A 1935 comedy, a masterpiece of cinematographic satire, highly successful at the time and somewhat forgotten today, which was ahead of its time: It has a feminist message, criticizing both hypocrisy and cowardice, and ironizes about the Spanish occupation in Flanders during the reign of Felipe III and has a notable reconstruction of life in Flanders in the first half of the 17th century, during the reign of Felipe III. The film, directed by the Belgian Jacques Feyder, is sarcastic and scathing, leaving no head puppet either among the occupiers or among the occupied. Feyder wanted to make a fable about war and peace, with outstanding dialogues, a great cast and splendid black and white photography. For the film’s visual style, Feyder wanted to pay homage to the old masters of his native country—Brueghel, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hoogh, Vermeer—and the designer undertook an elaborate creation of a Flemish city. The film satirizes the acts of cowardice used by the women of the town to frustrate the men as they go into hiding against what they believe in before an invading Spanish army. It also shows the cowardice of men and the self-confidence and sexual liberation of women.
The film is directed by the Belgian Jacques Feyder (Belgium, July 21, 1888 – Switzerland, May 24, 1948), of aristocratic origin, considered French by adoption since it was in France where he did most of his work. ‘La kermesse heroica’ emerges as a contrast to the hard realism films that Feyder had made up to then. The filmmaker, a master of realist cinema who had a long career in silent cinema behind him, expressed his interest in making “a peaceful film where no one could see the slightest allusion to the present, a historical matter, of the time, far from the present.” It is then that he recovers a plot written ten years earlier by his usual collaborator and Belgian plot writer, Charles Spaak, which no producer had wanted to produce because they were convinced that the public was not interested in historical films. He worked on the script trying not to raise controversy, but introducing some depth charges that would not go unnoticed after its release, such as the cowardice of the French men before the Kaisser’s army in World War I, a parallelism with the Belgian men in the film, which outraged many, mocking the heroes.
hospital preparations
In 1616, when Flanders is part of the Spanish crown, the small town of Boom, in the midst of preparations for its carnival, panics when its inhabitants learn that the Duke of Olivares (Jean Murat), who rules the country On behalf of King Felipe III of Spain, with his army, the fearsome Tercios de Flandes, he goes to spend the night there. Fearing that this will inevitably end in rape and looting, the burgomaster Korbus de Witte (André Alerme), supported by his town council, has the idea of pretending that he is dead to avoid receiving the soldiers, also thinking that if the town is in mourning, the Spaniards will leave them alone. But his fearsome wife Cornelia (Françoise Rosay) despises this ploy and organizes the other women to prepare hospitality and tailor their carnival entertainments for the Spanish, who insist on entering town anyway. The men of the town become increasingly paranoid of the Spanish, as the women are free to run the shops and inns, assuming their new stage of sexual liberation in juxtaposition to the rape and looting that the men are supposed to do. The women of the town decide to welcome the invaders in a festive way, making them feel at home, while the men hide, run away or play dead.
It is quite a celebration of female intelligence that, based on acceptance and sympathy, quenches the warrior spirits of an invading band and turns them into a friendly coexistence. Thus, the women decide to become the best hostesses that the Spaniards have ever known, such is the warmth of their welcome that not only do the Spaniards refrain from making mistakes, but upon their departure the duke announces the remission of one year of taxes for the people. Cornelia allows her husband to take credit for her good fortune, but in the meantime she has thwarted his plans for her daughter to marry the town butcher (Marcel Carpentier) instead of the young painter Brueghel (Bernard Lancret) whom she loves.
The cast included Françoise Rosay (Feyder’s wife), Micheline Cheirel, André Alerme, Jean Murat, Louis Jouvet, Lyne Clevers and Micheline Cheirel. The film was shot between June and September 1935 on location in Bruges and in studio-built interiors in Paris, a vaudeville that became the first and most accurate historical reconstruction of French cinema. The artistic director Lazare Meerson, who died prematurely at the age of 38, produced an artistic marvel, well assisted by the great Alexandre Trauner (who would later do this job in many Billy Wilder films) and Georges Wakhévitch. Right from the beginning the tone of the film is that of a brilliant comedy, which ridicules all the known establishments and the whole world. The result was a film full of strength, humor and a joyous celebration of life. ‘La kermesse heroica’ was presented at the Venice Festival where Feyder won the Best Director Award.
Paris premiere and critical success
Its premiere took place in Paris on December 3, 1935. Its critical success was enormous, but the public did not quite get into it, perhaps because it was reflected. Although the film is intended to make people laugh as light entertainment, some took it quite seriously. The worst happened a few weeks later in the Netherlands: the public felt wronged, spectators destroyed cinemas and the police had to intervene against the attendees. Feyder defended himself: «I was trying to explain to a public, who poorly remembers his story, that Felipe el Hermoso was born in Bruges and Carlos V in Ghent, that Felipe II called the Belgians »my compatriots«, that the kings of Spain It was not the ones who had annexed Belgium, but the Belgian sovereigns who, on the contrary, had annexed Spain, because one day Spain and the territories of America had found each other, in the inheritance of their wives”, adding: «I tried to remember that, since the time of the Archdukes Alberto and Isabella, the royal militias had been made up of 70 percent, by Flemish soldiers, to explain that it was in no way a question of a local farce, to oppose the bourgeois spirit to the attraction of the military adventurer against the monotony at ground level of the small merchants and their wives. It was of no use.”
It also raised controversy in many other places, which saw the film as Nazi-inspired. The French ambassador in Berlin feared that the German public would see in it an allusion to the Ruhr by French black troops. In a way it was somewhat prescient about the collaborationist Vichy regime, which made things easier for the Nazis after their invasion of France, leading to her being labeled a “philo-German”. In Madrid, the film was released on January 24, 1936. It was a great critical success, but it did not give time for it to be so with the public. The immediate civil war condemned the film to oblivion and in the Franco zone, prohibited. For many years it could not even be talked about, until on July 4, 1968 it was able to return to theaters, in the original version with subtitles. Many Spanish viewers then discovered the film. It still had another replacement, already in democracy, in the 80s.
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