From propaganda to commemoration: reworking the national narrative

Abstract

In Belgium, memories of the World War I have contributed to the production and the perpetuation of a fractured national narrative. While the official narration emphasizes the unity of the Belgian state and glorifies the heroism of Belgian soldiers acting as a unified force against the German invader, a counter-narrative presents the Flemish soldiers as victims who were used as cannon fodder by the French-speaking commanding elite. In the immediate postwar period, newsreels largely reinforced the image of a national unity during the Great War. Ten years later, however, cinema took an active part in the production of a counter-memory. Met onze jogens aan den IJzer/With Our Troops on the Yser (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928), a Flemish film, is a key work in this regard. This article first examines the narratives and formal strategies the film resorts to in order to forcefully deconstruct the patriotic narrative and to forge a ‘Flamingant,’ Flemish activist collective memory. It subsequently analyzes more recent French-speaking documentary film projects aiming to commemorate the memory of the Great War. Lacking any overt problematization of their relationship to the Flemish separatist narrative, the documentaries are still shaped by it. Indeed, they either attempt to overcome it by reinforcing Belgium's sense of national identity or to counterbalance it by putting forward a regional narrative that specifically revives the French-speaking Belgians' memory of the War.