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BORINAGE—A DOCUMENTARY EXPERIENCE
JORIS IVENS
I still can find no better definition for the word Art, than this, “Liart c’est Vhomme ajouté a la nature,’ nature, reality, truth, but with a significance, a conception, a character, which the artist brings out in it, and to which he gives expression, “qu'il dégage,’ which he
disentangles, and makes free and clears up.
—VINCENT VAN GOGH In a letter written from Wasmes, the Borinage, June, 1879.
“The Borins (inhabitants of the Borinage, located west of Mons) find work only in the coal mines. These mines are an imposing sight, 300 metres underground; there daily descend groups of working men, worthy of our respect and our sympathies. The miner is a particular type of the Borinage; for him daylight does not exist, and except on Sunday he never sees the sunshine. He works laboriously by a lamp whose light is pale and dim, in a narrow tunnel, his body bent double and sometimes he is obliged to crawl on the ground; he extracts from the bowels of the earth the mineral whose great usefulness we well know; he works among the threats of ever-recurring dangers. . .”
This is in the little Dutch geography book that Vincent van Gogh read before going to the Borinage as a student evangelist. That is where I went to make my next film, not as a missionary to soften or to treat wounds, but to reveal the wounds to the rest of the world because I thought this my best way to help the wounds. My working conditions both normally and artistically had been wonderful in the Soviet Union but, as much as I enjoyed these conditions, I couldn’t feel that I was really needed there, so after Song of Heroes I came back to Holland.
If Philips had now telephoned me I had learned enough to have turned down their offer. Fortunately the first opportunity that appeared after my return to Holland was exactly what I was hoping for and needed most.
Henri Storck, a Belgian director whom I knew to be an honest and serious documentary filmmaker came to me with the idea for a film—or rather a definite need for a film. He told me what had been happening in the Borinage while I was away in 1932.
In June the Belgian mine-owners had announced a 5 per cent cut in wages. On Monday the 20th, a meeting was called by the Wasmes miners to strike the next day if the cut was not withdrawn. On Tuesday the eight pits of Wasmes were deserted and certain pits in Guesmes, Frameties and Quanegnon were stopped. By the following Monday 15,000 miners were on strike in the Borinage district, and by July 7, 30,000 were out in the Borinage and 15,000 in the Centre and Charleroi. Mons, Charleroi and Liége were put under martial law, armored cars patrolled the