Polygoon leads the way, also in sound!
On the occasion of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and to celebrate the 1000th added video, a few special videos have been added to Open Images. These videos from the Polygoon collection of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision are about the arrival of the first Polygoon newsreels with sound.
From 1922 the audience was able to watch the Polygoon newsreels in the Dutch cinemas. The first years the Dutch audience had to watch these newsreels without any Dutch commentary. The Dutch news was silent and the reports that were imported from abroad only had foreign commentary. Almost ten years after the first Polygoon newsreel this changed. On May 29, 1931 Polygoon showed the first Dutch film with sound in the cinemas. Soon after that, Dutch commentary was also added to the well-known Polygoon Hollands Nieuws (Polygoon Dutch News). Before the first Polygoon Hollands Nieuws with sound was made a few test films were shot. As a test for the sound-film, the director of the film factory Polygoon, mr. B.D. Ochse, read a couple of texts aloud:
To add lustre to the arrival of the first Polygoon Hollands Nieuws with sound, a few prominent figures from the film industry were asked to deliver a speech. Mr. D. van Staveren, chairman of the Centrale Commissie Filmkeuring (Central Film Censorship Board), spoke on film about how delighted he was with the arrival of the sound-film. He thereby also spoke of his displeasure with “all kinds of foreign influences creeping into the Dutch language”, which he mainly blamed on the American sound-film:
Besides mr. van Staveren, the chairman of the Dutch Union of Cinema Proprietors, mr. David Hamburger jr., was also asked to speak about the arrival of the sound-film. He was delighted that he could now understand the foreign news reports just as well as the German, French and English speaking inhabitants of the country. According to him the arrival of the Polygoon Hollands Nieuws with sound was “a real boon”:
Finally, a recording of mr. Ochse in which he announces the sound-film and contemplates on the added value this will have for watching football matches. These will now “enter the cinema with the richness of it’s buzzing sounds”: