films-offer much-needed information

on Canadian cinema. Their different

methods will make that information
available to a broad readership.
University of Western Ontario
SPLIT SCREEN: BELGIAN CINEMA
AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
Philip Mosley
Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2000, 288 pp.
Reviewed by Jerry White
Apart from the worldwide acclaim of
Chantal k e ~ m n and the modest suc-
cess of laco van Dormal, Belgian
cinema is very little known in North
America. This is especially unfortu-
nate for Canadian film scholars, as
Belgium, technically a tri-lingual
nation (French and Flemish are the
predominate language groups, and
German has official status in the
cantons of Eupen and Sankt Vith) ,
raises questions of national cinema
that are very similar to the Canadian
cinema/cinema quebecois debates so
familiar to readers of this journal.
Although there is a fair bit of work
available in French on Belgium's
cinema, Philip Mosley's Split Screen:
Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity is the
first book-length treatment of the
subject in English (aside from
Marianne Thys' tri-lingual illustrated
106 Volume 11 NQ. :1
filmography Belgian Cinema/Ie Cinema
beigelDe Belgische Film [Brussels:
Cinematheque Royale du Belgique,
2000]). It should be of tremendous
interest to those interested in
smaller national cinemas, and it is
especially valuable for Canadian film
scholars. Belgium even has a strong
animation sector.
The part of the book most directly
relevant to Canadian cinema is the
introduction, which sketches out
some of the important arguments
around Belgian cultural identity and
explains the relationship of these argu-
ments to questions of national cinema.
Early on, Mosley writes that "in a now
federalized nation so beset by linguis-
tic problems and separatist claims,
the idea of a 'national'cinema func-
tions as little more than a residual
trace of a devalued myth of national
identity." That sounds familiar and
could easily have appeared in a book
on the national cinemas of Canada.
The model for Belgian cinema that
Mosley adopts is a "split screen," which
is sort of like two separate national,
cinemas, but not quite. "Since the
Flemish and French-language cinemas
of Belgium may each claim individual
histories yet together constitute what
passes for a Belgian national cinema,"
he writes, "Belgian film historiography,
contingent on this dialectic of unity
and duality, becomes a highly probe
lematic subject." Mosley's discomfort
with the idea of a Belgian cinema
is palpable throughout the book;
however, he is never quite able to
advance a convincing argument that
Flemish and Walloon (i.e., French lan-
guage) cinemas constitute distinct
national cinemas.
Much of this discomfort arises from
the book's implicit definition of "a
cinema." Mosley writes at one point
of his willingness to regard Belgian
documentary, animation, and colonial
cinema as "microcinemas." The equa-
tion of generic forms with national
cinemas, even for taxonomic pur-
poses, is, to my mind, questionable.
Hence, scepticism about a unitary
British cinema in favour of Scottish
Cinema, Welsh Cinema, and English
Cinema seems to me reasonable, but
scepticism about a unitary British
cinema in favour of a British docu-
mentary cinema, a British narrative
cinema, or a British avant-garde
cinema, is part of a fundamentally
different conversation. This issue of
taxonomy is especially relevant to
the split between English-Canadian
cinema and Quebec cinema; both
have documentary streams, and each
of these streams could be seen
as distinct.
It may very well be an important
aspect of Belgian cinema that dis-
tinctions between Flemish-language
and French-language documentary
are comparatively minor. What this
relative lack of distinction between
Flemish and French documentary
streams (or between Flemish and
French animation streams, or between
Flemish and French colonial cinema)
also implies is that in the final analy-
sis, a bi-lingual national cinema, even
one full of holes, fragments, loose
ends, and so on, can indeed be seen
in Belgium. This is quite different from
the case of English-Canadian and
Quebec cinema, or for that matter
Taiwanese and Chinese cinema, or
Israeli and Palestinian cinemas, all of
which, to my mind, are better seen as
distinct national cinemas (although
they are by no means unanimously
seen as such).
Part of this unity, however fragile
or illusory, is no doubt a result of
industrial and institutional practices
rather than strictly ideological or
national matters. Corsica, after all,
lacks a national cinema not because
it lacks a widespread national con-
sciousness or a linguistic specificity,
but because it lacks a sustainable,
locally-rooted and locally-oriented
cinematic infrastructure. "National" is
present; "cinema" is still missing. In
Quebec, "national" and "cinema" are
both present; not so in Flanders or
in Wallonia.
