Out of Many, One: The Dual Monolingualism of Contemporary Flemish Cinema

Verheul, Jaap (2016) Out of Many, One: The Dual Monolingualism of Contemporary Flemish Cinema. In, Mamula, Tijana and Patti, Lisa (eds.) The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference. Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 317-334. (doi:10.5040/9781501302848.ch-016).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

The regional cinema of Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, has flourished since the early 2000s. The region witnessed a proliferation of films targeted at its domestic market, while the public’s broadening interest in these Flemish productions secured their financial success. As the Flemish audiovisual sector gradually professionalised itself, its moving image culture increasingly explored the apparently distinctive identity of the Flemish region. This cinematic reawakening coincided with the growing political popularity of the separatist Flemish Movement, which, since its materialisation in the nineteenth century, had advocated for an independent Flemish state. The renewed political interest in a culturally restrictive notion of Flemishness thus corresponded with a new wave of films that examined the specificities 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 first 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 differentiate its Flemish dialects of the Dutch language from both Standard Dutch, which it rejects as the official 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 official language, Dutch, but nonetheless considers the language barrier, comprised of different Dutch and Belgian dialects of the Dutch language, as too great an obstacle—an experience shared by their 318 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. This 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.
This 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 defining itself linguistically in relation to these perceived adversaries. In addition, I demonstrate that the Dutch-Flemish remake cycle—exemplified by films such as Loft (Erik Van Looy, Belgium, 2008) and its remake Loft (Antoinette Beumer, Netherlands, 2010)—signifies 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.

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