Having only a very small film industry but equipped with a high number of film theatres and a thriving network of ciné clubs, Belgium played a minor but nevertheless significant role in the history of city symphonies.1 Films such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) or Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929) were enthusiastically received by the artists and theorists of the Belgian avant-garde, and they were celebrated in art journals such as Variétés.2 These films corresponded with an interest in the theme of the modern metropolis that was already very much present among Belgian artists, above all Frans Masereel, whose The City (1925) can be considered a veritable “city symphony on paper.”3 Published simultaneously in France and Germany, Masereel’s series of 100 woodcuts depicting life in the modern metropolis can almost be read as an illustrated storyboard for Ruttmann’s Berlin city symphony. Illustrious commentators such as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig noted the “cinematic” qualities of Masereel’s work, and there’s no question that the similarities between La Ville and Ruttmann’s famous city symphony are striking: the dawn-to- dusk structure, the juxtaposition of panoramic shots and closer views, the opening sequence depicting the arrival in the city by train, the evocation of hectic city life, the street as a site of social protest, the bustle of entertainment and nightlife, the machines in factories, the phantasmagoria of commodities in shop windows, et cetera. Even specific scenes, such as the horse fallen in traffic and the suicide attempt of a woman, also appear in La Ville. According to William Moritz, there can be no doubt that Ruttmann’s film was based on Masereel’s best-selling book. Referring to the film’s credit title “From an Idea by Carl Mayer,” Moritz ironically suggests that Mayer’s idea was: “Let’s make a film like Masereel’s book.”4
Apart from Masereel’s “city symphony on paper,” several Belgian city poems were also made on celluloid. In 1929, the year of the release of city symphonies by Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Robert Florey, and others, at least two Belgian avant-garde filmmakers made films dealing with Brussels city life, both of which are now unfortunately lost. Lucien Backman, a cameraman who became one of the leading figures in the Union belge des cinéastes amateurs in the early 1930s, made Midi (Noon, 1929), which deals with urban life as the clock strikes noon in the style of Ruttmann. According to press reviews, the film shows floods of office clerks leaving through doors, fully- packed trams, construction sites coming to a standstill, restaurants filling with clients, and road workers having their lunch or taking a nap, in an ironical montage orchestrating all the details typical of a city at noon. As in his La Vie à l’envers (1930), Backmann used reverse motion effects in Midi evoking Vertov.5 In addition, painter Carlo Queeckers depicted the popular Marolles neighborhood in Kermesse flamande (1929), made in collaboration with Paul Flon and Camy Cluytens. La Nation belge described the film as made of
shots that are not only original but that also give away a sophisticated artistic taste. Of particular interest is the tour of the Hôtel de Ville that we only discover gradually and that literally launches its Saint Michael into the sky. We like its quarters, churches, and panoramas seen from unexpected angles… . This film is an excellent work, full of rhythm and movement [but] its too rapid succession of images hurts the eye.6
In the same year, Queeckers also made Mélodie bruxelloise (1929), one of the many city films with a musical term in its title.7
The year 1929 also saw the release of Images d’Ostende, Henri Storck’s lyrical portrait of the Belgian seaside town where he was born in 1907. After seeing Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) in a Brussels ciné-club—a veritable revelation to him—Storck (1907–99) founded a highly successful film club in his native city in 1928.8 Seeking advice from other ciné-clubs, he began an intense correspondence with Jean Vigo, who was establishing a film club in Nice at that time. This international network of film clubs proved very important for the proliferation of city symphonies as well as for Storck’s own film career.9 Soon after, Images d’Ostende began its own tour of ciné-clubs. In Paris, Storck got advice from Boris Kaufman, Vertov’s brother who collaborated on Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930). In this context, he also met Joris Ivens, the driving force behind the Amsterdam Filmliga.
