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Verheul, Jaap. "Out of Many, One: The Dual Monolingualism of Contemporary FlemishCinema." The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference. Ed.Tijana Mamula and Lisa Patti. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 317–334. BloomsburyCollections. Web. 20 Jun. 2016. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501302848.ch-016>.

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16

Out of Many, One: Th e Dual Monolingualism of Contemporary Flemish Cinema

Jaap Verheul

Th e regional cinema of Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, has fl ourished

since the early 2000s. Th e region witnessed a proliferation of fi lms targeted at its

domestic market, while the public’s broadening interest in these Flemish

productions secured their fi nancial success. As the Flemish audiovisual sector

gradually professionalized itself, its moving image culture increasingly explored

the apparently distinctive identity of the Flemish region. Th is cinematic

reawakening coincided with the growing political popularity of the separatist

Flemish Movement, which, since its materialization in the nineteenth century,

had advocated for an independent Flemish state. Th e renewed political interest

in a culturally restrictive notion of Flemishness thus corresponded with a new

wave of fi lms that examined the specifi cities and peculiarities of a presumed

Flemish identity.

Language was a key component in the formation of an imagined Flemish

community, and the rediscovery and subsequent celebration of Flanders’ vast

array of regional dialects of the Dutch language accompanied a linguistic turn in

Flemish cinema, which, for the very fi rst time, began to cultivate this southern-

Dutch vernacular. Flemish cinema gradually articulated what I am calling the

region’s dual monolingualism: Flanders’ desire to linguistically diff erentiate its

Flemish dialects of the Dutch language from both Standard Dutch, which it

rejects as the offi cial language of the Netherlands, and French, which it regards

as the language of its perceived Walloon antagonist in the southern part of

Belgium. If this linguistic turn imbued Flemish cinema with a renewed sense of

authenticity, it also reduced the region’s export potential to the Netherlands,

which shares with Flanders the same offi cial language, Dutch, but nonetheless

considers the language barrier, comprised of diff erent Dutch and Belgian dialects

of the Dutch language, as too great an obstacle—an experience shared by their

317

Th e Multilingual Screen318

linguistic Flemish counterparts, who equally reject the northern-Dutch

vernacular of Dutch cinema. To counter this linguistic obstacle to cinematic

exchange, production companies in Flanders and the Netherlands have begun to

remake each other’s hits according to their own cultural contexts, relying on

national celebrities and regional dialects of the Dutch language to sell these

remakes to a, respectively, Flemish or Dutch audience. Th is strategy has proved

highly successful, and thereby put into question not only the exportability of

Flemish cinema to the Netherlands, and vice versa, but also the idea of a Dutch

geolinguistic identity.

Th is chapter argues that the linguistic turn in contemporary Flemish cinema

professes the dual monolingualism of a discursive Flemish identity that rejects

the, respectively, Dutch and French vernaculars of the Netherlands and Wallonia,

while also defi ning itself linguistically in relation to these perceived adversaries.

In addition, I demonstrate that the Dutch-Flemish remake cycle—exemplifi ed

by fi lms such as Loft (Erik Van Looy, Belgium, 2008) and its remake Loft

(Antoinette Beumer, Netherlands, 2010)—signifi es the social, cultural and

linguistic ties between Flanders and the Netherlands, yet simultaneously reveals

the increasing erosion of the Dutch language area. In pursuing these two

objectives, this chapter posits the dual monolingualism of Flemish cinema as a

locus of multilingual negotiation.

Th e historical development of the Dutch language

Th roughout the Middle Ages, the Germanic peoples of both Germany and the

Low Countries, comprised of modern- day Belgium, Luxembourg and the

Netherlands, referred to themselves as Deutsche/Duits(ch)ers and to their

language as Deutsch/Duits(ch) . From the seventeenth century onward, Holland

designated its language as Nederduits (Low German), while the mostly Saxon

based dialects of northern Germany used the term Niederdeutsch to distinguish

themselves from the southern and central regions of modern- day Germany that

spoke Hochdeutsch , the standardized written and spoken language developed to

facilitate communication across all German- speaking regions. With the

inauguration of the Dutch Republic in 1581, the English language began to

diff erentiate Dutch from German, with the former signifying the Low Dutch of

the Republic. In Holland, however, the use of Nederduits lingered well into the

late nineteenth century, thus implying its etymological affi liation with the

Out of Many, One 319

Niederdeutsch of Germany’s northern territories. It is only in the early twentieth

century that the term Nederlands , or what is now known as Dutch, offi cially

replaced the more ambiguous Nederduits . 1

Nederlands , or Dutch, has been standardized as the offi cial language of the

Netherlands and Flanders ever since. Nonetheless, there has been much

confusion over the status of Vlaams , or Flemish, which, according to Bruce

Donaldson, designates either the Dutch dialects of the Belgian provinces of West

and East Flanders, the dialect of the region of French Flanders in the north- west

of France, the Dutch as spoken in Belgium as perceived by both Belgians and

Dutchmen, or the misinterpretation of Flemish as a separate yet related language

to Dutch. All four meanings of the Flemish dialects of Dutch are, according to

Donaldson, the result of the historical development of the northern and southern

Netherlands, now known, respectively, as the Netherlands and Belgium. 2 Th e

origins of this linguistic division are to be found in the Treaty of Verdun of 843,

