Gladly Breaking Bread : Religious repertoires and family

film
Susan Aasman

Film History: An International Journal, Volume 19, Number 4, 2007, pp. 361-371
(Article)

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Gladly Breaking Bread:
Religious repertoires and
family film
Gladly Breaki ng Bread : Religious repertoire s and family film
Susan Aasman
T
he scene is quite remarkable: a woman raising
her arms to heaven receives a small naked baby
into her hands. In the next shot she carefully
clothes the child and lays him on a bed of straw.
Of course, this scene represents Mary and the birth
of Jesus. The film, entitled Kerstverhaal (Christmas
Story, 1926), is part of the Huygen Collection housed
in the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The
film is only one minute and eighteen seconds long,
but is carefully lit and structured using five intertitles,
the first one being The Birth of Christ. Jos Huygen,
an amateur filmmaker, cast his wife as Mary and his
son Huub as Jesus.
Jos Huygen (18931965) was a mechanical
engineer who started making films in 1926 with a
9.5mm Path camera. Over the years he made many
home movies. When his film collection was donated
to the Smalfilmmuseum, it contained some forty ti-
tles, including several he had purchased from the
Path Baby collection.1 Christmas Story was one of
his first attempts at filmmaking. In that same year
Huygen documented his pilgrimage to Lourdes in
France. What this early film points at is the presence
of Catholic themes in Huygens films.
In this paper I shall focus on another film from
this collection, called Graag gebroken brood (Gladly
Breaking Bread, 1935). It is Huygens last home
movie; silent, black-and-white, lasting a little less
than ten minutes. In this family portrait he celebrates
his family of eleven children, while at the same time
showing the daily struggle to feed all these mouths.
Between the images, Huygen placed intertitles such
as: Oh my children, gladly breaking bread/would
happiness be less/when the burden is heavier/would
poverty be worse/with one more mouth to feed?
Gladly Breaking Bread has a fairly explicit ideo-
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 361
Film History, Volume 19, pp. 361371, 2007. Copyright John Libbey Publishing
ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America
logical tone that is quite unusual in home movies. Of
course, domestic modes of communication are pri-
vate as well as public, containing meanings, as Pa-
tricia Holland has already observed, which are
always both personal and social.2 However, Huy-
gens home movie goes far beyond the more usual
implicit transmission of ideological meaning: it reads
like propaganda. Nonetheless, the depiction of his
family as a household of faith comfortably fit into
Catholic popular culture in the Netherlands during
the interwar period. As the historian John Coleman
has suggested: In the Netherlands, Catholicism was
conscious during that time.3 In the Netherlands,
Protestants had long been in a privileged position,
but from the second half of the nineteenth century a
strong Catholic emancipation movement developed,
which resulted in a period of self-confidence and
triumphalism in the Catholic minority. This made
Catholic identity by definition a public issue and
within this context the family played a central role in
the struggle for power.
I will analyse Huygens private images within
the context of public representations of the Catholic
family as propagated by the Catholic Church. The
attempts of the Catholic Church to spread its relig-
ious views through cinema have been studied by
others, including the Dutch historian Pim Slot who
has described how in the first half of the twentieth
century the Church invested in producing and dis-
tributing nontheatrical Catholic films on several oc-
casions outside the context of the movie theater.4
Susan Aasman lectures on film history and contem-
porary history at the University of Groningen. She has
written several books and articles on the history of the
home movie. e-mail: s.i.aasman@rug.nl
362
Fig. 1. Geertruide Huygen as Mary, in her husbands film Kerstverhaal (Christmas
Story, 1926). [All images from the Huygen Collection, courtesy of the Netherlands
Institute for Sound and Vision.]
While Gladly Breaking Bread was not a public movie,
being a home movie produced for and viewed in a
private context, it remains interesting to explore this
home movie as a religious film, one that provides
insight into the official ideology expressed in daily
domestic life. In his book Visual Piety (1998) David
Morgan explores the practices, attitudes and ideas
that are articulated through religious iconography.
He shows how the social construction of reality works
through articulation and imitation, and in the process
transforms the appropriation of official religious ide-
Fig. 2. Through the house / morning light is playing. Intertitle (including Path-Baby
logo) created by Jos Huygen for Graag gebroken brood (Gladly Breaking Bread, 1935).
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 362
Susan Aasman
ology.5 The question is: can home movie making also
be understood as a kind of devotional practice?
Home movie-making has been a remarkable
part of twentieth-century family culture. Making home
movies became a family practice that added to the
definition of a new family ideology. The presence of
a movie camera could hold a double promise, both
celebrating and preserving family happiness. Home
movie-making became a practice historian John R.
