Cinema in Post-War Belgium

First comprehensive history of Belgian cinema in the post-war decades.

Between the liberation of 1944 and the mid-1960s, cinema in Belgium was both booming and fragile. Film theatres across the country attracted record audiences and were rebuilt into dazzling spaces, while local film production remained a precarious enterprise. This book brings that paradoxical landscape to life. It explores cinephile culture and institutional developments alongside popular comedies, art documentaries, colonial films, industrial productions and experimental shorts. Sixteen chapters show how cinema related to Belgium’s shifting identities in a period of reconstruction and transition. The book also challenges long-standing notions of a linguistic divide within Belgian cinema, showing that in the decades before regional film policies emerged, filmmakers and audiences largely operated within a shared national film culture. Generously illustrated and grounded in fresh archival research, this is the first comprehensive history of Belgian cinema in the post-war decades. Situating Belgian cinema within wider cultural, political and international contexts, it offers a compelling resource for film historians, cultural scholars, and heritage institutions.

Foreword
Tomas Leyers

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Cinema in post-war Belgium
Bjorn Gabriels, Gertjan Willems, & Bénédicte Rochet

PART I: Setting the Stage: Contextualising Post-War Belgian Cinema

Chapter 1. From national to regional film support: Belgian film production policy in the post-war era (1945–1967)
Gertjan Willems & Alexander De Man
Chapter 2. Concentric spheres of control: On film censorship and discipline during the Belgian Trente Glorieuses
Daniel Biltereyst
Chapter 3. Reel power: Belgian colonial filmmaking after 1945
Matthew G. Stanard
Chapter 4. Mechanics of the industrial image at Sofidoc, the Société du Film Documentaire: Where aesthetic ambitions meet the demands of commissioned films (1947–1960)
Bénédicte Rochet
Chapter 5. From film club to film archive: The 1947 Brussels 1st Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux-Arts and the making of the Cinémathèque de Belgique
Xavier García Bardón
Chapter 6. From cinephilia to cinéma critique: The Haesaerts brothers’ impact on post-war Belgian film culture, non-fiction networks, and art documentaries
Joséphine Vandekerckhove

PART II: Behind the Camera: Key Figures and Filmmaking Practices

Chapter 7. Flemish popular comedies: Edith Kiel, Jan Vanderheyden, and the Antwerp Film Company AFO, 1952–1961
Dirk Van Engeland, Roel Vande Winkel, & Gertjan Willems
Chapter 8. Towards the myth of the industrial hero: Charles Dekeukeleire’s theories on fiction films
Mathilde Lejeune
Chapter 9. Marcel Broodthaers: Documentary filmmaker (1957–1964)
Margaux Van Uytvanck & Raf Wollaert
Chapter 10. Red searching for form: The early works of Harry Kümel
Ernest Mathijs
Chapter 11. Tracing the origins of Fugitive Cinema
Liesje Baltussen & Gertjan Willems

PART III: On Screen: Identities, Politics and Modernism

Chapter 12. Ceci est un cinéma d’auteur belge: Belgian auteur cinema inspired by Italian, French, and Belgian modernist cinema
Wouter Hessels
Chapter 13. Meeting another Waterloo: Edmond Bernhard and the “metaphysical subversion of the tourist film”
Bjorn Gabriels
Chapter 14. Henri Storck’s The Smugglers’ Banquet (1952): Blurring the borders between commission and reality
Christoph Brüll & Jeremy Hamers
Chapter 15. Silver screens, gendered lenses: Age and gender in post-war Belgian fiction films
Femke De Sutter
Chapter 16. A royal zero hour? Belgian King Leopold III and SS officer Ernst Schäfer making Masters of the Congo Jungle (1958)
Matthias De Groof, Bjorn Gabriels, & Koen Aerts

Contributors
Index

Gertjan Willems

Gertjan Willems is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the University of Antwerp and Visiting Professor at Ghent University.

Bjorn Gabriels

Bjorn Gabriels is a film critic and researcher at the Universities of Antwerp and Namur.

Bénédicte Rochet

Bénédicte Rochet is Professor of History at the University of Namur.

Christoph Brull

Daniel Biltereyst

Ernest Mathijs

Femke De Sutter

Jérémy Hamers

Joséphine Vandekerckhove

Koen Aerts

Liesje Baltussen

Mathilde Lejeune

Matthias De Groof

Matthias De Groof is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the University of Antwerp. He has held visiting fellow appointments at the New York University, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland, and the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence of the Bayreuth University in Germany.

Raf Wollaert

Raf Wollaert completed a PhD on the subject of Marcel Broodthaers’s cinema at the University of Antwerp in 2024.

Margaux Van Uytvanck

Tomas Leyers

Xavier García Bardón

Matthew Stanard

Matthew G. Stanard is professor of history at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia, USA.

Wouter Hessels

Alexander De Man

Roel Vande Winkel

Dirk Van Engeland