival of the guests at 3 min 20 sec.
Yesterday I posted on his first production the artistic documentary “Sjabbos“.
① memo 20190824 ~ Hollywood in Holland – Barnstijn’s FILMSTAD
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