Gillis calls a world of their own making. Gillis postu-
lates that in the twentieth century, creating myths,
rituals and images increasingly became an important
family activity and a typical do-it-yourself thing. Ac-
cording to Gillis, these self-produced, imagined
families we live by often served as a defence against
the possibly fragmented family we live with.6
Elsewhere I have explored the different mean-
ings of home movie-making as a new social and
cultural practice in the twentieth century. I have ar-
gued that home movie-making developed into a
ritual grounded within the family, using consumer
technology to construct a unique domestic ideal. In
this article I explore how an amateur filmmaker made
use of Catholic repertoires in order to construct an
ideal Catholic family to live by, as a way to reconcile
the daily struggle of the family he lived with. His
conviction provided this meaning, and Catholic
popular culture enabled him to express this in a
cinematic way.7
A day in a life
Huygen took pride in his amateur filmmaking, choos-
ing to work with Paths 9.5mm film camera. In 1922
Path had introduced the 9.5 mm Path Baby pro-
jector and film stock. One year later Path marketed
the camera. It found wide acceptance in Europe,
primarily because of its relatively low cost. An exten-
sive catalogue of existing Path films were issued in
this new format, for sale or rent, including re-edited
commercial movies.
Huygen loved the technical side of his hobby
and liked to play with the idea of professional cinema
by editing the official Path Baby logo into his own
home movies.8 The effect gave the impression that
his work was a rented small-gauge film from the
Path Baby catalogue. His practice of using inter-
titles and his custom of ending his films with credits
such as edited and recorded by Jos A. Huygen, also
demonstrates this ambition. Nevertheless, Huygens
ambition did not exceed the domestic context. On
Sunday afternoons Huygen would usually show his
Gladly Breaking Bread: Religious repertoires and family film 363

movies in the living room that was just for the

occasion transformed into a movie theatre. His
children were allowed to make special requests. The
films in which Huygen used stop-motion camera
tricks were their favourites. Sometimes but not very
often friends or relatives were invited to watch,
though when the family had reached its maximum of
fifteen children there was barely room for others. On
rare occasions some of Huygens films were also
shown outside the house, for instance, the eldest son
Tom showed Gladly Breaking Bread in the convent
where his aunt lived.9
The narrative of Gladly Breaking Bread follows
that typical amateur genre of A day in the life of ....
Father gets up early in the morning and wakes the
rest of the family. One of the little boys is crying in his
bed waiting for his mother. Mother is still lying in bed
with two other children, feeding them with a bottle of
milk. The boys who have risen dip their fingers into
the holy water font, before crossing themselves. They duties. The sequence ends with images of the eldest Fig. 3.
end their performance with a proud smile to the son arriving with a cartload of bread, some of which Gathering at the
camera. The film continues by focusing on the fam- two of the youngest children are shown stealing. domestic altar in
ilys daily routines. Huygen introduces this aspect of a morning ritual.
The next sequence focuses on the parents. We
Frame from
the narrative symbolically by recording one of the see, for example, Huygen arriving home from work Gladly Breaking
boys carrying a hive full of bees. The meaning is (his eldest son probably operated the camera). The Bread.
clear: his children are as busy as bees. The next children await his arrival in front of the house. At
sequence shows the eldest helping the younger home, father stretches out on the couch. In the
brothers and sisters to wash and clothe themselves, meantime one of the toddlers sneaks out of the
with one brother washing his younger brothers feet. house and discovers bread in the saddlebag of their
In the meantime mother brushes the hair of one of Fig. 4. Breakfast.
mothers bicycle and full of joy begins eating the
Frame from
the youngsters, who does not seem to enjoy the bread. The next sequence is again about food. Now Gladly Breaking
performance very much. When the entire family is it is time for a warm meal. Mother cooks dinner while Bread.
dressed, they gather before the statue of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus and kneel down before their domestic
altar. Even the youngest participate, as Huygen
shows in a medium shot. The eldest boys are then
shown leaving for mass. In the early morning fog the
contours of the church are barely visible. We can see
that the trip to church is not purely serious, but is also
an occasion for play.
The following scene shows breakfast being
prepared. Huygen takes his time, showing the water
boiling in the kettle and mother cooking porridge.
While the family sits at the table, the eldest girl pours
tea and slices bread. In an endearing shot, Huygen
shows the baby sitting on the table putting bread into
his little mouth. After breakfast work has to be done.
The children help with vacuuming the house, sewing
clothes, peeling potatoes or cleaning shoes, with
each child having his or her own duties. Huygen
takes special care to show the joy felt in fulfilling these

FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 363

364
Fig. 5. A lonely
only child
reaches for his
selfish mother in
Levensgang
(Course of Life,
1938), Wim Cox,
Jr.s 16mm film
for the Roman
Catholic Union
for Large
Families.
[Netherlands
Institute for
Sound and
Vision.]
one of the boys sets the table. When dinner is ready,
mother serves the food. Before they start eating there
is a moment of prayer: each member of the family
makes the sign of the cross and father asks for Gods
blessing, while mother helps a young child to join his
hands in prayer. After dinner the children prepare for
bed and a fade out ends the first part of the film.
The second part of the film shows some of the
familys leisure activities. Living near the sea they
visited the seaside during the summer. Huygen films
the family enjoying their leisure time, with the children
playing on the beach. He returns to the narrative of
a day in a life by ending this sequence with the
sunset. As the sun slowly sets before them we see
husband and wife, side by side, gazing out to sea.
