Eye Film Museum

This guide to the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam follows Jean Desmet, a fairground showman who traded carnival life for film distribution in 1909 and quietly kept every poster, invoice and reel he ever handled, more than nine hundred films made between 1907 and 1916. It follows what became of that hoard after his death in 1956, when it passed to the institution that grew into this museum. Listen for how an ordinary showman's habit of never throwing anything away shaped what the collection became.