Done with exploring the street art of Brussels, we went towards La Senne, the river near the Halle Gate (Porte de Hal). The Halle Gate is the former medieval city gate with the gigantic portcullis built in the 14th century. The exterior was being worked on but the interior was accessible.
As gates go I’d say it’s one of the most formidable I’ve walked through. I mean how many gates house a three floor museum? A museum with oodles of medieval weaponry.
And as a special weird bonus, the 17th century horse that was shot under Archduke Albert of Austria. The fatal bullet wound has been preserved with some finicky taxidermy.
But from my perspective, the highlight was on the top floor where a reel of the Lumière brothers early films were being shown against the wall. In the late 19th century, around the same time Edison’s assistants were playing with short film snippets of people sneezing, or kissing, the Lumière Brothers were shooting doc footage of everyday activity in Paris and regions north. Their clips were longer in length than the Edison bits so they have a claim at being the first movie-makers. The short movies projected onto the Halle Gate wall were of daily life in Fin de Siècle Belgium. They set up their camera at major intersections in Brussels where the streets seemed to be reserved for pedestrians jaywalking in a random Brownian motion. Now and then a horse-drawn cart rumbles by, or a worker in his shirtsleeves (everyone else is wearing a suit or long dress) is pushing a cart. There it is, life on foot promenading the latest fashion (frock coats, top hats, shirt-waists and bustles) while the goods are being delivered by wagon. As the film clip fades to another recording strollers on Mechelen’s central square, I wonder, with World War I in the near future, whether any of these people ambling by in their well-tailored threads had a clue. According to Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday”, they didn’t.
Now imagining the future we seem to have plenty of clues, we just don’t know which one will, when we look back on it, make the crowded cafés we’re walking by today look quaint.
