Belgium, much like Switzerland and Canada is a country that stands divided along linguistic lines, and that makes its already modest population almost too fractional to support a native film industry. There actually wasn't to be a Belgian film industry until the 1960s. Top talents, in the names of Jacques Feyder and screenwriter Charles Spaak from Brussels, emigrated to France and it was up to the documentarists, notably Henri Storck (1907-1999), to keep Belgium's film reputation afloat. The breakthrough year for the country was 1967, when Andre Delvaux' De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short,1966) won the British Film Institutes's coveted Sutherland Trophy as the most cutting edge and imaginative film of the year, and Jerzy Skolimowski's Le Depart (The Departure,1967) was rewarded the esteemed Grand Prix at Berlin.
Born in Antwerp, Harry Kumel made an outstanding debut in 1968 with the Dutch co-production Monsieur Harwarden, a baroque fantasy of ideas. A similar approach worked less effectually in such later films as Malpertuis: Histoire d'une maison maudite (Malpertuis : The Legend of Doom House,1972) and Het verloren paradijs (The Lost Paradise,1977). Andre, Baron Delvaux (1926-2002) had decidedly more success with his later efforts, working in both French and Flemish. His finest hour would star Godard's gal Anna Karina in Rendez-vous a Bray (Rendezvous at Bray,1971), albeit he had continued to excel in such films as 1973's subsequent Belle and Une femme entre chien et loup (Woman in a Twilight Garden,1979) which featured Rutger Hauer.
 |
| The doors of perception in Chantal Akerman's lush Le rendevous d'anna (1978) |
The second wave of Belgian directors emerged from the avant-garde in the early Seventies, led by the highly original Chantal Akerman (b 1950) whose Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruselles (1975) was a deliberately paced but powerful piece of intensely feminist cinema. The running time was nearly four hours. Her later films including Les Rendezvous d'Anna (The Meetings of Anna,1978) and Toute une Nuit (All Night Long,1982) helped her reputation as a serious auteur Jean-Jacques Andrien would make an indelible mark in 1975 with his hallucinatory Amr's Son Is Dead . One of Akerman's nearest and dearest associates, Samy Szlingerbaum would become a director himself in the year 1980 with the sensitive Yiddish-language production of Bruxelles - Transit (Brussels - Transit)