Throughout the film, intertitles support the images.
The lyrical intertitles were inspired by a poem entitled
Kingdom of Heaven by the Catholic poet Emiel
Hullebroeks.
Through the house/morning light is play-
ing/children please wake up/everyone knows
their duty/busy as bees/sweet youth helps/and
each small job brings a little joy/O my chil-
dren/gladly breaking bread/would happiness
be less/where the burden is heavier/would
poverty be worse/with one more mouth to
feed/those who fight prayer/help the
Lord/sleep my princess/sleep well.10
Course of Life
The family seen in Gladly Breaking Bread is an
exemplar of the values articulated by a Dutch lay
organization founded in 1918, the Roman Catholic
Union for Large Families (of which Jos Huygen was
a member). In fact, only three years later, the Union
commissioned a professionally-made propaganda
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 364
Susan Aasman
film, one that bears striking similarities to Huygens
home movie.
Entitled Levensgang (Course of Life, 1938), the
16mm sound film depicts the circle of life from cradle
to grave within a Catholic context, using documen-
tary and staged images. Its thirty-five minutes show
not only the hardships of such a choice of life but also
the joys of having a large family. To emphasize these
rewards, the film contrasts the warmth of Catholic
family life with the cold emptiness of a contemporary
single-child family, suggesting that such a family
could never be more than a loveless union. To dem-
onstrate this, the film shows us images of a modern,
urban, well-dressed mother who pays more attention
to her pet dog than to her only son. When the son
reaches out to his mother he only receives the pro-
fessional care of a nanny. The film contrasts this
situation with images of large families who seem to
be much happier. While it suggests that perhaps they
are not as rich and that the parents might sometimes
have difficulty feeding the children the voice-over
speaks of the music of the hungry bellies never-
theless the film affirms that the warmth and blessings
a sick child receives when born into such a family
outweigh such problems. The narrator underscores
the images with unambiguous comment.
The day belongs to the sunny world of children,
the evening is for parents and the worries they
share and bear with cheer. The rent is steep.
The children need new clothing. A healthy ap-
petite makes the bill high. The taxman does not
want to wait any longer. They have to measure
and tighten their resources, but all the time
their children are in mind ... .
Who would want to miss one child because of
all these sweet worries?
Religious family culture
Course of Life propagated a choice of lifestyle that
was already practised, as Gladly Breaking Bread
demonstrates. What is so interesting is that the two
films are so similar in their discourse which justifies
and even praises this kind of life that at certain
moments they almost seem interchangeable. In both
films it is quite easy to recognize a typical Catholic
family household. In Gladly Breaking Bread we see
for example, the holy water font hanging on the wall
and the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus standing
on a chest of drawers, creating an altar. In Course of
Life we see the crucifix on the wall from which a rosary
Gladly Breaking Bread: Religious repertoires and family film
hangs. In addition to these material objects, both
films show daily religious practices.
These images make the religious conviction
visible. However, not all of the images in the two
movies are typically or exclusively Catholic. Take for
example, the image in Gladly Breaking Bread where
the mother helps her child to join his hands in prayer.
This is part of Catholic iconography, but it also sym-
bolizes one of the main functions of a Protestant
family, religious education. Other activities such as
reading the Bible, singing Christian songs, and say-
ing grace before a meal are all common Christian
practices.11 However, these kinds of religious prac-
tice are seldom depicted in most Protestant home
movies if such a thing exists per se.
Did devout Protestant families tend to avoid
making home movies at this time? Was it part of
Protestant religious culture not to record acts of faith?
By what visual evidence can one recognize a Protes-
tant familys home? By nothing! one historical study
drolly put it.12 Art historians have long distinguished
the visual richness of Catholic iconography from the
spare quality of Calvinist design. This aesthetic gen-
erally holds true in reproductions of Protestant
households, whether in family albums or home mov-
ies. There is no crucifix hanging on the wall and few
other religious attributes are visible. The only thing
one might come across is a liturgical text hanging on
the wall. Words rather than pictures were used, fol-
lowing the Protestant tradition that considers faith to
be in the head and the heart.13 Conversely, a
Catholic had no fear of images, one history of the
churchs culture concluded.14 Indeed, historically
Catholicism has had a more elaborate and visually-
oriented culture, including elements such as mass,
processions, kneeling before a statue and the sign
of the cross. These rituals share a visuality and a
theatricality in their performances.
However, there is more than a difference in
visual culture. In the second half of the nineteenth
century a process of the sacralization of domestic
life emerged within the Catholic Church. Church ritu-
als increasingly entered the home and infiltrated do-
mestic life. Objects of devotion such as the statue of
the Sacred Heart of Jesus appeared in many house-
holds. Catholic domestic life entailed becoming a
household of faith.15 Family life imitated both in
space and time monastic life, with every hour of the
day being guided by religious activities and gestures,
and the presence of devotional objects transforming
the domestic setting into a holy space.
