The one and only Dutch movie mogul

Loet C. Barnstijn was a self-made man who owned a textile company. But, in the early 1910s, he made an unexpected move: he got into the film business and opened his own theatre in The Hague. Around those years the Dutch film industry had undergone a radical change:  theatres had become dominant at the expense of traveling cinema and screenings in variety shows. The golden age of cinema owners and distributors had begun. Acumen and luck could guarantee a lucrative business, and entrepreneurs like Jean Desmet, Abraham Tuschinski and Loet C. Barnstijn indeed made a fortune.

The entrepreneurs did earn good money but the government also saw a cash cow in cinema and issued a high entertainment tax. A twenty or more percent levy became the rule, causing discontent among many cinema owners. For Barnstijn this was a good enough reason to close his cinema and focus exclusively on distribution. In 1915 he established his own company, HAP, named after the three cinemas he and his brothers were operating in The Hague, Enschede and Groningen. Barnstijn soon became one of the largest distributors in the Netherlands. His success largely depended on securing exclusive rights on United Artists’ films, which starred celebrities such as Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Mary Pickford. In 1921 Barnstijn also managed to invite the latter two in The Hague during their honeymoon: a large crowd was attracted by the publicity stunt.

After Barnstijn witnessed the breakthrough of talkies in the USA, he set out to bring sound film to the Netherlands as soon as possible. The problem was to get the right equipment, and purchasing an American audio system could be very costly. So he decided to develop his own system in collaboration with Philips. He took Prinsen, an engineer for Philips, to London with him in order to study various options and, finally, they decided for a solution where images and sound were recorded on individual carriers and then played in sync. Within two months, Prinsen was ready for the first demonstration and, within a week, Philips and Barnstijn signed a contract. The Handelsmaatschappij Loetafoon was born to create and sell projectors manufactured by Philips. The first public screening happened on 31 January 1929, at the Flora theatre in Utrecht for a selected audience. The program included two shorts, one about the violinist Albert Sandler and one about the singer Emanuel List.

The new sound projector was named Loetafoon, after Barnstijn himself. The idea behind the Loetafoon dated to the beginning of the twentieth century. Producers like Gaumont and Pathé Frèeres had already brought on the market short films, the sound of which was fixed on a record synchronized to the picture. Although the system suffered a few problems, and never really took off, it was later further developed by both the British Phototone and the American Vitagraph. Barnstijn and Prinsen based their work on these designs, without too many changes, so that they were able to develop a prototype quickly. The main problem they encountered was not synchronization but volume: an issue that they solved easily thanks to the expertise that Philips had in the field of sound.
 
The Loetafoon was a commercial success. It was installed in a large number of Dutch cinemas: nearly one third of them. The success allowed the Netherlands, along with Britain, to have the fastest transition to sound film. Barnstijn’s initiative, commitment and connections had helped to spread the talkies. Unfortunately, the marriage between Philips and Barnstijn wasn’t destined to last. He distrusted the company from Eindhoven and suspected them of planning to dump him once they no longer needed him. In 1933, after several crises, they finally separated.
But even darker clouds appeared on the horizon with the upcoming dominance of the optical soundtrack, which allowed to sync sound and image on the film itself. The Loetafoon lost the battle with optical sound film and disappeared from Dutch cinemas after 1932. The brand-name Loetafoon wasn’t used anymore from the end of 1930.

The Loetafoon demise was not the end of Barnstijn’s involvement with sound film. In 1931 he brought back from the USA several Akeley cameras. These recorded the audio signal directly on the optical track so they were not suitable for fiction film but perfect for reportage with sound. Barnstijn sold one of them to Filmfabriek Polygoon that used it for their first sound news reels. But, most importantly, Barnstijn became a sound film producer. He began with De Jantjes – the second major sound feature in the Netherlands, after Willem van Oranje. Barnstijn stepped in to save the production when it ran out of money and when the movie turned out to be a huge success, he became hungry for more.  In the same year Malle gevallen came out, followed in 1935 by De familie van mijn vrouw and Het mysterie van de Mondscheinsonate. All films were produced by his own company, Loet C. Barnstijn Filmproductie. The first three were shot in the Cinetone Studio’s in Duivendrecht, the Dutch Hollywood; the last one was shot in Barnstijn’s own complex: Filmstad, in Wassenaar.

Filmstad Wassenaar would be Barnstijn’s last big project. A private complex with two large soundstages on which - in Barnstijn’s own words - quality entertainment films would be made for the Dutch public. It would offer new impulses for Dutch film. But Barnstijn was too late. The tide had turned and crisis hit the Dutch industry. There were fewer and fewer movies made, and Barnstijn struggled to keep his studio afloat. The final blow came during the war. Barnstijn fled to the United States, while the Germans, because of his Jewish heritage, confiscated his belongings.
 
The complex was renamed UFA Filmstadt Den Haag and used to shoot German movies. Until mid-1944, when it was destroyed by British bombs. This event marked the end of Barnstijn’s film career. After the war he unsuccessfully requested compensation. He then left for the United States, where he died 1953, the only real Dutch "movie tycoon” and the man who had given an indelible imprint to Dutch sound films.