Anaïs Duyvejonck

Week 10/2024

Until May, Cinema RITCS presents The Power of Belgian Cinema, 11 lectures by Belgian scholars on important movements, films and directors in Belgian film history. On Tuesday 5 March, ULB’s Dominique Nasta will be giving a lecture on the magic realist cinema of André Delvaux, followed by a screening of De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen. Although reactions by the Belgian press were rather lukewarm when Delvaux’s debut was released in 1965, it was well received abroad. Particularly in France, where Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais admired the film for its inventive articulation of time and memory. Delvaux’s compatriots eventually reviewed their opinion. The film is now considered a pinnacle of modernist Belgian film history.

With a screening of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) at Palace on Thursday 7 March, we turn to the Western frontier. Having worked together with John Wayne on ten features, Ford is largely responsible for the mythology of the Western as we know it today. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is routinely referred to as the last great Ford film. It sets itself apart from previous Ford films as it tells a story about the modernisation of the West, and the end of the “character” of the cowboy. While Ford is famous for shooting on location in Monument Valley, this film was shot in black and white at the sound stages of Paramount Studios, for financial reasons according to cinematographer William Clothier. At that time, Hollywood’s well-oiled machine began to fall apart.

Set in the 1950s, The Dupes (1972) traces the destinies of three Palestinian refugees brought together by their dispossession, despair and hope for a better future. The protagonists try to make their way across the border from Iraq into Kuwait, the “Promised Land,” concealed in the steel tank of a truck. Based on the 1962 novella Men in the Sun by the assassinated resistance leader Ghassan Kanafani, this is one of the first Arab films to address the Palestinian question. It was banned in several Arab countries due to its implied criticism of Arab governments. The film will be screened at Cinema ZED on Friday 8 March.

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Week 2/2024

On Wednesday night, Kinoautomat organizes a screening of Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) at KASKcinema, preceded by an introduction by film lecturer Wiebe Copman. Mekas is regarded by many as the grandfather of American avant-garde cinema. He arrived in America in 1949 together with his brother. They were former prisoners of German labour camps who’d been exiled from their Lithuanian hometown. Upon arrival in the US, Mekas began documenting his life with a camera. This narrative documentary is a compelling testimony of a divided family and their long-delayed reunion.

As Cinema Nova’s leasing term comes to an end, Supernova Coop aims to acquire a long-term lease of the building with the help of their loyal attendees, who can all become shareholders. To achieve their goal, Nova launches a new program, kicking off on Thursday with a screening of Jean Harlez’s Le chantier des gosses (1970). A Belgian made, neo-realist film about Brussels in the 1950s, giving centre stage to the grimy cul-de-sacs of the populous district of Les Marolles. Children play in the wasteland, left gaping after the fall of a V1 missile at the end of the Second World War, surrounded by old shacks and blind fences. Harlez will be present to introduce the screening, alongside his partner Marcelle Dumont, who wrote the dialogues for the film.

In light of the second part of the Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet retrospective this semester, the last screening on this week’s list features a double bill at CINEMATEK on Thursday: Incantati (2003) and Schwarze Sünde (1989). The production of Umiliati (2003) resulted in several films including Incantati, which serves as an alternative ending of said film (Balthazar). After their earlier film The Death of Empedocles, Straub and Huillet return to Etna and again to Friedrich Hölderlin’s Empedocles in Schwarze Sünde. It is a dark political text, and the characters that have remained walk on black ashes like ghosts of another world.

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Week 51/2023

This week’s selection of screenings consists of films depicting dystopian realities, both real and false.

On Monday, Kunsthal Gent offers four films by Belgian video artist and director Johan Grimonprez, renowned for films such as Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) and Double Take (2009). His work often emphasises political themes and the changing media portrayal of historical events. In Shadow World (2016), Grimonprez exposes the global arms trade – an underworld of extortion, corruption and greed that’s ruled by weapon distributors, world leaders, politicians, and secret services. What I Will (2013) is a one-minute rollercoaster in which Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad searches for a glimmer of hope amid military parades and anti-aircraft artillery. This short acts as a preview for Shadow World. In Three Thoughts on Terror (2018), investigative journalists Robert Fisk, Jeremy Scahill and Vijay Prashad approach the concept of terror from their own perspectives. In Two Travellers to a River (2018), Palestinian actress Manal Khader recites a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is a dystopian crime film by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel of the same name, that was banned in quite a few countries because of its harsh depiction of violence and rape. Kubrick eventually had the film removed from circulation in the UK himself until his death in 1999. Anke Brouwers will introduce the film on Tuesday at De Grote Post (Ostend) and contemplate its subtexts of repression, free will and criminality.

Also on Tuesday, Paprika (1988) will be screened at KASKcinema. The film follows a group of scientists who have pioneered a radical new tool for psychotherapy treatment: the DC Mini, which allows therapists to enter a person’s dreams and analyse their subconscious mind. This Japanese dystopian science fiction anime film famously inspired Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).

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Week 45/2023

Our first film of the week, Häxan (1922) by Benjamin Christensen, is a fictionalized documentary showing the evolution of witchcraft, from its pagan roots to its confusion with hysteria in modern Europe. Häxan has known a lot of resistance due to its subversive, offensive images of “unadulterated horror”. Upon its release, a famous review from 1923 reads: “Wonderful though this picture is, it is absolutely unfit for public exhibition.” It was banned or censored a lot until its later re-releases. Bjorn Gabriels from the Research Centre for Visual Poetics will introduce the screening.

The second film featured on this week’s agenda, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), chronicles the intense love affair of a French actress and a Japanese architect over the course of one day and one night. Their lives are bound to the fate of the nations they represent – entwined bodies melt together, and France meets Japan as memories of the last German occupation in Nevers intersect with those of the bombardment of Hiroshima. Part of the literary inspired Groupe Rive Gauche (Left Bank Group) movement, Alain Resnais was launched into recognition with this film, his first feature-length film, based on the screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Hiroshima mon amour is perhaps the most successful synthesis between film and literature. Resnais allegedly urged Duras to “write literature. Don’t worry about me. Forget about the camera.”

Trop tôt/Trop tard (1981) will close the first complete retrospective of the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub presented by Goethe-Institut Brussels and CINEMATEK. “This retrospective is the result of a twofold desire: to show the films Straub made after 2006, most of which were shot digitally, and to show, in the same programme and sometimes within the same screenings, the films they made together between 1962 and 2005.” Gilles Deleuze remarks about Straub’s films that there is something peasantry about history. History is inseparable from the earth. Trop tôt/Trop tard is a remembrance of class struggle that links the 19th century French peasants to 20th century Egyptian workers.

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