which separated the county of Flanders, a predominantly Dutch- speaking

territory, from the Low Countries and incorporated it into the French- speaking

realm. As Flanders fl ourished when Philip of Alsace (1168—91) modernized its

institutions and expanded its territory, the Dutch written word originated in the

medieval Flemish cities of Ghent and Bruges, which transformed the county,

according to Donaldson, into a French-Dutch language border where “Dutch

and French met head- on and where the nobility and many of the up- and-coming

middle class were undoubtedly bilingual.” 3

Th e consecutive Burgundian period, which reunited Flanders with the other

Dutch provinces under the Spanish crown in 1430, facilitated the further cultural

and economic development of the Low Countries. Th e installation of Brussels as

its French- speaking Princely Capital threatened the position of Dutch, for

although Brussels was geographically located in the Dutch- speaking duchy of

Brabant, the usage of French dominated political life. When Burgundy was

integrated into France in 1477, it was transferred to control by the House of

Habsburg and thus became a territory of the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V,

whose son, Philip II , inherited the Spanish Empire and the Low Countries. Th e

Spanish rule under the House of Habsburg soon generated discontent among

the Dutch provinces, whose socioeconomic concerns culminated in an uprising

against the reign of Philip II , known as the Eighty Years’ War, in 1568. 4

Led by William I of Orange, the northern provinces of the Low Countries

signed the Union of Utrecht in 1579 to establish the Republic of the Seven United

Provinces, also known as the Dutch Republic, while the Act of Abjuration of 1581


subsequently declared the independence of the northern provinces from the

Habsburgian realm. It is at this point, Donaldson argues, that “the histories of

Holland and Belgium part ways and the linguistic situations in both countries

follow diff erent paths too.” 5 When the Eighty Years’ War fi nally came to an end, and

Spain and the Republic signed the Treaty of Münster in 1648, the Habsburg

Netherlands were divided into two parts. In the north, the Republic encapsulated

most of the modern- day Netherlands, while present- day Belgium, Luxembourg

and Nord-Pas- de-Calais (the northwestern region of France) remained under

Spanish rule and were renamed as the Spanish Netherlands, demarcated by

Antwerp in the north. Th is formal geographical split coincided with the further

disintegration of the Dutch language area. While Dutch became increasingly

standardized in the Republic, the south, centered on Brussels, preserved the

hegemony of French, which, in addition to the multitude of regional Dutch dialects

in Flanders, hampered the standardization of Dutch in the Spanish Netherlands.

Th is potpourri of regional Dutch dialects defi nes Flanders to this very day. 6

Th e incorporation of Flanders into Napoleon’s French Republic in 1794

further tarnished the status of Dutch in the southern Netherlands. Th e language

nonetheless retained a pseudo- offi cial status in Flemish public life, especially in

smaller towns and in the lower classes of Flemish society, whose members did

not master the French language and thus lacked the privilege to abandon Dutch,

which paradoxically secured its survival in the southern Netherlands. Aft er

Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the Congress of Vienna reunited the northern and

southern Netherlands. Now under Dutch rule, King William I strove to integrate

the two regions under one common Dutch language, and this period is referred

to as one of vernederlandsing (“Dutchifi cation”). Although only partially

successful, William I’s language decrees ( Taalbesluiten ) assured the

implementation of Dutch for education, jurisdiction and administration from

1823 onward. However, the growing dissent among the southern Netherlanders,

who regarded William’s rule as despotic and were dissatisfi ed with the northern

Dutch domination over the Kingdom’s economic, political and social life,

eventually led to the Belgian Revolution of 1830. On February 7, 1831, the

Belgian Constitution established the Kingdom of Belgium, now independent

from the Netherlands, as a constitutional monarchy under the reign of king

Leopold I. Although the new constitution guaranteed Belgians freedom of

language choice, French soon became the country’s offi cial language.

Dutch was never formally abolished, however, and unlike most newly- formed

nation- states, the Belgian government did not pursue a single language policy.


Furthermore, esteemed literary fi gures such as Jans Frans Willems and Guido

Gezelle inspired Flanders’ intelligentsia to organize into a Flemish Movement

that advocated for the greater equality of Dutch in Belgium and for a Flemish

dialect distinct from the standardized Dutch of the northern Netherlands. If this

latter strand, known as “Flemish particularism,” sought to create a written

language that distinguished itself from northern-Dutch through the

standardization of autochthonous Flemish dialects, “Flemish integrationists”

promoted a linguistic alliance with the Netherlands to advance the position of

Dutch in Belgium. By the early twentieth century, the integrationist course of

action had prevailed, and ever since, Flanders and the Netherlands have worked

together to further develop the Dutch standard language. 7

Th e Flemish Movement’s struggle for linguistic equality refl ected its aspiration

to emancipate Flanders politically and economically. Th roughout the nineteenth

century, Flanders was a relatively poor region paralyzed by high levels of

unemployment, mostly due to the decline of its formerly prosperous textile

manufacturing. By contrast, the industrial development of Wallonia’s coal and

steel sectors brought Belgium’s southern region substantial fortune and spawned

a wave of migration from Flanders to Wallonia. Consequently, Vogl and Hüning

argue, “the image of the ‘backward Fleming’ and his second- class language

proliferated.” 8 Th is profound experience of socioeconomic discrimination

spurred the Flemish Movement to push for a greater level of social and political

participation for the Flemish community through the implementation of the

gelijkheidswet (equality law) in 1898 to secure the formal legal equality of Dutch

in the Flemish region. 9 Th e Movement obtained additional concessions during

both the First and the Second World War, when it actively collaborated with the

German occupier to advance Flemish legal and linguistic equality in Belgium.

