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BELGIAN DOCUMENTARY
average art-film completely fails to develop. It was neither pretentious nor sentimental in its approach, but presented its subject in feature-length as a piece of vivid and critical exposition. Le Monde de Paul Delvaux, made two years earlier, was a shorter but equally fascinating study — the combined efforts of Storck as director, the painter Delvaux himself, the script-writer Rene Micha, the composer Andre Souris and Paul Eluard the poet. In this case, the approach was not didactic; instead the music and verse were used in counterpart to the pictures to bring out their style and mood.
Storck and Andre Cauvin (the director of films on Van Eyck and Memling) had pioneered this kind of film before the war. Films on the fine arts were in a way a continuation of the avantgarde and they have remained one of the main contributions of Belgian film-making. Vernaillen's Porcelaine de Bruxelles (1947) was a study of technique. Charles Dekeukelaire, the other main figure in Belgian cinema, in Le Fondateur (1947), used largely contemporary illustrations with animation to describe the reign of Leopold the First. Implicit in the film, too, was an interesting comment on the economic history of the time. Heritiers du Passe (1948) made for the Belgian Army by Jean Cleinge, one of the younger directors, surveyed in two reels the whole development of Belgian culture. It surmounted this intrinsic difficulty with considerable skill.
Any expansion of documentary film-making in Belgium into other fields has been limited. Government sponsorship has been restricted almost exclusively to Army training and to school films. There is no overall information policy, nor has there been any notable sponsorship by private organisations. The more superficial aspects of Belgian life — its manners and customs, its buildings and countryside — have certainly found their way on to the screen, mainly through commercial enterprise. The Belgian Congo has also been a source of similar inspiration. But where the occasional opportunity has arisen, a sense of social purpose has emerged. Again Storck has provided the principal exceptions. Before the war he made Borinage (1933) with Joris Ivens, about conditions in the Belgian mining industry, and Les Maisons de la Misere (1938) on slums and rehousing, photographed by the Dutch cameraman, John Ferno, and Eli Lotar, who was later to make Aubervilliers in France. To these Storck added in 1949 Les Carrefours de la Vie on juvenile delinquency in Belgium —
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