Eric de Kuyper (b. 1942) has worked and continues to work in many different areas of (Belgian) cinema. He worked as a producer for BRT [Belgian Radio and Television], where he hosted, for example, De Andere Film. He is a filmmaker and worked as a co-screenwriter for several of Chantal Akerman’s films. He was a film theorist and essayist and deputy director of Eye, the Dutch film museum, and he has written numerous articles and essays on film, opera, dance and media. Between 1982 and 1992, together with Emile Poppe, he was the editor of the Dutch-language film magazine Versus. Over the course of three nights, Sabzian and Eric de Kuyper will highlight his rich career as part of the Belgian-cinema-dedicated series Seuls.
On the first night at KASKcinema, we take a closer look at de Kuyper’s activities as a filmmaker. The screening of Pink Ulysses (1990) will be followed by an in-depth conversation about his filmmaking. Pink Ulysses is a homoerotic quest for beauty to the beat of Richard Wagner, Zarah Leander and Sergei Eisenstein. De Kuyper edited together film and music fragments, taking Ulysses’s wanderings as his guide: “Penelope, as Homer tells us, wove her shroud by day and unraveled it by night. That is how Pink Ulysses came into being. Images gleaned from everywhere, also from classic films, and music drawn from the well-known and lesser known repertoire gradually turned into a fabric of pictures and sounds, the Odyssey its common thread.”
Eric de Kuyper (b. 1942, Belgium) graduated from the Brussels film school RITCS in 1966. Between 1965 and 1977 he worked as a producer for the BRT, where he hosted, for example, De Andere Film. His filmography includes Casta Diva (1982), Naughty Boys (1984), A Strange Love Affair (1985), Pink Ulysses (1990) – all screened at the Venice Film Festival – and most recently My Life as an Actor (2015). De Kuyper was also a co-screenwriter for several of Chantal Akerman’s films.
In addition, de Kuyper works as a film theorist and essayist. In the 1970s, he studied in Paris, with the philosopher/semiotician Roland Barthes and the linguist/semiotician Algirdas Greimas, among others. He founded the department of film and performance arts at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. His book Filmische hartstochten (1984) is a study of love in Hollywood cinema.
The autobiographical Aan zee (1988) was his literary debut, followed by a quick succession of books based on his youth in Brussels and numerous stays with his family in Ostend.
Until 1992, de Kuyper was deputy director of Eye, the Dutch film museum. He wrote numerous articles and essays on film, opera, dance and media (in Dutch as well as French magazines such as Cinémathèque and Trafic). Between 1982 and 1992, together with Emile Poppe, he was the editor of film magazine Versus.
For the Operadagen Rotterdam he made silent films accompany live performances of works by Schumann (Genoveva, 2010), Debussy (L’enfant prodigue, 2010) and Berlioz (Les nuits d’eté, 2011). For CINEMATEK in Brussels, he set up projects on early silent films (De verbeelding in context) and worked with De Nederlandse Opera and conductor Hartmut Haenchen on the accompaniment of Die Stahlwerke bei Poldihütte. He also put together a programme for Bozar on Eric Satie, John Cage, James Ensor and early silent films.
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