During the interwar years, the language laws of 1932, which introduced a policy

of unilingualism that required civil servants to be profi cient in only one of the

two national languages, marked the beginning of what Donaldson refers to as

“linguistic federalism.” 10

Th e 1960s witnessed the reawakening of the Belgian language wars. While

Flanders had been rejuvenated economically through investments in new

industries, the postindustrial steel and coal sectors of Wallonia plummeted into

economic depression, which bestowed on the Flemish government economic

leverage in federal negotiations. Th e language laws of 1962–63 installed the

language border between Flanders and Wallonia and divided Belgium into four

language areas, which, although multilingual on the federal level, would


essentially be governed in the native language of each area’s majority population:

Dutch in Flanders, French in Wallonia, German in the small German- speaking

region of Eupen-Malmedy (geographically located in Wallonia), and both Dutch

and French in the offi cially bilingual capital region of Brussels. Currently, the

extremist party Flemish Interest ( Vlaams Belang ) and the separatist party New

Flemish Alliance ( NVA , Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie ) represent the Flemish

Movement politically and advocate for an independent and monolingual Dutch

Flemish state that includes the capital of Brussels. 11

Hence, if Belgium is a historically multilingual country that unites the Dutch,

French, German and bilingual language communities under one federal state,

Vogl and Hüning argue that the Flemish Movement’s language policy also

divides the country into Flemish and Walloon subnations defi ned by a,

respectively, Dutch and French monolingualism. Th is continuing policy of

linguistic territoriality makes the Flemish language doubly monolingual, for as

this historical account has demonstrated, the Flemish region has sought to

distinguish its Flemish vernacular from both its French- speaking, southern

antagonist in Wallonia and its Hollandish- speaking, northern neighbor in the

Netherlands. 12

Th e Dutch and Flemish dialects of the Dutch standard language

Dutch linguistics has referred to the northern and southern regional dialects of

the Dutch language as streektalen , or regional languages, which diverge from the

Dutch standard language through local articulations of vocabulary, pronunciation

and idiom. Th e dialects of Dutch can be divided into two linguistic families. Th e

river Ijssel, a branch of the Rhine in the west of the Netherlands, has historically

constituted the language barrier between the Saxon- based dialects in the north

and the sociologically more important Franconian dialects in the southern and

western regions of the Low Countries: Zeeuws , Flemish , Brabants , Limburgs and

Hollands , which has become the basis of the Dutch standard language. Belgian

dialects of the Dutch language are, according to Donaldson, even more

idiosyncratic than their Dutch counterparts because Flanders’ Dutch- speaking

communities traditionally cultivated their regional vernaculars more vigorously

while relying on standardized Dutch mostly for offi cial communication. Th e

four Belgian dialects of Dutch are, with exception of the capital region of


Brussels, predominantly confi ned to the fi ve northern, Dutch- speaking provinces

of Flanders: West Flemish (West Flanders), East Flemish (East Flanders),

Brabants (Flemish Brabant, Antwerp) and Limburgs (Limburg), with the latter

two forming a continuum with the southern dialects on the Dutch side of the

border. 13

It is important to emphasize, Donaldson reminds us, that these regional

dialects of the Dutch standard language in Belgium and the Netherlands “are not

deviations from the standard language [. . .] but that the standard is in fact the

product of those dialectical variations.” 14 Until the 1970s, the Dutch standard

language was commonly referred to as Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands ( ABN ),

or General Cultured Dutch. Th e reference to a “cultured” language signifi ed the

social distinctions inherent in Dutch language usage. Mastery of ABN ’s “proper”

speech and writing oft en implied one’s educated, affl uent, urban and “cultured”

position in the Dutch and Flemish social order, while local articulations of

regional dialects, and particularly those from the southern provinces of the

Netherlands and Flanders, suggested one’s rural and ultimately “uncultured”

lineage. To mitigate these socioeconomic connotations, the term “Cultured” was

removed in the 1970s, and Algemeen Nederlands ( AN , General Dutch) became

the dominant classifi cation until 2005, when it was replaced by what is now

known as Standaardnederlands or Standard Dutch.

With so many regional varieties in such a geographically concentrated area,

the institutionalization of any Dutch vernacular as “standard” continues to be a

highly hegemonic and exclusionary practice, with important implications. Th e

formerly dominant defi nition of General Cultured Dutch, which assumed that

the “proper” use of standardized Dutch would not disclose the speaker’s or

writer’s region of origin, no longer applies, for it erroneously positioned

pronunciation as a determining factor, and thereby ignored the correct usage of

Standard Dutch with a Brabants or East Flemish accent. Th us, although diff erent

from northern-Dutch in pronunciation, vocabulary and syntax, the Flemish

dialects of Dutch are oft en, and accurately, referred to as a southern-Dutch

language that oscillates, according to Frans Van Coetsem, “between a sort of

purifi ed dialect and, in a few cases, a Dutch that is to all intents and purposes

pure ‘northern’ Dutch.” 15

Under the auspices of the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union),

founded by the Netherlands and Belgium in 1980 (and joined by Suriname in

2005), Standard Dutch has been solidifi ed as the offi cial language of both the

Netherlands and the northern region of Flanders in Belgium. Although the


Taalunie seeks to translate this political synchronicity into a cultural and linguistic

integration of both Dutch language areas on the European continent, diff erent

enunciations of Dutch continue to persist and have become more articulated.