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 365
365
In contrast, Protestant culture was restrained.
Even events such as family parties and celebrations
occurred less frequently and were relatively sober.
Too much theater was considered inauthentic. As
Gillis observes, family life was simply part of every-
day life, immediate, transparent and non-reflexive,
unmediated by any representations of itself.16 Thus,
Protestant households are not only less easy to rec-
ognize, they may also have been more reserved
about the practice of home movie-making, consider-
ing it to involve an overly ritualistic and at times
theatrical celebration of family life.
Audiovisual power
It was not so much that Catholics and Protestants
differed in their evaluation of film on a matter of
principle. The invention of cinema as such was not
something to be rejected; however, there were con-
cerns about the rapidly growing popularity of the
cinema on the basis of which Catholics and Protes-
tants reacted differently. Catholics regarded film as
a curse and a blessing.17 Film was acceptable, but
only under certain conditions. In the Netherlands, the
Catholic Church wanted to have special reviewing
boards to censor films, despite a national board of
censorship being established in 1928. The Catholic
Church also addressed the issue more positively by
seeking ways of producing films which were repre-
sentative of Catholic ideology. This goal was harder
to achieve and after 1936 all the different initiatives
and activities involved became concentrated in the
Catholic Film Action group.
The main difference between Catholics and
Protestants lay in the acceptance of the filming of
religious or devotional activities. Sacred practices in
film are not allowed under any circumstances, a
Protestant critic wrote, and he continued: Agony of
the soul and inward struggle may not be acted out
and prayer may not be degraded by film.18 This
strong resistance to the representation of religious
acts in motion pictures also applied to the private
sphere. For instance, taking snapshots of your child
praying was frowned upon. This was in sharp con-
trast to the Catholics for whom re-enacting the life
and sufferings of Jesus, children pretending to take
mass at home, or the imitation of the birth of Jesus
in a home movie were accepted and even regarded
as a sign of commitment to Catholic values. As one
sociologist states, Catholicism was a religion with a
strong audiovisual power.19
366
Catholic cinema
The strength of Catholic identity reached its height
during the interwar years. These were the decades
of The Rich Roman Life, a title that was also used
for a famous weekly photo-special in the very popular
Catholic family magazine Katholieke Illustratie (Illus-
trated Catholic). These were the decades during
which Dutch Catholics were very self-conscious yet
showed no fear of demonstrating their faith. At the
same time, most Catholics were involved in a tightly
knit and rather insular network of schools, hospitals,
churches and newspapers controlled by the Catholic
Church. This network has been defined as a column
or pillar comprising part of a pillarized society that
existed in the first part of the twentieth century. In
addition to the Catholic pillar there were the Protes-
tant, the socialist, and the liberal pillars. In this rather
polarized society, demonstrating ones conviction
became a public show of strength.20
Huygen could relate to a strong and rich visual
tradition which not only came from the official church
but also from popular media such as the daily news-
paper, illustrated magazines, and cinema. As men-
tioned above, there were several attempts to develop
a real Catholic cinema in terms of production, distri-
bution and reception. A Catholic film theater had
opened in Amsterdam as early as 1910, but this
theatre was in fact more of a distribution centre that
had as its goal the production, buying and selling,
and renting of films and attributes. In 1913 the com-
pany distributed the American feature film From the
Manger to the Cross (1912), about the life and suffer-
ings of Jesus. In 1930 there was another attempt to
establish a Catholic distribution centre, this time us-
ing Paths 17.5mm film. Introduced in 1926, the
format was designed for non-commercial use in re-
mote places, hence the name Path Rural. There was
some hope that this format would become the basis
for the Catholic Petit Cinema, suitable for the parish,
school or youth groups.21 Some people hoped to
establish a true Catholic film culture that could reach
the Catholic audience. The Dutch catalogue for
17.5mm films contained those by the French come-
dian Max Linder, films by Mlis, and La Vie et la
passion de Jsus Christ (The Life and Passion of
Jesus Christ, 1905).22
Path had a tradition of marketing small-
gauge film for nontheatrical use. As early as 1911,
the company had developed Path Kok, a 28mm
system intended for home and nontheatrical use. In
1923, Path not only entered the amateur cinema
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 366
Susan Aasman
market with a new small-gauge film format (the Path
Baby 9.5mm film, projector and camera), it also
introduced a catalogue of films on small cassettes
that could be rented or bought. Just like the Path
Kok system, the new catalogue contained titles that
were mainly short, edited prints of commercial films
which Path had produced. A 1934 catalogue men-
tions, for example, categories such as for our chil-
dren, for older children, educational, scientific
and religious programme. Amateurs such as Huy-
gen could rent or buy movies from the last category
which were similar to religious classics such as The
Life and Passion of Jesus Christ.23
There were several attempts to give the cine-
matic expression of Catholicism a place in movie
theaters, as well as the nontheatrical contexts of
churches, parishes or homes, using professional,
semi-professional and amateur means. This is the
context in which Huygen undertook his amateur film-
making. His 9.5mm film camera, projector and
screen were the basis of his own home theatre. He
also had a box full of 9.5mm films from the Path
Baby catalogue and in the weeks before Christmas
would show his Path film of The Life and Suffering
of Jesus Christ. Huygen added his own films to these
programmes, which made it a curious but interesting
mix of professional and amateur productions.
