Een eeuw journalistiek

Polygoon, the Dutch film association which became well-known especially owing to the weekly newsreels they made from 1924 to the early eighties, was founded seventy-five years ago. A much lesser known fact is that before World War II, Polygoon played an influential role in the aspiration to elevate film from an entertaining fairground attraction to a serious and educational medium. Documentaries suited this aim perfectly and a host of young filmmakers were given the opportunity by Polygoon to develop their talents. Cor Aafjes was one of them. In 1928, as an employee of Polygoon, he was commissioned by the Algemeen Handelsblad - the newspaper was celebrating its centenary - to make a short documentary about the tabloid. The result, A CENTURY OF JOURNALISM, demonstrates that young filmmakers like Cor Aafjes were very well acquainted with the international aesthetic developments in the field of cinema. In the fast and rhythmical montage of the film particularly the influence of the Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Poedovkin can be discerned, who had at that time just been discovered in the west. The 'Filmliga', an association of people devoted to 'high-quality film', considered A CENTURY OF JOURNALISM "a positive and by no means unimportant result of the sort that had not been achieved so far in Holland."