This book examines shifting images of occupation in Dutch feature films about World War Two, with an emphasis on films made between the 1960s and the 1980s. It explores the complex, evolving role played by film within Dutch post-war cultural memory and asks to what extent film can represent and assimilate the experiences and collective legacies of war. The book views film as a cultural text—a representation of the past that reveals the concerns of society from the time it was made, whether this happens consciously or not. In this way, the Dutch films examined in this volume form part of collective social memory, bringing to light how Dutch society sees itself—or saw itself— during the decades after the war. Though its apparent subject is Dutch films with war as their theme, Images of Occupation in Dutch Film is at the same time an exploration of how the films of a nation re-tell the stories of its past.

The book argues for a progression from ‘black-and-white’ responses to Germany's 1940-1945 occupation of the Netherlands—reflected in the tendency in films of the early post-war decades to portray ‘good’ Dutch citizens against ‘evil’ occupiers—towards a much more nuanced, intricate image in later films of the moral choices faced by ordinary Dutch people during occupation.