In the late nineteenth century, Ostend had become a fashionable Belgian seaside resort and, in the early twentieth century, it turned into an important cultural center, being the residence of writers such as de Michel de Ghelderode and Fernand Crommelynck, and painters such as James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Constant Permeke, and Félix Labisse. The city and its beaches became an important motif in their works, in particular those of Ensor and Spilliaert. As a young man, Storck had close contacts with these artists and they certainly inspired him. Ostend became one of Storck’s favorite subjects, featuring in several films of the early 1930s and also in many later ones.10
As in so many of the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, in Images d’Ostende the tourist’s city remains largely out of sight. Storck filmed on a windy winter day—“Aspects intimes de la ville, l’hiver,” an intertitle states. Just a few strollers face the wind on the beach. As the titles of the visual chapters indicate, the film focuses on the port, the anchors, the foam, the dunes, and the North Sea. By means of a series of panning shots or shots characterized by gentle camera movements, Images d’Ostende visualizes the places and natural elements that constitute Ostend and its immediate surroundings. Focusing on water and wind and the graphic patterns they create in the sand, Storck deals with the favorite motifs of an earlier generation of artists, such as Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau designers. In his 1931 article on Storck, Oswell Blakeston wrote about the “ephemeral, fleeting beauty on which the condensation of cinema imposes the living rhythm of dance.”11 Ephemeral elements such as water and sand moved by the wind connect Images d’Ostende with French impressionist cinema and the aspirations of the cinéma pur. In his 1938 Histoire de l’art cinématographique, Carl Vincent called Images d’Ostende “one of the most beautiful works of pure cinematographic poetry that silent cinema has left us.”12 Contrary to other city symphonies that favor the mechanical, Storck draws only to a certain extent attention to the urban infrastructure of the coastal town such as the harbor, the dikes, and the jetties. His main interest is unmistakably the natural world of shifting sensations, a world which the medium of film can evoke perfectly. Evoking ideas of French impressionist film theory of the 1920s, Carl Vincent states that Images d’Ostende is a discovery of the “photogenic secrets of beings, nature, and things, through the plasticity of their life,” and he notes “the expressive beauty of the image” as well as “the insistent and musical rhythm in the way of a symphony.”13 In the works of Belgian and Dutch documentarists such as Storck, Dekeukeleire, and Ivens, Vincent recognized “a remarkable perfection in the plasticity, an emphatic sense of rhythm, a care for the composition of images and the movement of sequences.” For Vincent, in short, Images d’Ostende is “a kind of symphonic composition.”14
With its focus on water and the sea, Images d’Ostende shares characteristics with À propos de Nice (1930), Vigo’s city symphony on the French seaside town, which opens with images of waves. Water, of course, also pervades Rain (1929), the city poem made by Ivens showing the city of Amsterdam through the lens of a shower of rain. As Ivens’s film on Amsterdam, Storck shows how nature intervenes in the fleeting life of the urban environment. In the following years, Storck would collaborate with both Vigo and Ivens: he would act as an assistant director for Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1932) and he would co-direct Misère au Borinage (1934) with Ivens.
Prior to these collaborations, Storck, Vigo, and Ivens were present at the second International Conference of Independent Film (CICI II), which took place in Brussels between 27 November and 1 December 1930.15 At this conference, both Images d’Ostende and Vigo’s À propos de Nice were screened in the presence of many prominent members of the European film avant-garde, including Hans Richter, Boris Kaufman, Léon Moussinac, Enrico Prampolini, and Oswell Blakeston. Also present was Germaine Dulac, who just had become artistic director of Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert and who invited Storck, as well as Vigo and Charles Dekeukeleire, to work with her.16 Storck and Vigo’s city symphonies were a perfect fit for the conference program, as it also included screenings of several other lyrical city films such as Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), Skyscraper Symphony (Robert Florey, 1929), Poèmes de Madrid (probably Esencia de verbena by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, 1930), Champs-Elysées (Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman, 1928), Bateaux Parisiens (Daniel Abric and Michel Gorel, 1929), as well as a (now lost) “Lyrical Reportage on Antwerp” by Charles Dekeukeleire.
