Adriënne Solser, Koningin der kluchten

In the minor film producing country of the Netherlands Adriënne Solser (1873-1943) was a relatively prolific actress producer and director of silent feature films in the 1920s. She was one of only two female film directors of Dutch silent films and her films were considerably successful. Nonetheless her thematic and aesthetic choices deviated from the aspirations held by most of her colleagues: instead of gloomy dramas and artistically ambitious films Adriënne Solser produced cinematically unpretentious and emphatically local farces which moreover were always intended to be shown with a live performance by Solser herself. Solser's success as well as her consistent choice for the popular and the lowbrow prompted interdisciplinary and intertextual research into popular stage genres and traditions that were much more related to her work than to most Dutch film productions of the era. The research considers most notably the popular stage genre of Jordaan plays as well as the traditions of mixing live performances with film screenings. Both are explored in their multiple and successive historic manifestations. It becomes clear that Solser not only drew her ideas from a specific and rather unknown variant of the Jordaan genre but that she then created her own variant of it for cinema. In addition she can be said to have continued a comic film tradition that originated from the revues of the 1910s and that embedded film in the comic performance. Adriënne Solser transferred and adapted this hybrid tradition to the cinema of the 1920s and in doing so became an exponent of Dutch comic film of the era.

• View at Publisher