Cinema that stays at home: the inexportable films of Belgium's Gaston Schoukens, Edith Kiel and Jan Vanderheyden

摘要

This essay focuses on a number of Belgian films made in Brussels by Gaston Schoukens and Antwerp by Edith Kiel and Jan Vanderheyden between 1939 and 1957. The films these three made did not travel, and indeed for the most part they were explicitly made to ‘stay at home’. They did so in several senses, first, because they were made for a long-wave national or local audience with no intention of broadcasting beyond that frequency. Second, because they have also been largely unregarded, mentioned in histories of Belgian cinema, but subject to critical approbation, and noted purely because they existed at a time when there was otherwise little continuity in Belgian film production. Finally, these films have stayed at home because they have been obscured by the ‘travelling’ Belgian national, which has typically focused on such directors as Charles Dekeukeleire and Henri Storck. Through a discussion of films by Schoukens, Kiel and Vanderheyden this essay argues that national cinema that ‘stays at home’ in its home country might provide a template for a mode of address that is locally specific and temporally contiguous. The wider interest of this study lies in, first, an expansion of our understanding of inexportable cinema and, second, to borrow a phrase from Charles R. Acland, the ‘recalibrat[ion]’ of our ‘understanding of relations between local and [national] … film cultures.