Th is has, in turn, led to important regional diff erences in Dutch language

standardization. Flemish dialects, for example, continue to be aff ected by French

vocabulary, grammar and syntax, and are typically distinguished from northern-

Dutch by their pronunciation, word order, the feminine gender of many nouns

and their opposition to English loanwords that dominate northern-Dutch. In

addition, the many regional dialects of Flanders consider the written word as the

antecedent of the spoken word, develop the latter from a more traditional

vocabulary, and thus sound more static than their northern-Dutch counterparts. 16

While Belgian Dutch, commonly referred to as Flemish, cannot be considered

a language of its own, as it is comprised of multiple southern dialects of the

Dutch language, I argue that it nevertheless operates as a proper language

discursively. As I have demonstrated, the Flemish vernacular has historically

sought to diff erentiate itself politically, culturally and linguistically from both

the French language of Wallonia and the northern-Dutch language of the

Netherlands. Th e linguistic turn in contemporary Flemish cinema refl ects this

dual monolingualism of the Flemish region.

Toward a monolingual Flemish cinema

Th e aforementioned equation of language with ethnicity has a twofold eff ect on

Flanders’ regional cinema. First, Flemish cinema’s recent linguistic turn toward

the use of regional southern-Dutch dialects has imbued it with a renewed sense

of authenticity. Until the early 2000s, most Flemish productions, both popular

and art- house, occupied an ambiguous linguistic realm in which the characters’

speech held the middle ground between Standard (southern-)Dutch and the

local vernacular of the story’s setting. Yet, because Flemish enunciation was and

is still dominated by dialect speech, the cinematic affi liation with Standard Dutch

appeared contrived, archaic and imprecise, for it represented neither the offi cial

language for communication in Flanders, Standard (southern-)Dutch, nor the

common speech of Flemish everyday life, which occurs in either East Flemish,

West Flemish, Brabants or Limburgs , with each of these four major dialects

further fragmented into a variety of urban, rural and subregional vernaculars

such as Antwerps , Aalsters or Gents . Although 1992’s Daens (Stijn Coninx,


Belgium/France/Netherlands, 1992), for example, is set in the East Flemish city of

Aalst and off ers a dramatization of the struggle of a Catholic priest, Adolf Daens,

for better labor conditions in the city’s late nineteenth- century textile industry,

the French- speaking aristocracy, bilingual clerics, and Dutch- speaking, lower-

class factory workers all communicate with each other in some peculiar hybrid of

Standard Dutch and East Flemish. Th e factory workers thus refer to Daens as

“Meneer Pastoor” (“Mister Priest”), while Daens exclaims “koop haar een kist”

(“buy her a coffi n”) when he orders the local community to buy a coffi n for a

child who was fatally injured while working in one of the factories. Th is imaginary

cinematic vernacular is not only historically improbable, but also challenges the

Flemish audience’s suspension of disbelief as it obscures the distinctive dialect of

the city of Aalst, which constitutes an urban subdialect of East Flemish.

By contrast, 2009’s De Helaasheid der Dingen ( Th e Misfortunates , Felix van

Groeningen, Belgium/Netherlands, 2009) is set in an imaginary East Flemish

town near Aalst, albeit one century later, and indulges in its Aalsters dialect,

which not only adds to the fi lm’s linguistic authenticity but also to its cultural

credibility, for the fi lm’s self- conscious cultivation of Aalsters accurately

communicates the underprivileged socioeconomic status of Aalst’s postindustrial

working class in the late 1980s. When the Strobbe brothers, the fi lm’s main

protagonists, organize a self- invented drinking game, they count their steps in

Aalsters rather than Standard Dutch: “ien, twie, droi” instead of “een, twee, drie”

(“one, two, three”). Similarly, one of the brothers, who is hospitalized aft er the

debauchery, tells his mother in Aalsters that “ ’k hadde k’ik vier trappist’n nevest

mekander gezetj,” instead of “ik had vier trappisten naast elkaar gezet” (“I had

placed four beers next to each other”). Th is relatively recent attention to linguistic

authenticity is by no means limited to cinematic representations of East Flanders.

Recently, such popular Flemish fi lms as Ex Drummer (Koen Mortier, Belgium/

France/Italy, 2007) and Rundskop ( Bullhead , Michael R. Roskam, Belgium/

Netherlands, 2011) were shot entirely in the vernacular of their stories’ settings

(respectively, West Flemish and Truierlands ). Th ese fi lms nourish their local

dialects to such an extent that Flemings from other regions have occasionally

expressed diffi culty in understanding the dialogue, and consequently admitted

to the necessity for subtitles.

Erik Van Looy’s Loft (Belgium, 2008) also celebrates its linguistic and cultural

Flemishness. Loft centers on a group of fi ve married male friends who buy a loft

in Antwerp to obtain a secret space where they can meet up with their mistresses.

