Film Culture (1956)

—any place that would be so white that you could forget black dust. In the Borinage I felt that miners, more than any other group of workers, need light and air and color. In my first sight of this district the thing that gave me the most violent dramatic impact were the huge heaps of stored coal protected by barbed wite from the people who needed it and had mined it. Their houses and their families were cold but they couldn’t buy a bucket full from these great store piles of coal because the owners weren't interested in selling—the price was too low this year. The final brutality of this crazy contradiction was indicated to me in a_ story about desperate miners who had been shot by the police when they crawled under the barbed wire to steal a few lumps of coal. Storck had made some very pleasant and sensitive avantgarde films on such subjects as the atmosphere around the seaside resort of Ostend, but he had never tackled anything so serious as this Borinage subject. This is why, when the Brussels people asked him to work on this film to give publicity to the miserable conditions in the Borinage, he asked me to share the directorial responsibility of the film with him and come to live there for a couple of months. His contributions to the film were very great. He was deeply moved by the terrible conditions in the Borinage and his film sensitivity made him an ideal collaborator for me. We agreed to share the duties of story and photography while I took responsibility for the whole production. As a Belgian citizen it was easier for him to move around in this very delicate filming situation. It is understandable that our film was not being made with the approval of the mine-owners and operators. It had been impossible to look outside the Philips factory but in the Borinage it was just as impossible to get into a mine; in fact, when our presence there became known, everything was done to keep us out of the district altogether. In the beginning we had behaved very much as a casual film unit, come to the Borinage to take a few stock-shots, but in two or three weeks our real purpose became clear and from then on we had to behave as if we were making an underground film. We couldn’t stay longer than a couple of days in one house at a time and during our stay in the Borinage we had ‘8 to make several emergency moves with only about an hour’s notice. Each day the film that we shot was taken to Brussels by a messenger so that there would never be any film to be discovered, confiscated and lost. As I was Dutch, a foreigner, we thought it safer never to leave any of the equipment with me. Our precautions were justified, for at 7:00 one morning in Mons the mine operators sent the Belgian secret police to investigate my connection with this film that was being made. They could find nothing in my room to disprove that I was just a reporter who had nothing to do with the actual filming; “Mc. Storck, a Belgian citizen, is in charge of the photography.” . An equally great obstacle was the lack of money. All we could afford was the raw film itself. Storck’s big camera and my hand camera were Our Own property so there was no rent to be paid on them. We even had to rely on the poor people of the Borinage themselves for all the physical assistance that we needed, carrying cameras and equipment, etc., and sometimes even for food and lodging. No film could possibly be more connected with the people about whom the film is made. Some nights we slept in miners’ houses that were already crowded beyond their capacity. We not only saw, but experienced things that made the Magnitogorsk barracks luxurious by compatison, but all this became as natural to us as it was to the miners. We were not strangers. They helped us and worked with us because they clearly understood the significance of this film in publicizing their terrible circumstances throughout Belgium and the rest of the world. We were as identified with their misery as we had been with the energy of the Magnitogorsk young people. From a physical point of view we had to revise and even renounce many of the usual production procedures. For example, our day to day progress had to be kept very flexible with alternative locales for each day so that if one place was being guarded or watched by the police we could move to another place without any waste of time. Sometimes we deliberately announced false plans to misinform the informers. Actually we were always a few steps ahead of the police. Once, in re-enacting an episode of an emer