Film Culture (1956)

streets, bombing planes circled overhead, the gendarmerie appeared in steel helmets and with fixed bayonets, armed soldiery were stationed throughout the mine district, and the right of street assembly was abolished—not more than five persons being allowed to collect together. Workers in other industries throughout the country struck in sympathy with the terrorized miners, and the Belgian government even prepared. for an imagined march of the strikers on the capital. The empty promises and oratory of the reformist leaders of Belgian labor brought the strike to an end, but by July 21, less than 350 miners had returned to work in the Borinage. Of the 100,000 miners who were on strike all over Begium very few returned—or were permitted to return. The mine-owners were to have their revenge. The aftermath of the strike was terrible. Miners who had taken an active part in the strike were not allowed to go back to their jobs. They were black-listed in all Belgian mines and were evicted from the company-owned houses. Whole ghost towns of company houses were left behind by miners’ families looking elsewhere for work. The systematized terror grew broader and deeper and the morale of the Borinage workers was at a dangerously low point. Storck said, “A few of us in Brussels want to make a factual film about the conditions in the Borinage now, which will help the workers there by acquainting the rest of the world with their real conditions.” This was exactly the film subject that 1 wanted and needed. Storck and a Brussels lawyer immediately introduced me to the Borinage by driving me there. In some film subjects you have to search and dig to find the truth about the subject, but in the Borinage everywhere you looked and every word you heard was a direct illustration of the Borinage truth. One of the first men I met was a miner whose family had been evicted and were living on the streets. Although there were bakeries two minutes away from the vacant lot where he and his family were now living, each day he had to cycle to his parents to get a loaf of bread—two hours there and two hours back. Throughout the Borinage you could see detailed evidences of the exhaustion and discourage ment after the last strike. Everywhere there were small groups of jobless workers, idling and talking only about their worries and their lost hopes. About the winter and their families and about people who were lucky and had jobs. There was a funeral of a miner who had died in a mine accident but no one was angry. Death and wretchedness and misery were now accepted as inevitable. Sometimes one could see faint expressions of the whole Borinage spirit in senseless fights that would flare up around the bars and cafes. This seemed a long way from the Borinage that Karl Marx had pointed to as a classic example of proletarian struggle or that Zola had written about in Germinal. But somehow I did understand why Van Gogh after living in the Borinage stopped preaching and began to paint.’ My first impression of the district was its dark and colorless uniformity—no bright thing, no happy thing. Black, dusty—no whites. The lightest tone is gray. Even nature seemed saddened by the district’s misery. The trees and leaves could not breathe through the old layers of coal-dust. The dust filters everywhere—no house is safe against it. A lack of decent plumbing keeps the men, women and children of the Bortnage permanently grimy. The absence of bathing facilities strikes the miner harder than it does any other worker. To work eight and ten hours in the black shafts and tunnels is bad enough, but to come up to the surface of the earth to find that life there is just as black and filthy—this makes the whole twenty-four hours of a miner’s day a terrible thing. All these people could work ten times better and more happily by just having a little clean house, a little room that could always be white. A white shower or a nice, clean kitchen 1 Here are his impressions of the Borinage: “Most of the miners are thin and pale from fever and look tired and emaciated, weather-beaten and aged before their time, the women, as a whole, faded and worn. Around the mine are poor miners’ huts with a few dead trees black from smoke, and thorn hedges, dunghills, and ash dumps, heaps of useless coal, etc. . . People here are very ignorant and untaught, most of them cannot read, but at the same time they are intelligent and quick in their difficult work, brave and frank, of small stature but square-shouldered with melancholy deep-set eyes. They are handy in many things, and work terribly hard. They have a nervous temperament, I do not mean weak, but very sensitive. They have an innate, deeply rooted hatred, and a deep mistrust of everybody who would try to domineer over them.”