Save the Christian family
Huygens home movie-making was embedded in an
outspoken Catholic popular culture that encom-
passed print media and also though relatively mar-
ginal Catholic cinema. Huygen was a member of
the Dutch Roman Catholic Union for Large Families,
which propagated the ideal of the multi-child family,
arguing that the main purpose of marriage should be
procreation. At the same time, the Union acknow-
ledged that many such families needed financial and
practical support. Membership in the Union provided
that aid, as well as benefits such as free access to
(Catholic) playgrounds.
During the 1920s the Union was transformed
from a pressure group into a more ideological organi-
zation, one that became a strong force against the
growing popularity of birth control. The perceived
threat of family planning was to be resisted by all
possible means: the Dutch Roman Catholic Union
for Large Families wanted to do no less than save
the Christian family. Lay institutions, working to-
gether with semi-religious groups and the official
Catholic Church, comprised what Hanneke Westhoff
Gladly Breaking Bread: Religious repertoires and family film
has called an ideological cordon. This alliance was
an important factor in maintaining a high fertility rate
among Catholics within the Netherlands. The na-
tions zealous Catholic minority had a strong sense
of survivalism, stemming from centuries of marginali-
zation. Most importantly, however, the ideology of the
large family was something practised in the daily life
of many Catholics.24
Non-Catholics criticized the practice of raising
many children in one family, motivating some Catho-
lics to defend their lifestyle. Geertruida Huygen for
example, wanted to avoid the common association
that was often made between a large family and
lower social class. On one occasion, when the family
had moved to a different part of town, the children
were dressed very neatly and made to walk through
the neighbourhood, to demonstrate that a decent
family had arrived. Geertruida Huygen also rebutted
the common belief that children from large families
were unhealthy with the argument that quality never
suffers from quantity. This rhetoric was common in
Catholic periodicals. The Sunday magazine Heilige
familie (Holy Family), for example, published Ameri-
can research contending that children with greater
intelligence were more often born into a large fam-
ily.25 Geertruida Huygen also found further support
in the popular Katholieke Illustratie (Catholic Illus-
trated), which from the mid-1920s published each
week a picture of a large family, sometimes accom-
panied by captions such as Gates of paradise, or
Lucky the child that has been born in a worn-out
cradle.26
The film Course of Life emphasized similar
themes. The production of this propaganda movie
had a long and difficult history. The first initiative for
a professional propaganda film about the phenome-
non of the large Catholic family came from the Catho-
lic film critic A. van Domburg. He was a well-known
figure who not only wrote for film publications and
newspapers, but also produced a radio show, Close
Up. Van Domburg promoted the development of
Catholic film production and was involved in a com-
mittee called Family film, which had as its goal
producing a Catholic film about the family. Earlier
attempts by the Union to produce such a film had
failed. One such movie, Moederweelde (Blessing of
Motherhood, 1932), was reviewed by Van Domburg,
who described it as trash. According to Van Dom-
burg a properly Catholic movie should show the
harsh reality of the fight between good and evil set in
the present time. It should address the struggles of
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 367
367
people who live here and now, people of flesh and Fig. 6. Mouths
blood. His attempts to realize such a movie failed, to feed. Frame
one reason being the cost of such a project using the from Gladly
Breaking Bread.
theatrical standard 35mm film.27
However, in 1938 sufficient funds became
available for a new attempt. A company called
Zuiderfilm, owned by W. Cox, the publisher of a local
Catholic newspaper, contracted to produce a 16mm
film. Coxs son, W. Cox Jr. (19091992) was the
companys young director. His first film had been the
industrial movie Wij maken een krant (We Make a
Newspaper, 1936) and in the same year he produced
his second documentary, Venlo. The latter was a kind
of city symphony about the industrial town of Venlo,
made in the style of Walter Ruttmanns Berlin, ein
Symphonie der Grostadt (1927).28 Cox Jr. received
good reviews, including one by van Domburg. He
seemed the ideal person to make the ideal film about
Catholic families and in 1938 he received the com-
mission to make a propaganda movie for the Roman
Catholic Union for Large Families.
Course of Life continued to use the aesthetic
approach of the avant-garde tradition of the 1920s
present in Coxs two previous movies. The focus is
on the lyrical, the abstract and the formal, using
images such as hands folded in prayer, a hand
stroking a dog, and flowers blossoming (the in ex-
treme close-up and fast motion). However, this focus
on form merges with a more traditional documentary
account of the lives of large families, rendered with a
solemn voice-over and languid organ music. In fact
the film mingles real events with ones staged by
amateur actors, friends, and large families that had
368
Fig. 7. been recruited. The scenes depicting the modern
Geertruide and small family are more clearly staged, while the
Jos Huygen at scenes involving the large families have a strong
the close day in
documentary quality, as does the sequence showing
Gladly Breaking
Bread. parents concerned for their sick child. In fact the
opposition between the family types, created using
both image and music (organ versus jazz), is a
crucial aspect of the film. The symbolic meaning
behind these scenes contrasts the natural lifestyle to
the superficial good as opposed to bad.
