Paul Kijzer

Biography

Producer and screenplay writer Paul Kijzer was already keenly interested in film during his high school years. He wrote film reviews in, among other places, the magazine Lichtbeeld cultuur. Director-in-exile Detlef Sierck, who would later become famous in the US as Douglas Sirk, gave him his first job as script boy for the film Boefje, the first Dutch adaptation of a children's book. Paul Kijzer survived the war by going into hiding. After WWII, he wrote film criticism for some time for the national newspaper NRC, but in 1946 he went to work at Kriterion, a student cinema founded by Piet Meerburg. In 1948 he took over the film distributor Hafbo. He introduced the nouvelle vague in the Netherlands.

Inspired by Henri Langlois, the director of the Parisian Cinematheek, he and Piet Meerburg established the Netherlands Historical Film Archive,which would later become the Filmmuseum and, ultimately, EYE Film Institute Netherlands. The archive was moved to the Stedelijk Museum in 1952. Kijzer was involved as a producer for many films, including Spuit Elf, Rondom het Oudekerksplein, and Ibiza, zon en zonde. In the 1960s he also taught at the Netherlands Film Academy. After financial problems with the production of a musical he left for Spain and, via Paris and Los Angeles, finally ended up in Berlin. There he continued to work as an intermediary agent securing funding for films.