Dekeukeleire (1905–71), who was, together with Storck, the leading Belgian avant-garde filmmaker of the 1920s and 1930s, would also become the author of another city poem: Visions de Lourdes (1932). Having close contacts with the avant-garde group and journal 7 Arts, which propagated the theories of Constructivism and the idea of pure art, Dekeukeleire expressed his admiration for filmmakers such as Epstein, Dullac, and Vertov in many of his writings.17 After having made some highly original avant-garde films such as Combat de boxe (1927), Impatience (1928), Histoire de détective (1929), and Witte vlam (1930), he turned to making documentaries. Marking this shift to documentary cinema, Visions de Lourdes was triggered by the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC), the Catholic Young Worker’s Movement, which undertook a pilgrimage to Lourdes. This small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees had developed into a major place of Christian pilgrimage after a series of apparitions of the Holy Virgin that are reported to have occurred to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.18 The spring water from the Grotto in which the Virgin appeared is believed to possess miraculous healing properties. Consequently, the pilgrimage to Lourdes entails the consumption of or bathing in the water, which pours out of the Grotto. One of the world’s leading Catholic Marian shrines, Lourdes became the site of several churches and places of worship as well as impressive candlelight and sacrament processions. In the political context of the Third Republic, marked as it was by fierce debates between Catholics and anticlerical republicans, Lourdes became a controversial site that also inspired novels such as Émile Zola’s Lourdes (1894) and feature films such as La Tragédie de Lourdes (Julien Duvivier, 1923) and La Vie merveilleuse de Bernadette (Georges Pallu, 1929).
In the late 1920s and 1930s leading members of the avant-garde discovered the site. Famous journalist and photo-reporter Egon Kisch, for instance, dedicated an extensive essay on Lourdes in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung and Jean Vigo played with the idea of making a film on the town.19 A questioning and critical catholic, Dekeukeleire elaborately shows all the elements that constitute Lourdes as a religious site through a swift succession of shots. Like so many city symphonies, Visions de Louvres opens its exploration of the town with images of a train approaching the city. This time, however, trains carry diseased and disabled pilgrims, who end up in an urban landscape marked by churches, crucifixes, religious statues, candles, and monstrances. Streets and squares are filled with priests, nuns, and monks. Pilgrims are praying on their knees. People collect holy water. Huge crowds gather in processions by day as well as by night, resulting in shots of hundreds of candles and torches passing in front of a church lit by hundreds of light bulbs.
Dekeukeleire’s style is sober and straightforward. Only once in a while does he appeal to a modernist or avant-garde sensibility by using high- angle shots (of crowds scattered over the squares) or low camera angles (depicting some of the procession’s participants or candle sellers against the sky). As Storck’s film on Ostend, Dekeukeleire’s city poem on Lourdes is characterized by a predilection for the sensuality of natural elements. Visions de Lourdes opens with beautiful images of clouds, the nearby mountains, snow, water, and even the waves of the sea, which is situated far away from this place of pilgrimage. Dekeukeleire’s camera also glides gently and sometimes restlessly along the jagged rock formations in a cave that suddenly changes into the Grotto containing a statue of the Holy Virgin.
In contrast with Storck’s film on Ostend, Dekeukeleire also focuses his camera on people and on the crowds. Apart from cherishing the beauty of the natural environment, Dekeukeleire’s observational style provides a respectful approach of Lourdes and its devout pilgrims. Nonetheless, the film is also marked by a critical and even acerbic approach, and, indeed, it was considered subversive in Catholic circles.20 As in his documentary on Dixmude (1931), the site of annual mass gatherings of Flemish nationalists, Dekeukeleire does not hesitate to demystify the place.21 Lourdes is also presented as a site of naïve credulity. Endless processions of pilgrims slide past shrewd and greedy sellers of candles and rosaries. The camera tracks impressively through a street lined with endless rows of shops packed with religious merchandise, evoking the transformation of religion into a commodity. Sick people awaiting a miracle are delivered in great numbers. Holy water pours down through taps. Thousands of letters are displayed behind metal bars. Evoking a timeless realm of nature and faith, the film also presents Lourdes as a place of superstition that is organized as a factory.
