From propaganda to commemoration: reworking the national narrative.

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 Frenchspeaking
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.