The portrait that Mosley paints here
is of two places with very little cine-
matic infrastructure indeed, and much
of what is present is national/federal
CIFS . RCEC 107
in orientation. One reason that
making films in Belgium is difficult,
Mosley points out, is the country's
North-SouthIFlemish-French division.
Another is "a lack of industrial infra-
structure. One consequence of this is
a constant shortage of funds due to
the small size of the country and to
limited state and private investment
in a sector perennially dominated J:.!y
American production and distribution
interests." While filmmakers north of
the forty-ninth parallel are hardly
blessed with an abundance of funds
or investors, the struggles faced by
Belgian cinema recounted in this
book make for a much grimmer situa-
tion than we have in Canada.
Lest I imply that Mosley is inor-
dinately preoccupied with theoretical
questions about a national cinema,
I should point out that most of the
book is given over to a relatively
straight-forward historical narrative
of the evolution of Belgian cinema.
There is a wealth of interesting
material here concerning cycles of
animation, regionalist narrative,
filmmaking in the colonised Congo,
and (often political) documentary.
The last two appear in a particularly
interesting combination in his dis-
cussion of ethnographic filmmaker
Luc de Heusch who, in filming the
Hamba people in the mid-fifties,
"entered fully into the life of the
tribe, thus avoiding a need to hide
his camera, using it rather to simulate
lOB Volume 11 No.:Z
the performance of rituals from
within the closed group in a similar
manner to Jean Rouch, with whom he
founded the International Committee
of Ethnographic and Sociological
Film." There is also a detailed and
fascinating discussion of the surpris-
ingly rich community of activist
videomakers (out of which came
the Dardenne brothers, who won
the Palme d'or at Cannes in 1999
for Rosetta).
Chantal Akerman makes a brief
appearance. While Mosley clearly
admires her work, he writes that "her
career is particularly interesting as a
case of a director who very soon-and
quite willingly, it may be said, espe-
cially after Belgian critics savaged
her early work-outgrew the context
of her national film culture to
become part of an international
feminist cinema to which her work
refers more readily in theme and
style." Mosley's resistance to consid-
ering Akerman as part of Belgium's
national cinema in favour of placing
her in an international feminist
cinema, is a taxonomic tendency I.
believe to be misguided. While for
taxonomic purposes, she can reason-
ably be thought of as part of
both Belgian cinema and feminist
cinema-with the qualification that
she herself rejects both of these
labels-there is little sense in this book
of Akerman's (probably more plausi-
ble) status as an example of that
much-discussed-of-late phenomnon,
the nomadic, trans-national filmmaker.
All of the book's theoretical and his-
torical material is presented in clear,
accessible language, and with a con-
fident command of the relevant criti-
cal discourse within Belgium (although
it is heavily weighted toward French-
language writings). It is a fine example
of a nuanced, tentative approach to a
marginalised cinema, with much to
offer scholars interested in alternatives
to Hollywood-centred film studies.
University of Alberta
DOCUMENTING THE
DOCUMENTARY:
CLOSE READINGS OF
DOCUMENTARY FII.M AND VIDEO
Edited by Barry Keith Grant
and Jeannette Sioniowski
Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1998, 488 pp.
INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARY
Bill Nichols
Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001,223 pp.
Reviewed by Michael Zyrd
Barry Grant andleannette Sloniowski's
collection of essays and Bill Nichols's
new volume are both designed as
documentary film course textbooks,
and they function as complementary
introductions to documentary analy-
sis. Documenting the Documentary exem-
plifies diverse types of formal and
contextual criticism, while Introduction
to Documentary outlines the major theo-
retical concepts and debates in non-
fiction film practice. Taught alongside
a solid history textbook like Eric
Barnouw's Documentary Film, they will
provide a thorough and flexible set
of teaching texts for a senior
undergraduate course on documen-
tary film, despite gaps in the histori-
cal comprehensiveness of Documenting
the Documentary and some erratic writ-
ing in Nichols's volume.
Documenting the Documentary offers
twenty-seven essays on individual
films and filmmakers, ranging histori-
cally from 1922 to 1991. Although
the collection concentrates on the
documentary canon, it includes
innovative non-canonical choices as
well. It works as a teaching anthology
because the writing is (with some
exceptions) clear and accessible to
senior undergraduate students, and
because so many essays consist of tex-
tual analysis that engages larger
cultural contexts and are explicit in
their methodology. Although it is
true to its subtitle in providing "close
readings" of the structure and argu-
ment of each film, the collection is not
narrowly formalist, but offers a range
of theoretical and critical approaches.
In some cases, like William Guynn's
CJFS RCEC 109