Although Images d’Ostende and Visions de Lourdes are lyrical portraits inspired by French impressionist cinema (on which Dekeukeleire had written enthusiastically during the 1920s), they also give us information on the topography of a Belgian seaside resort and a French place of pilgrimage. In so doing, they mark the “documentary turn” of many progressive filmmakers in the early sound era—an evolution that became clear at the Brussels CICI conference.22 However, the documentaries by Storck and Dekeukeleire do not necessarily stand in contrast to their avant-garde or more abstract films—at the time, film programs often combined screenings of Images d’Ostende or Visions de Louvre with other, more “abstract” films by the same directors.23 Like Joris Ivens, these Belgian filmmakers demonstrated that a personal or auteurist documentary film could be seen as the last stand of the avant-garde against the film industry.24 In addition, the city poems by Storck and Dekeukeleire also show affinities with Surrealism—undoubtedly the most important avant-garde movement in Belgium in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Images d’Ostende, for instance, shares with Surrealism a fascination for waste, garbage, dust, debris, and derelict spaces in its remarkable sequence of images of deserted docks, smoking fishing boats, rusty chains, withered anchors, and stagnant and sordid water full of rubbish. Reminiscent of the works by writers and photographers associated with Surrealism such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Man Ray, André Kertesz, and Eli Lotar, this aesthetics of the l’informe turns the urban landscape into a Surrealist terrain vague and site of estrangement, suggesting wreckage or raw forces hidden beneath cultured surfaces.25
This sense of unease is also the result of Storck’s fascination for an uncanny emptiness—another trope of Surrealist urban imagery. In novels such as Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) or Breton’s Nadja (1927, with photographs by André Boiffard), or in the photographs by Eugène Atget, admired and rediscovered by the Surrealists, empty streets and squares are presented as stages for an existential drama.26 Similar imagery can be found in urban photographs by Man Ray, Eli Lotar, and many others. In contrast with the fascination for the urban masses characterizing many city symphonies, Images d’Ostende does not only focus on water and sand, it also emphatically shows a harbor, beaches, and boardwalk without its tourists crowds—Storck focused later on Ostend’s crowded beaches in Trains de Plaisir (1930) and Ostende, reine des plages (1931). In Images d’Ostende, only a few characters can be seen in some long shots of a pier, the embankment, the beaches, and the dunes. However, instead of animating the empty spaces, these solitary figures emphasize the emptiness of the city—a notion that was also evoked by a striking shot of the wind blowing in empty deck chairs.
Shrouded in an uncanny and gloomy atmosphere, Visions de Lourdes, too, is marked by Surrealist elements. Explicitly juxtaposing the divine and the commercial, the magical and the industrial, Visions de Lourdes comes close to Surrealism’s oxymoronic fascination for Roman Catholicism, combining an interest in the supernatural with an obsession for irrational beliefs, physical pain, the grotesque, and strategies of desecration.27 In particular the uncanny shots of crutches suspended in the Sacred Grotto and the striking images of floors strewn with leather corsets, wooden legs, and other prostheses speak unmistakably of a Surrealist sensibility. Not coincidentally, both Storck and Dekeukeleire are mentioned in Ado Kyrou’s 1953 Le Surréalisme au cinema, one of the few books on Surrealist cinema drawing attention to documentaries.28 Like the “straight photography” admired by the Surrealists, documentary cinema could reveal the surreal or the marvelous in the real.29 Like other key figures of the history of documentary film close to Surrealism such as Jacques Brunius, Georges Franju, Humphrey Jennings, Eli Lotar, Jean Painlevé, and Jean Vigo, Storck and Dekeukeleire brought a poetic ambivalence to their films, creating unsettling juxtapositions within and between images.