Course of Life can be understood within the
context of the Dutch documentary tradition, which
combined an aesthetic approach with documentary
realism. According to his critics, Cox was able to
show the struggle of his contemporaries, people
who are born, grow up, have their own family and
grow old. Even non-Catholic critics responded with
positive reviews and until the Second World War the
film attracted reasonably large audiences (25,000
spectators in all, according to one source).29
Compared to Course of Life, Huygens home
movie is more modest in style and narrative. There
are no elaborate camera manoeuvres, no rhythmic
editing, no music, no voice-over. Huygen was of
course operating in a different tradition. For one
thing, amateur films were mostly silent and did not
often use post-production techniques such as add-
ing sound or voice-overs. This does not mean that
there is no ambition or that Gladly Breaking Bread is
a naive portrait. The film was carefully crafted and
Huygen had a clear narrative in mind. It even has an
ending something missing from many home mov-
ies, which tend to end when the reel finishes. Huygen
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 368
Susan Aasman
ends his story with a shot of himself and his wife at
the seaside looking into the sunset. Huygen also
actively directed his movie, the scenes being photo-
graphed with the close cooperation of other family
members and often being staged, for example those
of the boys stealing bread, or the family performing
religious rituals. By adding intertitles, the result was
a home movie utilizing a more professional docu-
mentary mode.
Breaking bread
Course of Life addressed future parents by making
clear that the suffering and sacrifices they would
make by having many children benefited society and
would be rewarded in death. As the voice-over prom-
ises, a good death is the basis of eternal life. Course
of Life took special care to praise the role of the
mother: she was the heroine of the draining board
and washtub. Gladly Breaking Bread demonstrates
the same message of suffering and joy. However,
Gladly Breaking Bread is not a propaganda movie
and despite the similarities in its discourse both
visually and in terms of its narrative on the Catholic
ideal of a large family, there are many differences.
Huygen was not making his film as a profes-
sional assignment but as a father recording his fam-
ily. Gladly Breaking Bread never forgets to
acknowledge the intimate relationship between the
film-maker (father) and his subject (the family). Also,
the subject and the audience overlap. However, at
the same time, the question of why he made this
movie in the way he did arises. What were his inten-
tions? As the filmmaker Michelle Citron discovered
while making a film about her own personal life,
[w]ith the creation of a narrative, a fragmented pre-
sent tense becomes a coherent past tense.30 It is an
interesting observation, for it should alert us to the
fact that maybe Huygens ideal portrait conceals
some tension, due to a certain degree of resistance
to the prescribed Catholic rules.
If Huygen and his wife were troubled by the fact
that they had to rear so many children, they were able
to hide it in their film. However, it was never their
intention to start such a large family. As Geertruida
Huygen would later tell her children, she did not bear
so many from a sense of vocation suggested by go
out and multiply.31 The main reason was the fact that
birth control was strictly forbidden to Catholics, with
the result that the joy of having a family entailed the
heavy burden of a large family. Many Catholic mar-
riages in the interwar period suffered from this inter-
Gladly Breaking Bread: Religious repertoires and family film
diction, for while family planning became a much
more common practice in the 1920s, the Catholic
Church and Catholic medical professionals main-
tained a strict resistance to birth control.32 They even
fiercely opposed attempts to introduce methods of
natural contraception. The Huygens only dared to
attempt such methods after their thirteenth child.
Even then they had two more children, albeit at
greater intervals than previously.
In the meantime Huygen had quit film-making
as it had become too difficult for him to combine the
hobby with his work and raising a family. Jos and
Geertruida no longer saw the home movie as a
means of celebrating the arrival of yet another child.
Life had become too complicated and the parents
sometimes required a helping hand. Whenever a
new baby arrived Geertruidas unwed sister Nolda
came to live with the family. Her diaries describe the
daily experiences of the family during her visits, but
her entries contrast sharply with the ideal images
depicted in Gladly Breaking Bread.33 Nolda de-
scribes the problems of raising such a family. The
eldest boys sometimes went hungry and the eco-
nomic depression made it even harder to make ends
meet. Of course, the family was not poor. They be-
longed to the middle class and Huygen had a steady
job as a mechanical engineer. However, by around
1935 he had to feed fourteen mouths on a single
income and the daily requirement for bread for the
family had risen to about eight loaves. By the mid-
1930s Huygen was obliged to spend his money on
food rather than film, and he gave up his expensive
hobby. Gladly Breaking Bread would be his last
movie.34
This context makes it all the more interesting
to look at the film again. In the first part of Gladly
Breaking Bread food or a reference to eating appears
in almost every scene. We see a milk bottle, break-
fast, the slicing of bread, the peeling of potatoes, a
cartload full of bread, bread being stolen and a warm
meal. Food makes up an important part of the movie,
with the many images of eating bread, in conjunction
with the intertitles, having a clear symbolic meaning.