When the body of a murdered woman is found in the apartment, the fi ve friends


begin to suspect each other as they are the only ones with keys to the premises.

In addition to the fi lm’s remarkable production values, especially by Flemish

standards, Loft ’s plot and style follow the conventions of a genre- thriller, while its

use of regionally specifi c Flemish stars (Koen De Bouw, Matthias Schoenaerts),

settings (Antwerp), and dialects ( Antwerps , East Flemish) renders it as a

distinctively Flemish fi lm.

All members of its production team participate in the Flemish cultural

community. Th e fi lm’s director and screenwriter, Erik Van Looy and Bart De

Pauw, are popular Flemish celebrities affi liated with the Flemish production house

Woestijnvis . Th e company constitutes a private syndicate of audiovisual talent in

Flanders, and its fi nancial self- sustainability, a rarity in the Flemish audiovisual

sector, enabled it to invest in Loft . In addition, the fi lm’s calculated placement of

well- known Flemish actors and its engagement with their star texts also enhance

its discursive Flemishness. Equally signifi cant is that each star has been cast in

terms of his or her star persona, which connects their character to diff erent social

positions within contemporary Flemish society. Reminiscent of the use of the

Aalsters dialect in Th e Misfortunates , these sociocultural connotations are partially

communicated through the use of regional Flemish dialects of the Dutch language.

Marnix (Koen De Graeve, who also starred in Th e Misfortunates ), for example,

speaks in a distinctively East Flemish dialect, underlining his provincial and

lower- class background, while Vincent’s (Filip Peeters) accent betrays his urban

and educated roots in Antwerp. Loft is thus a linguistically Flemish fi lm, for it

rejects the conventional use of Standard Dutch and favors instead regional

Flemish dialects. Given that Flemish speech is still based on the written word, it is

perhaps ironic that the subtitles for the DVD -version of Loft translate these

regional southern-Dutch dialects into Standard Dutch, thereby indicating the

complex linguistic identity of both Flanders and the Dutch language area. And

although the Dutch- speaking region of Flanders constitutes but one region of an

offi cially trilingual federal Belgian state, French and German- speaking Walloon

characters, as well as bilingual Bruxellois protagonists, are altogether absent.

As Loft demonstrates, contemporary Flemish cinema expresses a desire to

protect and preserve the diff erent Flemish dialects of Dutch. In doing so, it

engenders a cinema that is doubly monolingual, for it seeks to diff erentiate itself

linguistically from Standard Dutch, which is stigmatized and rejected as the

offi cial language of the Netherlands, and French, seen as the language of Flanders’

formerly aristocratic antagonist. Th is dual monolingualism of Flemish cinema

signifi es, in turn, the revived politicization of a normative Flemish identity since


the early 2000s. Consequently, Loft , like other popular fi lms such as Zot van A

( Crazy about A., Jan Verheyen, Belgium, 2010) and Smoorverliefd ( Head over

Heels , Hilde Van Mieghem, Belgium, 2010), sets its story in Antwerp, which

functions as the most culturally, economically and politically distinctive Flemish

city in Belgium. If Brussels is the offi cial capital of both Flanders and Belgium,

Antwerp occupies that position in Flemish public discourse, for Brussels is

geographically Flemish but culturally Walloon, or linguistically French, and thus,

according to Flemings, not representative of their community. In addition, the

city of Antwerp also holds historical signifi cance for the Flemish region as it has

long been one of the most important economic, political and cultural centers of

the Low Countries. Following centuries of domination by successive foreign

powers, most notably the Spaniards, French, Austrians and Dutch, Antwerp has

positioned itself as an idiosyncratically Flemish city and, above all, as culturally

and ideologically distinct from both the Netherlands and Wallonia. In 2012,

Antwerp’s central position in the Flemish imaginary was solidifi ed politically by

the election of Bart De Wever, the populist chairman of the separatist New

Flemish Alliance ( NVA ), as mayor of the city; this local victory anticipated the

NVA ’s general election victory in the European, federal (Belgian), and Flemish

elections of 2014. It is thus not surprising that contemporary Flemish cinema

represents Antwerp, and Flanders, as a dynamic, cosmopolitan and attractive

location characterized by modern architecture and remarkable residences—

indeed, loft - spaces—by the Schelde river, which constitutes the artery of both

the city of Antwerp, and due to its important harbor, the Flemish economy.

Th e relatively recent emergence of a Flemish cinema that ideologically,

culturally and linguistically asserts and even celebrates its “Flemishness”

facilitated its increasing popularity with domestic audiences. As a result, its share

of the Flemish exhibition market has grown steadily since the early 2000s.

