Released in France as La Kermesse Heroique, Carnival in Flanders is set during the long-ago war between the Dutch and Spanish. A tiny village in Flanders is invaded by Spanish troops. The townsfolk have heard of Spanish cruelties in other towns, and decide to deflect the vanquishers by playing dead. This isn’t terribly effective (you have to take a breath once in a while), so the wife of the burgomaster tries to soften up the invaders with a lavish carnival. So successful is this venture that the Spaniards allow the village to escape being decimated, or even taxed. An award-winner many times over, Carnival in Flanders was banned in Germany; evidently, Goebbels caught on that director Jacques Feyder and scenarists Bernard Zimmer and Charles Spaak were drawing deliberate parallels between the Spanish and the then-burgeoning Nazis.
French Filmmaker Jacques Feyder is one of the founders of poetic realism in French cinema. Feyder came from a bourgeois family with a strong military tradition, but after flunking the entrance exams to officers school, Feyder began working in a canon foundry. Upon learning that his son really aspired to becoming an actor, Feyder’s father forbade him to use the family name on stage. Feyder went to Paris in 1911 where he played many small roles on stage and in film before becoming interested in filmmaking. Just before World War I, he began assisting director Gaston Ravel. As most of the regular directors were called to serve in the war, Feyder was assigned to direct. He began with nondescript little comedies, but in 1917, soon after he married famed actress Francoise Rosay, he was inducted into the Belgian army where he worked as an actor in a military troupe. He did not return to filmmaking until 1919. Over the next two decades, Feyder’s reputation as a filmmaker extraordinaire grew… read more
In Jacques Feyder’s weird pacifist fantasy, a Dutch town conquers by surrendering, politically and romantically.
