Cinema that stays at home: the inexportable films of Belgium's Gaston Schoukens, Edith Kiel and Jan Vanderheyden

This essay focuses on a number of Belgian films made in Brussels by Gaston Schoukens and Antwerp by Edith Kiel and Jan Vanderheyden between 1939 and 1957. The films these three made did not travel, and indeed for the most part they were explicitly made to ‘stay at home’. They did so in several senses, first, because they were made for a long-wave national or local audience with no intention of broadcasting beyond that frequency. Second, because they have also been largely unregarded, mentioned in histories of Belgian cinema, but subject to critical approbation, and noted purely because they ex... Mehr ...