Misery with Coal-mining

Misère with Coal-mining is a film made in 1932 by Henri Storck and Joris Ivens. This documentary militant, known universally, lengthily explores the misery of the minors, the brutality of the working exploitation with the Borinage in this time, the difficult living conditions of the workmen of the coal, their physical diseases, etc

Reality and fiction

Like very documentary, it mixes reality and the fiction and this all the more prodigiously as this mixture does not concern the direct will of the realizers. Indeed, in film, the two authors had organized, with observers borains, a demonstration of minors walking behind a portrait of Karl Marx. The gendarmerie took this scene of cinema for a true demonstration and intervened it to disperse, which the camera of Storck and Ivens also films. Walter Benjamin then writes in the work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility In the same way, thanks to the filmed current events, any passer by is likely its to become appear in a film. It may be even that it appears thus in a work of art — that one thinks of the Three Songs on Lénine of Dziga Vertov or of the Borinage of Joris Ivens. Each one today can legitimately assert to be filmed.

A Netherlander and Ostendais found the Walloon cinema

This film, made by Ostendais and a Netherlander, can be regarded as the founding document of the Histoire of the Walloon cinema of which the dominant characteristic, as a cinema " national" (within the meaning of Jean-Michel Frodon), always was to approach reality working (but so country for example with (Jean-Jacques Andrien) in all its dimensions, without fearing to return to a difficult, critical, hard image of the Walloon country, that which one can say that the Dardenne Brothers prolong under fires of the world-famous personality.

Misère with Coal-mining generates other enracinés and universal films

In certain connections one could consider the film Déjà flies away the thin flower (1959) of Paul Meyer like a counterpart of this film, but where it approaches another category of excluded, that from abroad who arrive at Coal-mining, in the middle of the Années 1950, even the day before the complete collapse of the coal industry which made, not certainly the richness of the minors Borains, but them " gloire" , their political power in the social struggle. It is remarkable that in 1999 (see external bond), Patric Jean proposed a second counterpart with the film-stake of Storck and Ivens, again encountering attempts at censure, which gives to these three films ( Misère with Coal-mining , Déjà flies away the thin flower and the children of Coal-mining ), if enracinés, an air of family of the type not only local but universal.

Patric Jean wrote: I decide to turn over to Coal-mining, place of my childhood to write a letter-film with Henri Stork in connection with the social misery which remained until my time to introduce to its film the children of Coal-mining, letter with Henri Storck .

Works carried out with the tests of turning of film

Around Coal-mining , of Jean Fonteyne (1933-1936)
With each one its Coal-mining, Images of Henri Storck , Wieslaw Hudon (1978)

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