Fêtes de Belgique ou l'effusion collective
Henri Storck
1972 - 120 min - 35 mm - Couleur - Belgique

"Festivities – entertainment or rejoicing – give shape to life and a desire for the joys of life. They are prepared with great care, in a state of happy anticipation of the pleasure they will give.
They are a dream that waking sleepers experience together, a complicity that opens the taps to a flow of warm affinity between people. If you are not there willingly, better not get involved at all. How can one film an organised dream whose intensity only really glows inside each participant?
Luckily the actors at the festivity are putting on a performance. There is show, therefore there are images; there is the pleasure for the filmmaker of happening upon the traces of madness, of excessiveness, of fishing for inventive gestures like rare pearls – these festivities are often an inexhaustible source of creation, of brilliant improvisation. The imagination begins to sparkle.
In order to express their happiness, people turn it into a show of gestures, words, songs, cries and chanting that are meat and drink for the filmmaker. According to his sensitivity, his cruel, ironic, tender or warm way of seeing things, he seizes from this matter fleeting instants like the butterfly hunter does, for his collection. What a result you get from capturing the transient!
The camera savours the self-satisfaction. The lens, that big greedy eye, shines with joyful voluptuousness for, in any show, there is exhibition. The titillated microphone vibrates to the rhythms of the festivities.
Swept away by this rhythm, one of the participants finally dares to surpass himself, lay himself bare. This is the most fascinating moment of all, for it exposes a fragment of human truth. The filmmaker stays on the fringes of the party, but does not try to avoid it. In order to film it properly, he must enter into its game. It is all a question of chance, mobility and above all, preparation. He needs to know relatively precisely what is going to happen. The best thing is to have experienced it before and, when editing, relive the emotions.
It is best that the film has a festive air to it too. It would be perverse to be sinister in a spirit of seriousness; it wouldn't be serious at all..." Fonds Henri Storck