Flemish cinema held a minimal stake of one percent to three percent in the early

1990s, and it secured a substantially greater share of 4.80 percent in 2005 and of

9.35 percent in 2012, indicating the Flemish audience’s renewed interest in its

domestically produced moving image culture. Although higher budgets,

enhanced production values, and professionalism have contributed to a

cinematic output of greater quality and variety, it is nonetheless important to

situate the renewed domestic allure of Flemish cinema in the region’s recent

political context. Since the early 2000s, the burgeoning popularity of Flemish

cinema has coincided with the political growth of De Wever’s New Flemish

Alliance. Th e increasing appeal of Flemish productions that, partially through


language, articulate a certain notion of Flemishness should thus be seen as a

political barometer for the intensifi ed assertion of Flemish sovereignty. 17

At the same time, a second consequence of Flemish cinema’s confl ation of

linguistic identity with ethnicity is that it presents international audiences with

an essentialized and normative conceptualization of what it means to be Flemish,

which, in turn, limits its appeal for spectators unfamiliar with the regional

specifi cities and peculiarities of Flanders’ culture, politics and southern-Dutch

dialects. Indeed, in 2012, “Made in Flanders:” Th e Export Potential of the Flemish

Audiovisual Sector , an industry report commissioned by the Flanders Audiovisual

Fund ( Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds , VAF ), argued that the Flemish fi lm industry

had one major shortcoming: the limited market potential of the relatively small

Dutch linguistic community. Th e export potential of Flemish cinema on the

international market has historically been limited to two or three fi lms per year.

In 2012, Flemish majority productions secured a market share of only 1.76

percent on the French market, 0.55 percent on the German market, 0.01 percent

on the British market and 1.40 percent on the Dutch market. In spite of their

shared language (Dutch), Flemish majority productions, with the exception of

popular franchises for children, have a hard time competing on the Dutch

market, as exemplifi ed by the minimal revenues in 2012, when Flemish majority

productions earned a mere 2,416,681 euro, most of which came from the

aforementioned children’s franchises. Flemish productions thus fail to gain an

audience abroad. To improve the situation, “Made in Flanders” suggested that the

VAF should raise its budget for the promotion, marketing and distribution of

Flemish fi lms. Too oft en, Flemish fi lms are rejected by international distributors

who are afraid of the risk and would rather invest in productions from larger

countries and linguistic communities. Finally, the report also warned against the

tendency of Flemish cinema to “refer too strongly to a Flemish context or taste,

which limits its export potential.” 18 Th e Dutch-Flemish remake cycle and the

emblematic case of Loft represent these limits of a monolingual Flemish cinema,

and by extension, of a Dutch geolinguistic identity. 19

Th e Dutch-Flemish remake cycle and the limits of a Dutch geolinguistic identity

As both Flanders and the Netherlands share the same language, Dutch, the box-

offi ce sensations of each region were exported to the other in order to increase


revenues. Yet while these fi lms proved immensely popular in their respective

country of origin, they failed to capitalize on this success abroad, and since the early

2000s, production companies in Flanders and the Netherlands have begun to

remake each other’s hits to counter this trend. Th e defi ning characteristic of most of

these Flemish-Dutch remakes is that they are genre fi lms adapted to diff erent

national or regional contexts. Joram Lürsen’s In Oranje ( In Orange , Netherlands,

2004), for example, tells the story of an eleven- year-old soccer player, Remco, who

dreams of playing for the Dutch national youth team, while its Flemish remake,

Buitenspel ( Gilles , Jan Verheyen, Belgium, 2005), translates the exact same story to a

Flemish context, replacing Remco with Gilles and the Dutch Orange Lions with the

Belgian Red Devils , thus transforming, like soccer itself, colors and species into

symbols of national or regional identifi cation. In like manner, Lürsen’s follow- up hit

Alles is Liefde ( Love is All , Netherlands, 2007), a romantic comedy set in Amsterdam

during the Dutch Sinterklaas (“Santa Claus”) celebrations, was remade as Crazy

about A. , which relocates the narrative to the Flemish city of Antwerp. Indeed, the

“A.” in the Flemish title is a pun, for it refers both to the Flemish slang for you (thus,

“Crazy about You”) and to the city of Antwerp, whose logo is a white “A” against a

red background (thus, “Crazy about Antwerp”). A more contemporary example is

provided by Van Mieghem’s Head over Heels , a romantic comedy set in Antwerp

and remade in 2013, by Van Mieghem herself, in the Dutch city of Th e Hague.

Th e most cited incentives to remake each other’s hits emphasize two

fundamental defi ciencies of both Dutch and Flemish cinema: if popular Flemish

fi lms fail to fi nd an audience in the Netherlands, and vice versa, it is predominantly

due to the language barrier and the negligible transnational appeal of Flemish

and Dutch fi lm stars. Th e diff erent Flemish and Netherlandish dialects of the

Dutch language are oft en seen as incommensurable, for they are offi cially

considered “in- between-languages” of Standard Dutch, occupying an

intermediary position between an informal regional dialect and the Dutch

standard language. Indeed, both Belgian Dutch and Netherlandish Dutch are

comprised of distinctive phonetic, lexical and grammatical elements that do not

belong to Standard Dutch, which, in concrete terms, means that both linguistic

subcommunities oft en have a hard time understanding each other if the Dutch

standard language is absent from the communication process. To further

complicate this situation, subtitling each other’s productions is also not an option

(although it is becoming more widely accepted, especially for television

productions). While spectators from both linguistic communities have oft en

expressed the need for subtitles to help them to understand the dialogue,


subtitling has discursively been constructed as unnecessary, given that Flanders

and the Netherlands both belong to the same language area. 20

Loft off ers a striking example of the limited export potential of two small

cinemas that nonetheless belong to the same language area. In 2008, Van Looy’s

blockbuster emerged as the most successful fi lm in both Flemish and Belgian fi lm

history, with 912,479 paying spectators on the Flemish market on a total audience

of 1,968,418 that year. In spite of its incredible success in Flanders, however,

Loft was not distributed internationally, except for an occasional screening at

an international fi lm festival and a DVD release in the Netherlands, where the

fi lm did not come out in theaters despite the country’s historical, linguistic and

cultural ties with Flanders. In this regard, Loft was by no means an exception, for

