‘To possible what ifs’: promises, reenactment and other horizons in francophone cinema

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. My heartfelt thanks go to Dudley Andrew, fabled critic and historian of French and francophone cinema, and editor extraordinaire, who, through his invaluable feedback, greatly helped improve this review.

2. This may be anecdotal, but it is worth pointing out – both as a testament to Cuthbertson’s precision but also to the work of the copyeditors at Legenda: this reviewer found merely three typographical errors in the whole book (on pp. 139, 143, 145, and in two cases they concerned French words) as opposed to the usual dozens.

3. Although they are not discussed in this volume, it is worth noting that Lehman’s most celebrated films, Magnum Begynasium Bruxellense (1978) or Babel: Lettre à mes amis restés en Belgique (1991), rank among the greatest achievements of Belgian cinema, and of that specific subgenre that is archival and/or autobiographical reenactment (and autofiction!), which Cuthbertson rightly celebrates.

4. Ironically enough, it is precisely at a time when the nation had but the most minimal film production infrastructures, when it was a land of experimentation and prototypes proper – the 1970s of… Akerman and Lehman, among others – that Belgian cinema produced its finest films.

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Jeremi Szaniawski

Jeremi Szaniawski is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, and the Amesbury Professor of Polish Language and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among his published works are the edited volumes The Directory of World Cinema: Belgium (with Marcelline Block, 2014), The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (with Seung-hoon Jeong, 2016) and Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (with Michael Cramer and Keith Wagner, 2022).