Shot with a Kinamo 35mm camera in the winter of 1929, Images d’Ostende was probably a remake of the early amateur films that Henri Storck (1907–99) had made with a Pathé Baby camera that he acquired in 1926. It depicts Storck’s native town of Ostend, which had become a fashionable Belgian seaside resort in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Ostend became an important cultural center, being the residence of a number of famous writers and painters, such as Michel de Ghelderode and James Ensor.
Organized by means of purely visual associations, the film focuses on the places, objects, and natural elements that constitute Ostend and its surroundings: the port, the anchors, the foam, the dunes, and the North Sea. Instead of evoking the industrial rhythms of the modern metropolis, Storck’s gently panning and gliding camera shows how nature intervenes in the fleeting life of the urban environment. Focusing on ephemeral elements such as 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. Moreover, this fascination for wind and water, links Images d’Ostende to the impressionist tendencies of 1920s French avant-garde cinema as well as to À propos de Nice by Jean Vigo and Rain by Joris Ivens, who both had close contacts with Storck. When the film was screened at the second congress of independent films (CICI 2) in Brussels in 1930, the audience included Germaine Dulac, Jean Lods, Jean Painlevé, Joris Ivens, and Jean Vigo, who reportedly shouted “Que d’eau, que d’eau!”—“Water, nothing but water”—in response.
In addition, Images d’Ostende is clearly marked by Surrealism. Evoking the Surrealist fascination for waste, garbage, dust, debris, wreckage, derelict spaces, and sites as the flea market or the abattoir, Storck’s images of smoking fishing boats, sordid waters, rusted chains and anchors evoke a hybrid realm where the urban and the natural as well as the primitive and the sophisticated intersect. This sense of unease is also the result of Storck’s fascination for an uncanny emptiness—another trope of Surrealist urban imagery. Storck’s Ostend lacks its tourists and crowds—one of the prominent emblems of urban modernity so cherished in many city symphonies. Carl Vincent called Storck’s Images d’Ostende “one of the most beautiful works of pure cinematographic poetry that silent cinema has left us.”
The film premiered in January 1930 at the Club du cinéma d’Ostende, one of the most progressive ciné-clubs in Belgium, and one that had screened works by Flaherty, Clair, L’Herbier, Eisenstein as well as Ruttmann’s Berlin during the previous years.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Aubenas, Jacqueline, Hommage à Henri Storck: Films 1928–1985: Catalogue analytique, édition revue et corrigée (Brussels: Commissariat général aux Relations internationales, 1995).
Geens, Vincent, “Le Temps des utopies: L’ambition cinématographique d’Henri Storck, de 1907 à 1940,” Cahiers d’Histoire du Temps présent/Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis 7 (2000): 189–237.
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