The title Gladly Breaking Bread is reminiscent of the
Gospels story of Jesus at Galilee feeding the five
thousand with five loaves and two fishes.35 For Huy-
gen, food and bread in particular was not some-
thing to be taken for granted. The acts of breaking
bread, portioning the porridge, stealing bread were
both serious and playful, a fact of life to deal with and
to love at the same time.
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 369
369
Self-portrait Fig. 8. Gladly
Huygen constructed a family portrait which differs Breaking Bread.
from most other home movies in the reflexive tone
that Huygen adds. By narrativizing his family life he
adds self-consciousness a form of self-repre-
sentation that is far from naive. Take, for example, the
fact that Gladly Breaking Bread does not celebrate
motherhood to the extent of Course of Life. In the
latter, the mother is the heroine of the kitchen. Moth-
erhood was a central theme in many Catholic cultural
expressions. While Geertruida is, of course, not ab-
sent from Gladly Breaking Bread, she is not portrayed
as the typical Catholic heroine. The film is more about
father- than motherhood. Huygen chose, after all, to
make the film from the perspective of the breadwin-
ner (as it were). He is the father who must provide.
And it is he who narrates the story.
Seen in this way Gladly Breaking Bread is also
a self-portrait. Of course, fathers held cameras in
many home movies. However, Huygen distinguishes
his film by inserting himself into a few crucial scenes.
He wakes up and then awakens his family. On the
beach he also closes the day and the film with the
image of himself putting his arm around his wife.
Everything that happened during the day is guided
by his invisible presence and introduced and closed
by his visible presence.
It was not the first time that he had made
explicit reference to himself. In earlier movies he
presented himself as the great hunter and thus the
patriarch of this populous household. Gladly Break-
370
ing Bread is more serious in tone. In this self-portrait
Huygen explores through representation his own
function as the head and protector of the family. In
the end Gladly Breaking Bread demonstrates his
pride and his joy as a reward for his daily struggle.
Huygens view was clouded by daily worries, which
his film attempts to give a higher purpose. That is why
the intertitle Oh my children, gladly breaking
bread/would happiness be less/when the burden is
Notes
1. Collection Huygen (19261935, 1959) was donated
to the Film Archive Smalfilmmuseum in Hilversum,
The Netherlands. The archive contains a large quan-
tity of amateur films, a collection of film apparatuses,
and many photographs and other documents. Since
2006 the collection has been housed in the Nether-
lands Institute for Sound and Vision.
2. Patricia Holland, History, memory and the family
album, in Family snaps. The meaning of domestic
photography, J. Spence and P. Holland (eds) (Lon-
don: Virago 1991), 3.
3. John A. Coleman, The evolution of Dutch Catholicism
19581974 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978), 87.
4. Pim Slot, Katholieken en de film, 19201940. Poging
tot vorming van een katholieke zuil, in Jaarboek van
het Katholiek Documentatiecentrum (Nijmegen:
Katholiek Documentatiecentrum, 1991) vol. 20,
6199. See also: G.J. Meulenbeld, Geknipt voor
katholieken. Een onderzoek naar de historische
ontwikkeling van de houding van de Nederlandse
katholieken tegenover de film vanaf zijn ontstaan
(1894) tot 1970, (unpublished: University of Tilburg,
1990); J.A Hes, In de ban van het beeld (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1972) and A. Dronkers, De religieuze film.
Een terreinverkenning (Den Haag: Boekencentrum,
1961).
5. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A history and theory of
popular religious images (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press 1998), 17.
6. John R. Gillis, A world of their own making: A history
of myth and ritual in family life (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
7. Susan Aasman, Ritueel van huiselijk geluk. Een cul-
tuurhistorische verkenning van de familiefilm (Ritual
of domestic happiness) (Amsterdam: Spinhuis
2004). Other important research on this topic has
been done by Richard Chalfen, Snapshot versions
of life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University
Press, 1987), Roger Odin, ed., Le film de famille:
Usage priv, usage public (Paris: Meridiens Klinck-
sieck,1995), Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel families:
FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 370
Susan Aasman
heavier/would poverty be worse/with one more
mouth to feed? was more than a rhetorical question.
It gave voice to his concerns and makes Gladly
Breaking Bread so much more than a schematically
ideological propaganda film. It was more immediate.
In constructing a narrative about his domestic reali-
ties Jos Huygen expressed his lived experience in the
idiom of the official Catholic discourse, in order to
account for his daily breaking of the bread.
A social history of amateur film (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), Martina Roepke, Privat-Vor-
stellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945
(Hildesheim/ New York: Olms Verlag, 2006), and
Alexandra Schneider, Die Stars sind wir: Heimkino
als filmische Praxis (Marburg: Schren, 2004).
