Theorizing Transregional Cinemas David Pettersen (bio) Niels Niessen. Miraculous Realism: The French-Walloon Cinéma du Nord. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020. 338 pages. $95 hardcover. $33.95 paperback. Niels Niessen's new book Miraculous Realism is a fascinating study of films from the French-speaking part of Belgium (the Wallonia region) and the industrial French north (the city of Lille and the Nord–Pas de Calais region). The book fills an important gap because there is not a significant number of scholarly monographs on Wallonian cinema in English, and regional films within scholarship on French cinema tend to be treated as elements of a national cinema or international auteurist, art house cinema. However, the interest of Niessen's study goes beyond just making a corpus of lesser-known films visible. The book also represents a significant methodological intervention into how to study regional cinemas, especially regions that extend across national borders. Niessen finds inadequate now well-established approaches to studying transnational cinemas, the cinemas of small nations (Mette Hjort), and approaches to large regional cinemas such as those of Europe, so he develops his own "small regions" approach to what he terms the Cinéma du Nord, or Cinema of the North. Miraculous Realism argues that the Cinéma du Nord is a transregional cinema in southern Belgium and northern France that exists as more than just a scholarly category thanks to shared [End Page 377] cultural, linguistic, historical, and industrial reasons. The shared French language is of course the most obvious link, but Niessen makes the compelling case for cultural and historical connections in that these two parts of Belgium and France are working-class rust belt regions that relied on heavy industry such as coal mining. However, they failed to diversity their economies and consequently have struggled in a postindustrial Europe from the 1970s on. Miraculous Realism makes the case for a regional aesthetic tradition in filmmakers such as Robert Bresson and Maurice Pialat and in a common emphasis on secular understandings of humanism and grace that results from the historical importance of Catholicism in the two areas. Niessen also examines how national and regional governments and local media producers have fostered regional media industries within each of the two countries and developed synergies across the national border. I found the book's overall argument for the usefulness of a Cinéma du Nord as a category to be convincing. The risk of such a regionally focused study is that the choice to emphasize lesser-known Belgian and French films could make it difficult to connect with general readers who do not work on those films or their regions. Neissen negotiates this risk directly by structuring the book around two very well-known films, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta, made in Wallonia, and Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, filmed in the French north. Both films were released in 1999, and both won awards at the Cannes Film Festival. All three filmmakers have gone on to become recognizable auteurs who have been well discussed by scholars. Miraculous Realism makes the strong case that scholars have much to gain by thinking of these films and filmmakers in terms of a regionally inflected Cinéma du Nord. The book's four chapters are methodologically diverse. Chapter 1 sets out to answer the question of what links Rosetta and L'Humanité through close analysis of both films that tease out how each is a covert passion story underneath a veneer of documentary realism. Neissen argues that both ultimately reflect on what kinds of consolation religion can offer in a secular, postindustrial age. Chapter 2 is split into two parts. The first part presents an economic history of northern France and southern Belgium in which Niessen argues that what links these two areas as a transregion is a shared Catholicism and a similar lack of response to deindustrialization. The second part of the chapter is about histories of cinematic representation of Wallonia, with strong roots in the documentary tradition and in northern France through films that combine local rootedness with audience appeal outside the area. [End Page 378] Chapter 3 focuses on a detailed analysis of the industrial structures of the...