Bruno De Wever

Cinema and History: the telling of stories

La Symphony Pastorale (1942–1944), is considered one of Storck’s major technical and poetic film achievements. Some historians tried to stress Storck’s difficulties in making these wartime movies devoted to rural life throughout the four seasons. Philip Mosley, for instance, indicated that the film-maker had to deal with a shortage of raw material, that he ‘pretended . . . to agree to make only approved films’, and that Storck had to use a ‘network of influential sympathizers to pitch his film to the appropriate authorities’ (in Split Screen: Belgian cinema & cultural identity, 2001, p. 65). Benvindo’s reconstruction of La Symphonie Pastorale’s production history completely destroys the thesis on Storck’s heroic film adventure under occupation. Using again a large amount of articles, contracts, letters, interviews and other sources, the author explains how Storck succeeded to convince the German controlled National Corporation for Agriculture and Food (CNAA/Corporation Nationale de l’Agriculture et de l’Alimentation) to make a series of propaganda pictures in order to reinforce the commissioner’s strategy to develop corporatist farming structures. The CNAA was widely unpopular, resulting into an intensification of war resistance among farmers. Benvindo painfully indicates how Storck never mentioned that one of the main protagonists of his movie, a farmer who went into clandestine armed resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and killed in February 1944. The author underlines that there are no reasons to believe that under those extremely tough war conditions the production of the movie went smoothly as Storck tried to indicate later. Benvindo raises more poignant questions on the movie’s production process and on its final ideological meanings, or better its striking lack of it. Various authors have tried to understand the idyllic image of rural life in La Symphonie Pastorale, but for Benvindo it is clear that Storck had made an anti-modernist ‘anti-Borinage’, where social and political engagement are far away. Although the author omits deeply to analyse La Symphonie Pastorale, I think his judgement on the movie is painfully correct, possibly even for more of Storck’s work.