Le banquet des fraudeurs (H. Storck, 1952). Blurring the borders between commission and reality

Le banquet des fraudeurs (1952) is an atypical work in Henri Storck's filmography. An anomaly in a career mainly devoted to documentaries for some, a hybrid film of multiple concessions or political instrumentalisations for others, this first feature-length fiction film, shot in part in what was to become the Meuse-Rhine Euregio, resists many of the analytical grids developed through contact with the Belgian filmmaker's rich filmography. The film's stylistic heterogeneity is no accident. By turns a pastoral comedy, a film noir or a propaganda film, Le banquet des Fraudurs seems to be influenced, depending on the sequence, by the cinema of the Popular Front, the German ‘Trümmerfilm’, film noir and even Soviet fiction of the late 1920s.
Faced with this initial heterogeneity, which we will recall in the introduction, our paper aims to identify the historical, economic and political determinants of a film that is also, in many respects, a work that gives a very precise account of the multiple and sometimes restrictive paths open to an internationally enowned Belgian filmmaker at the start of the 1950s. We will do this in three stages. In the first part of our talk, we will look back at the political and economic genesis of the film, focusing not only on the decisive role played by Charles Spaak, but also on the more discreet role played by Eugen Kogon.Nourished by these initial elements, we will then offer an analysis of certain dramaturgical components of the film, with a particular focus on its direction—complex yet essential for identifying the film’s target audience—and its use of multilingualism. Finally, in a third stage, drawing on the insights from the first two sections, we will attempt to present a clear picture of the film’s political thesis, and more specifically, the way it utilises the creation of the Benelux—not so much to document it, but rather to serve the purpose of another form of union.