Week 9/2024

On Monday, Bozar, Avila, and Sabzian present a unique cinema concert. Pianist Seppe Gebruers will accompany Charles Dekeukeleire's avant-garde masterpiece, Histoire de détective (1929), live on two grand pianos. The dogma of harmonic consonance will be questioned, as Dekeukeleire rejects linear narrative forms and employs parallel montage, and the music will dialogue with the film’s playful absurdity and surprising rhythms.

Two days later, Art Cinema OFFoff and Ciné Rio present another ciné-concert in Ghent. In the performance Traversées, artist Jelle Martens will engage in a live dialogue with two of Brussels-based filmmaker Els van Riel’s films. Van Riel explores the basic elements of cinema in her work, often working with 16mm film and experimenting with the technique and simultaneous use of multiple projectors. Her films, videos, and installations explore the impact of detailed changes in moments, movements, matter, light, and perception. For Martens, sound is a crucial element in terms of rhythm, repetition, texture, and montage. In his work, he focuses on the dialogue between the mechanical and the human through repetition and reproduction. Els van Riel and Jelle Martens also chose to show the film Chimera (2019) by Haris Epaminonda, which explores “a quest for light and shadow, and for all the elements that make this quest visible.”

The final film of the week is Claire Denis’s Beau travail (1999). Set in a French legionnaire base in Djibouti, Beau travail shows the interaction of two different worlds: the ascetic lifeworld of the soldiers dominated by masculinity and the vibrant and sensual African society all around them. The film remains revered for its treatment of movement and the body, filming military exercises as if they were a choreographed ballet. Testifying to this is Beau travail’s final dance scene to ‘Rhythm Of The Night’: a fitting end to an already very musical week.