Van Looy’s previous hit, De Zaak Alzheimer ( Th e Memory of a Killer , Belgium/

Netherlands, 2003), only reached an audience of 7,505 paying spectators on its

release in the Netherlands, which is symptomatic of the limited commercial

potential of the cinematic exchange between the two neighbors. Consequently,

Woestijnvis was reluctant to distribute Loft in the Netherlands and opted instead

for a remake produced by the Dutch fi lm industry for a Dutch cultural context. 21

If the lack of crosscultural stars and the Netherlandish-Flemish language

barrier are cited as the two main reasons for remaking rather than distributing

Flemish box- offi ce successes in the Netherlands, and vice versa, it is not

surprising that the modifi cations to the Dutch remake of Loft (Antoinette

Beumer, Netherlands, 2010) are situated on these two levels. First, the Flemish

cast is replaced with Dutch celebrities. Th e remake’s second modifi cation

concerns the adaptation of Bart De Pauw’s original screenplay by the popular

Dutch crime novelist Saskia Noort. Noort preserved the plot of De Pauw’s script

and predominantly focused on updating its dialogue and content to a Dutch

context, as exemplifi ed by the remake’s northern-Dutch vernacular, and

specifi cally, by its infusion of the urban dialect of Amsterdams and American-

English idioms, which are more common in the Netherlands than in Flanders,

where most Dutch loanwords have their origin in the French language. Similar

to the Flemish original, the remake’s linguistic identity refl ects its cultural

politics. Th e Dutch Loft relocates the original’s setting from Antwerp to

Amsterdam, and from the Schelde River to the Ij, the most important and most

recognizable river in Amsterdam. Set in the Dutch capital, the remake cultivates

the iconography of the city’s waterways and some of its most reputable landmarks

while also celebrating its modern urban architecture—indeed, its trendy loft -

spaces—and its demographically diverse composition. If the Flemish original


brushed a Bredaelesque canvas of a picturesque Antwerp, the Dutch remake

similarly daubs a Ruisdaelian panorama of the Amsterdam cosmopolis. 22

With 441,761 paying spectators in 2010 and 2011, the remake of Loft was a

moderate success in the Netherlands, although it paled in comparison to the

original’s commercial, industrial and cultural impact on the Flemish audiovisual

sector. 23 Akin to its Flemish predecessor, the Dutch Loft also failed to attract an

audience in Flanders, where it was exhibited on a mere two screens, and

withdrawn aft er one week. Th e remake of Loft thus represents the limited

potential for cinematic exchange between Flanders and the Netherlands, and, by

extension, signifi es the disunity of the Dutch language area. Although this

linguistic heteroglossia is by no means exclusive to Flanders and the

Netherlands—for example, the limited distribution potential of Austrian and

Swiss-German fi lms in Germany is oft en attributed to a similar incompatibility

of regional sublanguages and dialects—the Dutch-Flemish remake cycle further

erodes the Dutch geolinguistic identity as it represents the political, cultural,

economic and linguistic incongruities that have separated Flanders from the

Netherlands since the Fall of Antwerp in 1585.

Writing in relation to Latin America, John Sinclair has argued that a “geolinguistic

region” comprises a singly regional cultural sphere defi ned by a homogeneity of

language and culture, in which cultural products from the geolinguistic region

circulate and distantiate themselves from the dominant geolinguistic region

constituted by English. By contrast, the inexportability of the Flemish Loft and its

Dutch remake illustrates the very local resistance to fi lm texts from other regions

or nations that nonetheless belong to the same cultural and geolinguistic

community. Even though contemporary Flemish cinema is situated in a

transnational European fi lm industry and shares with the Netherlands a Dutch

standard language, it is, above all, a distinctively Flemish cinema that is doubly

monolingual. Neither French nor northern-Dutch, Flemish cinema has begun to

protect, preserve and even celebrate the many local dialects that still dominate the

everyday speech of most Flemings today. In doing so, however, Flemish cinema has

also confused linguistic identity for ethnicity, and it has thereby at least implicitly

supported the separatist agenda of a burgeoning Flemish Movement built on a

historically essentialist notion of what it means to be Flemish. 24

And yet this dual assertion of monolingualism may perhaps disclose, rather

paradoxically, the inherent multilingualism of Flanders and its cinema. As

Flanders strives arduously to politically externalize its culturally internalized

Walloon and Dutch others, the Flemish vernacular continues to develop itself in


relation to, and in opposition to, the French and northern-Dutch languages. What

is more, the current wave of Flemish separatism ignores the historic bilingualism

of Flanders and its code- switching people, who have always been capable of

negotiating multiple linguistic codes at once, for their everyday communication

occurred, oft en simultaneously, in their local dialects: Standard Dutch and offi cial

French. It is thus perfectly sensible that the Oscar- nominated Bullhead , which

revels so gracefully in its subtle articulation of the Truierlands dialect of Flemish

Limburg, explicitly incorporates the region’s inherent bilingualism into its plot. Its

protagonist, the Limburgian farmer Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts),

consistently crosses the Dutch-French language border, switching between his

Truierlands dialect and his commendable French as he travels back and forth

between the Flemish region of Sint-Truiden and the Walloon region of Liège. Th is

comes, of course, as no surprise to the attentive Flandrien , for half a century

earlier, Jacques Brel, the bilingual Brusselse Ket par excellence, had already

serenaded “zijn platte land, Vlaanderenland, entre les tours de Bruges et Gand.”

