Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Introduction: Regional/National/Transnational Debates in Francophone Belgian Cinema
- 1 The (Francophone) Belgian Film Ecosystem: Trends in Production, Distribution and Exhibition
- 2 ‘No Future’: Social Marginalisation, Social Precariousness and Depictions of Seraing in Le gamin au vélo (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011) and Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014)
- 3 ‘Stills’ and Fragmented Families: Contemplating the Private Sphere in Joachim Lafosse’s Wallonia
- 4 From Slag Heaps to Cliffs: The ‘Marked’ Regional Landscape in Cages (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2006)
- 5 The Francophone Belgian Road Movie: Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008) and Ultranova (Bouli Lanners, 2005)
- 6 Lucas Belvaux’s Return: The Thriller Genre and Heists in Liège
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Films Cited
- Index
1 - The (Francophone) Belgian Film Ecosystem: Trends in Production, Distribution and Exhibition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Traditions in World Cinema
- Introduction: Regional/National/Transnational Debates in Francophone Belgian Cinema
- 1 The (Francophone) Belgian Film Ecosystem: Trends in Production, Distribution and Exhibition
- 2 ‘No Future’: Social Marginalisation, Social Precariousness and Depictions of Seraing in Le gamin au vélo (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2011) and Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2014)
- 3 ‘Stills’ and Fragmented Families: Contemplating the Private Sphere in Joachim Lafosse’s Wallonia
- 4 From Slag Heaps to Cliffs: The ‘Marked’ Regional Landscape in Cages (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2006)
- 5 The Francophone Belgian Road Movie: Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008) and Ultranova (Bouli Lanners, 2005)
- 6 Lucas Belvaux’s Return: The Thriller Genre and Heists in Liège
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
- Films Cited
- Index
Summary
Supporting cinema […] is essential to the image of our [linguistic] community in Belgium, for the development of our culture as well as an economic resource […] and for education purposes. (Frédéric Fonteyne and Patrick Quinet, cited in Duplat and Pluijgers 2001)
Francophone Belgian cinema is supporting itself well thanks to its creative talent but it is fragile, and I am well aware of this, it is imperative to consolidate it. (Belgian Minister of Culture, Richard Miller, cited in Duplat 2001)
Belgian cinema does not have a sufficiently large internal/domestic market to amortise its production costs and even less so to make it profitable. The true internal market is France, where in order to exist, there is no other choice than to single itself out through its difference (or its indifference). (Reynaert 2011: personal communication)
The eighth annual ‘Small Cinemas’ conference (2017) preferred the use of the ‘glocal’ as a critical category to frame and analyse questions of cultural diversity, language and identity in small national cinema contexts. In this sense, the ‘glocal’ served to replace the transnational as an apposite means of considering and detailing the in-between spaces of the local and the global – that is in terms of production, distribution and exhibition as well as ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’ (Klinger 1997) representational approaches. This is typically the home of cinematic transnationalism. However, Vincendeau highlights the limitations of the composite ‘glocal’ term, by suggesting that it overlooks the relevance of the ‘national’ (2011: 339). In the case of Belgium, the idea of ‘national cinema’, remains under the ‘francophone Belgian’ label. The national remains as a ‘dialogic partner’ – to adopt Ezra and Rowden's notion (2006: 4) – to the transnational and the regional. In film scholarship, the national is inescapable as a framework, since, as Elsaesser contends,
by the mid-1990s the discussion around national cinema had – depending on one's view – hardened into dogma or reached a generally accepted consensus around a particular set of arguments that encouraged the desire to conceptualise the field differently, or at the very least to signal such a need. (Elsaesser 2013)
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- Francophone Belgian Cinema , pp. 26 - 50Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018