by Allan Fish
(Belgium 1944 115m) DVD2 (Belgium/France only)
Aka. Boerensymfonie
Four seasons and a wedding
p Henri Storck d Henri Storck, Maurice Delattre w Henri Storck, Jacques de Schryver, Marie Gevers ph Henri Storck, Maurice Delattre, Charles Abel, François Rents ed Henri Storck m Pierre Moulaert
Even today, into the 21st century, the cinema of what have been long described, rather disparagingly, as the Low Countries, has been at best marginalised and, at worst, almost completely unacknowledged. The lands that gave us Van Dyke, Rubens, Vermeer and especially, Rembrandt, who was playing with light and shadow centuries before the Lumières, treated like cinematic orphans.
Before Paul Verhoeven came on the scene in the seventies, Dutch cinema was confined to the documentaries of Joris Ivens and Bert Haanstra. And then what of its neighbour Belgium? Sure, we now have the Dardenne brothers, but they’re seen as French, and André Delvaux was treated the same. As both made French language films it was perhaps understandable. Before Delvaux only really one name stands out, and he, too, like Ivens and Haanstra, was a documentarist; Henri Storck.
There’s an irony then that Storck is still best known for his documentary Borinage about Dutch miners co-directed with Ivens. He made many films in a sixty year career; aside from a few features – including one about Rubens – they were all shorts, the majority under twenty minutes in length. There were several about his beloved Ostende, thirteen about the Fêtes de Belgique, but if asked to single out one achievement to stand for his legacy, I choose Peasant Symphony. I say one, but in actual fact it’s five for the price of one. They may be played together in order, but the Symphony is actually five films; Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and, in the middle, a peasant wedding. These five movements combine to give one a symphony of life in rural Ghent.
The symphony owes a lot to those that went before, not just Ivens but Robert Flaherty and Jean Epstein. It also makes a fascinating companion piece to Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique, shot soon after in France. There is one major difference, however, betwixt the two; Rouquier’s film has natural sound and dialogue in its tale of a farming family. Storck’s symphony is told through a narrator, with the sounds – of farming machinery and a varied menagerie of animals – seeming post-dubbed. In some ways it makes the film seem more artificial and one doesn’t come to care much about the farmers themselves as we don’t get to know them. It’s thus a testimony to Storck’s narrative and the individual power and beauty of the visuals that it maintains our interest.
We are given the seasons in detail. Spring is all about the beginning of the cycle of life, of foals being born (and sadly lost to colic), of chicks, kittens, piglets, calves, lambs and other young clinging to their mothers for food. We are shown the extensive labour of ploughing fields, whether with horses or, for the tougher jobs, oxen, as well as the back-breaking planting of potatoes by women. Summer details the harvest, of wheat, rye, oats, barley and the long, laborious haymaking process that will feed their animals through the harshest winter. Autumn depicts the beginning of threshing to create straw for winter bedding, the potato harvest with its inherent back-breaking collection and beetroot gathering through wind, fog and the incessant rain reminding one of the world calamity that so devastated those same fields a generation earlier. After pauses for prayer for good harvest and healthy livestock and human remembrances in November, winter begins with tree-felling as a precursor to the survival months of January and February. The cumulative effect is educational rather than empathetic and there are just hints of political commentary in its affinity to some of the Soviet rural pieces of the previous decades (though the same could be said of many of the British documentaries of the 1930s). Storck’s entire oeuvre is worth tracking down, but if you must watch one, make is this one.
