Cowboys, Icebergs, Anarchists and Toreadors: The Paradoxes and Possibilities of the Francophone Belgian Road Cinema

Abstract

This chapter attempts to answer the questions: ‘what, and where, is Belgian road cinema?’ Doing so involves considering the European-ness of Belgian film as well as its national specificity and connection to wider French-language cultural categories and industries. This chapter analyses five films: Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008), L'iceberg (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005), Quand la mer monte (Jeanne Moreau and Gilles Porte, 2004), Les folles aventures de Simon Konianski/Simon Konianski (Micha Wald, 2008) and Aaltra (Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, 2004, France/Belgium).Although these voyages generally engage with national culture – or cultures, in the case of Belgium – the limits of the nation-state no longer adequately contain the cultures and spaces explored in Belgian road cinema. Citizenship in contemporary Belgium is reframed as inherently linked to mobility, a stance that rejects fixed, monolithic identity formulations and the closed spaces associated with national identities and conceptions of Fortress Europe.

Intranational film industries: A quantitative analysis of contemporary Belgian cinema

“…The few existing studies focus mostly either on Flemish or on francophone Belgian cinema (Niessen 2020;Steele 2015;Willems 2017b;Willems, Vande Winkel, and Biltereyst 2021). Most other studies take as their point of departure a textual analysis of specific (groups of) films (Andrin 2014;Gott 2013;Hartford 2017;Mosley 2013), rarely addressing the wider production context from which these films emerge. This article aims to complement the textual and qualitative approaches to contemporary Belgian cinema by offering a quantitative industry analysis of its subnational, national and transnational dynamics.…”