8. Paul Kusters, Kroniek van een familie. De familiefilms
van Jos A. Huygen, in Nieuwsbrief Smalfilmmuseum
1 (1994), 111.
9. Diary of Aunt Nolda (19391951), second book, 17
juni 1941. Private collection of Patrick Huygen, Oss.
10. According to members of the Huygen family this
poem was written by Emiel Hullenbroeks,
11. J.H. Franken, De godsdienstige opvoeding thuis
(Hoenderloo: Drukkerij Stichting Hoenderloo, 1938).
12. Ben v. Kaam and Anne. v. d. Meiden, De dominee
gaat voorbij: Familiealbum van driekwart protestants
leven in Nederland (Bilthoven: Ambo, 1974), 30.
13. A. Th. van Deursen and G.J. Schutte, Geleefd
geloven: Geschiedenis van de protestantse vroom-
heid (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1996), 103.
14. Michiel van der Plas and J.H. Roes, De kerk gaat uit:
Familiealbum van een halve eeuw katholiek leven in
Nederland (Bilthoven: Ambo, 1973), 129.
15. Peter Nissen, Zoals het huisje van Nazareth. Over
devoties en rituelen in de kring van het gezin en de
religieuze aankleding van het woonhuis, Trajecta.
Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van het katholiek
leven in Nederland 4 (1995), 122140, 149.
16. Gillis, A world of their own making, 6364.
17. Jan Antoine Hes, In de ban van het beeld (Assen:
Van Gorcum, 1972); Slot, Katholieken en de film,
6199.
18. A.C. de Gooyer, Het beeld der vadren: Een docu-
mentaire over het leven van het protestants christelijke
volksdeel in de twintiger en dertiger jaren (Utrecht:
De Fontein, 1964) 7072.
19. Ger Groot, Opkomst, ondergang en herstel van het
roomse leven, NRC Handelsblad, 29-11-1996, 9.
Gladly Breaking Bread: Religious repertoires and family film 371

20. Walter Goddijn, Roomsen, dat waren wij (Hilversum
1978) 8.
21. Slot, Katholieken en de film, 73, 75.
22. Henk Verheul, De huisbioscoop van Path Frres,
Het Photohistorisch Tijdschrift 11 (1988): 4, 9597.
23. This film is probably catalogued as Path Baby nr.
2031/2032 and 2033. Kusters, Kroniek van een
familie, 111.
24. H.C.M. Wijffels, Doel en noodzakelijkheid (Nijmegen:
Nederlandse R.K. Bond voor Grote gezinnen, 1927),
n.p. (Save the Christian family); HannekeWesthoff,
Natuurlijk geboortenregelen in de twintigste eeuw
(Baarn: Ambo, 1986) 41; F. van Heek, Het geboorte-
niveau der Nederlandse Rooms-Katholieken: Een
demografisch-sociologische studie van een
gemancipeerde minderheidsgroep (Leiden: Sten-
fert Kroese, 1954).
25. Michiel van der Plas, Uit het rijke Roomsche Leven:
Een documentaire over de jaren 19251935 (Baarn:
Ambo, 1992) 26. First published in 1962.
26. Heilige Familie: zondagsblad met platen, uitgegeven
door het Aartsbroederschap der H. Familie, vol. 65
(1929), 381.
27. Quotations from A. van Domburg Levende schadu-
wen: Aantekeningen over film (Utrecht: Het Spec-
trum,1936), 88 (production) and 81 (flesh and
blood), as well as A. van Domburg, Alphons Laudy,
Jaarboek van de maatschappij der Nederlandse let-
terkunde te Leiden 196970, 131136 (trash). See
also Slot, Katholieken en de film, 87 (movie failed).
28. J.W.G. Derkx. Wim Cox jr. Levensgang, Pronkstuk-
ken, 1993, www.limburgsmuseum.nl/me-
dia/pdf/levensg.pdf (accessed 1 December 2006).
29. Derkx estimates 25,000 people saw Course of Life.
See Bert Hogenkamp, De Nederlandse documen-
taire film, 19201940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennip,
1988), on the eras documentary aesthetics.
30. Michelle Citron, Home movies and other necessary
fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), 42.
31. Interview with Jos Huygens daughter, Vera and
Stella Huygen (Haarlem, 2003).
32. Westhoff, Natuurlijke geboorteregeling, 59.
33. The diaries of Aunt Nolda, private collection of P.
Huygen.
34. Kusters, Kroniek van een familie, 111.
35. The story of the feeding of the five thousand is found
in Mark 6: 3044, Luke 9: 1017, and John 6: 114.

Abstract: Gladly Breaking Bread: Religious repertoires and family film,

by Susan Aasman

Home movie-making developed into a new ritual grounded within the family, using available consumer
technology to construct ones own domestic ideals. This essay examines how amateurs considered
religious ideals as well. A collection of home movies from the 1920s and 1930s illustrates how one Dutch
Catholic father of fourteen children used his small-gauge film camera to express his lived experience in
terms of official Catholic discourse.

FILM HISTORY: Volume 19, Number 4, 2007 p. 371