Belgian film
| Cinema of Belgium | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| No. of screens | 461 (2010) |
| • Per capita | 4.7 per 100,000 (2010) |
| Main distributors |
20th Century Fox 19.2% Upi 16.6% Walt Disney Pictures 12.3% |
| Produced feature films (2009) | |
| Fictional | 36 (76.6%) |
| Animated | 4 (8.5%) |
| Documentary | 7 (14.9%) |
| Number of admissions (2010) | |
| Total | 21,230,379 |
| • Per capita | 1.97 (2012) |
| National films | 2,050,604 (9.7%) |
| Gross box office (2010) | |
| Total | €145 million |
| National films | €13.5 million (9.4%) |
Cinema of Belgium refers to the film industry based in Belgium. Belgium is essentially a bi-lingual country divided into the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) north and the French-speaking south. There is also a small community of German speakers in the border region with Germany. Belgium is further a federal country made up of three regions (the Flemish Region, the Walloon Region and the Brussels-Capital Region) and three language communities (the Flemish Community (Dutch-speaking), the French (i.e., French-speaking) Community and the German-speaking Community). Due to these linguistic and political divisions it is difficult to speak of a national, unified Cinema of Belgium. It would be more appropriate to talk about Flemish or Dutch-language cinema of Belgium and Walloon or French-language cinema of Belgium.
While the invention of the cinématographe by the French Lumière brothers is widely regarded as the birth of cinema, a number of developments in photography preceded the advent of film. Among the people pioneering work on animation devices was a Belgian professor of experimental physics Joseph Plateau. Plateau, who was active at the Ghent University invented an early stroboscopic device in 1836, the "phenakistiscope". It consisted of two disks, one with small equidistant radial windows, through which the viewer could look, and another containing a sequence of images. When the two disks rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows and the images created an animated effect. The projection of stroboscopic photographs, creating the illusion of motion, eventually led to the development of cinema.
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