Earlier this year, the third, this time digital, Encyclopedia of the Flemish Movement was published. It is the outcome of a widely supported collaborative effort involving researchers, archival institutions, universities, and other entities with expertise on the Flemish Movement. The Encyclopedia of the Flemish Movement aims to serve as the premier reference for all research and knowledge concerning the Flemish Movement from its origins to the present day. It is a scholarly publication ensuring the scientific integrity of each entry, but it targets not just specialists like historians, policymakers, and journalists, but also seeks to engage a wider audience, making its content accessible to educators, the cultural sector, and interested citizens. Moreover, the Encyclopedia is designed as a living knowledge base, continually updated beyond its 2024 publication. Readers are encouraged to contribute by reporting errors, gaps, or new suggestions through a dedicated suggestion submission feature.
Together with Guido Convents, Daniel Biltereyst and Roel Vande Winkel, I contributed a lengthy lemma on cinema. In this lemma, we describe how since the inception of cinema at the end of the 19th century, the film industry in Flanders has evolved from a Belgian sector, predominantly French-speaking, into an increasingly distinct Flemish film sector. Flemish national discourses were primarily found in non-fiction and amateur film productions, while the professional Flemish fiction film production rarely engaged with ‘hot nationalism’. However, we show how these films also contributed to a ‘banal’ cinematic construction of a Flemish nation.
A shorter version of our lemma was selected to appear in the book Encyclopedia of the Flemish Movement: The Synthesis. The notion of ‘synthesis’ is somewhat relative, as the work extends beyond 700 pages… It was a great pleasure to participate in this expansive collaborative project, which brought together such a wide array of scholars and experts! A big thank you to the people from ADVN (Archive for National Movements), who coordinated this massive work in a very smooth way.