Abstract
Pieter van Hees’s Waste Land (2014) situates Belgian national anxiety in the country’s white supremacist past and present, both of which milieux are shared by the language communities. The film represents Brussels while suggesting, perhaps in spite of itself, that the city’s claim to be a centre of power is ethically, as well as ethnically, problematic. It breaks a taboo in confronting Belgium’s colonial past, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Leopold II’s accession (1865), yet ultimately reproduces the economy of the racialized system it tries to critique. The ineffability of spatial spectacle would betray the way in which its protagonist’s narrative is ‘mapped’ onto the space of Brussels, with the character’s breakdown – hence, a failed attempt at constructing his own narrative, at mapping his life in Brussels -- being further unintentional testimony to the city’s abject history beneath it.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 21-34 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Journal of European Popular Culture |
Volume | 15 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Apr 2024 |
Keywords
- Brussels
- Congo
- postcolonial
- Belgian film
- urban cinema