Notes

1 Bruce Donaldson, Dutch: A Linguistic History of Holland and Belgium (Leiden:

Martinus Nijhoff , 1983), 4–5.

2 Ibid., 6–7.

3 Ibid., 21.

4 Ibid., 21–23.

5 Ibid., 24.

6 Ulrike Vogl and Matthias Hüning, “One Nation, One Language? Th e Case of

Belgium,” Dutch Crossing 32, no. 3 (2010): 234–35.

7 Ibid., 237–38; Donaldson, Dutch , 26–27; Guido Geerts. “Language Legislation in

Belgium and the Balance of Power in Walloon-Flemish Relationships,” in Language

Attitudes in the Dutch Language Area , ed. Roeland van Hout and Uus Knops (Berlin:

Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 32–33.

8 Vogl and Hüning, “One Nation, One Language,” 237.

9 Ibid., 236–37.

10 Donaldson, Dutch , 27; Geerts, “Language Legislation,” 34–35.

11 Donaldson, Dutch , 30.

12 Vogl and Hüning, “One Nation, One Language,” 244–45.

13 Jan Goossens, Inleiding tot de Nederlandse Dialectologie (Groningen: Wolters-

Noordhoff , 1977), 11–30; Donaldson, Dutch , 11–17.

14 Donaldson, Dutch , 17.


15 Frans Van Coetsem. “De rijksgrens tussen Nederland en Belgie als taalgrens in de

Algemene Taal,” in Taal en spraak in stad en streek: algemene taal en dialecten , ed.

B.W. Schippers (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff , 1968), 103. As cited and translated

by Donaldson, Dutch , 18.

16 Donaldson, Dutch , 33–34; Geert Booj, Th e Phonology of Dutch (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1995), 4–21, 53–95.

17 Gertjan Willems, “Filmbeleid in Vlaanderen en Denemarken: Een Comparatieve

Analyse,” Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap 38, no. 2 (2010): 177; European

Audiovisual Observatory, “European Union Cinema Attendence up 4% in 2006”

(Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory, February 21, 2007 ), accessed

June 1, 2014. http://www.obs.coe.int/about/oea/pr/berlin2007.htm ; Flanders

Audiovisual Fund ngo, Annual Report 2012 (Brussels: Flanders Audiovisual

Fund, 2013), 107–10.

18 Econopolis. “ Made in Flanders:” Het Exportpotentieel van de Vlaamse Audiovisuele

Sector (Antwerp: Econopolis, 2012 ), 11.

19 Ibid., 10–16, 37–46; Flanders Audiovisual Fund ngo, Annual Report 2012 , 118–22.

20 Steven De Foer, “Nederlandse Versie is Gewoon wat Explicietere Kopie van de

Vlaamse: Ook in Holland Staat een Loft ,” De Standaard , December 16, 2010.

21 Flanders Audiovisual Fund ngo, Annual Report 2008 (Brussels: Flanders Audiovisual

Fund, 2009), 10, 140; Ibid., Annual Report 2010 (Brussels: Flanders Audiovisual Fund,

2011), 156–60; Dana Linssen, “Moeizaam Grensverkeer tussen Nederland en

Vlaanderen,” NRC Handelsblad , March 25, 2009, 8; Raymond van den Bogaard, “De

Nederlander kan niet zonder Ironie,” NRC Handelsblad , May 7, 2010, 3.

22 Hugo Bernaers. “Een ‘Nieuwe’ Loft : Was Dat nou echt Nodig,” Filmmagie , no. 612

(2011): 35; Bor Beekman, “Remakes: De Verschillen tussen Nederlands en Vlaams

Filmpubliek. Sentimenteler dan de Belgen,” De Volkskrant , June 1, 2010, 42–43.

23 Netherlands Film Fund, Annual Report 2010 (Amsterdam: Netherlands Film Fund,

2011), 96; Film Facts and Figures of the Netherlands. September 2011 (Amsterdam:

Netherlands Film Fund, 2011), 14.

24 John Sinclair, “Geolinguistic Region as Global Space: Th e Case of Latin America,” in

Th e New Communications Landscape. Demystifying Media Globalization , ed.

Georgette Wang, Jan Servaes, and Anura Goonasekera (New York: Routledge, 2000),

19–32; Bernaers, “Een ‘Nieuwe’ Loft ,” 35.

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( 2011 ): 35 .

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Handelsblad , May 7 , 2010 .

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Algemene Taal. ” In Taal en spraak in stad en streek: algemene taal en dialecten , edited

by B.W. Schippers , 99–112 . Groningen : Wolters-Noordhoff , 1968 .

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Ook in Holland Staat een Loft . ” De Standaard , December 16 , 2010 .

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Dutch Crossing 32 , no. 3 ( 2010 ): 228–47 .

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Analyse. ” Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap 38 , no. 2 ( 2010 ): 172–86 .

\"out of many, one: the dual monolingualism of contemporary flemish cinema\"

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