“You’ve seen a lot of movies”: Rereading Paul van Ostaijen’s Occupied City in Light of the Contemporary Cinema Culture in Belgium

The famous poetry volume Occupied City (Bezette Stad, 1921) by the Antwerp avant-garde poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928) offers the reader a subjective and highly partisan account of life in Antwerp on the eve of and during the Great War. The book is traditionally considered to be one of the most prominent samples of avant-garde poetry in Dutch. Van Ostaijen ranks high in the canon of 20th-century Flemish-Dutch literature, and Occupied City is among the most extensively commented texts in modern Dutch poetry. One could therefore be inclined to think that revisiting it is unlikely to yield a wealth of new insights. This paper refutes this idea by making a case for analysing the text as a ‘dialogic’ response to its historical context, taking into account while doing so recent insights that were advanced in various fields of historical study. One of these fields is the history of entertainment.