R.I.P. Paul Morrissey. The American avant-garde filmmaker passed away three weeks ago and so the screening of Flesh for Frankenstein at KASKcinema this week can serve as a commemoration. This same week, they’re also showing a 35mm print of Twilight, paired with a queer reading of the vampire saga. Having never seen Twilight, I imagine it as a kind of Morrissey-style schlock entertainment – but perhaps there’s more between these gothic tales about the horror of sexuality or sexuality of horror. Kristen Stewart herself called Twilight “such a gay movie,” though it’s generally seen as pro-abstinence propaganda. As argued in The New Statesman, “the act of heroism becomes the not having sex, even when it’s clearly desired by both parties.” In Robert Pattison’s own words: “Believe me, I want to. I just want to be married to you first!”

“Remember,” Paul Morrissey said about Flesh for Frankenstein, “to me, a conservative, sex is the stupid religion of the ‘liberal’. But the emotional urges towards family and to control life and, in doing so, frustrate death are far more complicated and interesting than the biological sex urge. Frankenstein wants control and possession, a much more powerful and confusing emotion. Sexuality is something to be against, something destructive.” In Morrissey’s version of the classic, Frankenstein is married to his sister, played by the Belgian actress Monique Van Vooren, and the experiments are about the unnatural urge to find an alternative to sex.

Shot back-to-back at Cinecittà with his own vampire myth Blood for Dracula, Flesh for Frankenstein ended Morrissey’s association with Andy Warhol’s Factory. He wanted to be independent beyond even the autonomy Warhol gave him. Jon Jost, another true American maverick, also began making films in the mid-sixties on shoestring budgets. CINEMATEK is screening his rare road movie, Frameup, about the beauty of the landscape and the shallowness of a zombie-like couple.

This Friday, Sabzian’s Johan van der Keuken retrospective opens with two films, The Filmmaker’s Holiday and Time, both about family and the intertwining of past and present in a reflection on death. Alain Bergala observed: “there’s something of Ingmar Bergman in Van der Keuken’s photographs though there’s not the slightest trace of Bergman in his films.” Van der Keuken’s photograph of his sleeping girlfriend, taken from behind a window, made Bergala think of Bergman as the filmmaker who best captured the sudden strangeness of a hitherto familiar body.

In Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, screening at CINEMATEK, two sisters return to their childhood home to be with their sibling who’s dying of cancer. Memories of their past and their mother return with them. Opening with shots of a statue of Orpheus and ticking clocks, the film shares an investment in the tension between time and stillness with The Filmmaker’s Holiday, but also echoes another van der Keuken film only appearing in Part II of the retrospective, Last Words - My Sister Joke (1998), where the filmmaker speaks with his sister days before her passing from cancer.

Van der Keuken conceived Time from the perspective of duration, which for him also touched upon the non-genetic family one chooses during life. In Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, the monk walking extremely slowly through today’s world is played by Lee Kang-sheng who’s appeared in every one of Tsai’s features. Ever since the filmmaker saw him outside a Taipei video arcade and cast him in Rebels of the Neon God (1992), they’ve become like family. This tenth collaboration in their Walker series, screening in its entirety at SMAK, is whispered to be the last and crystalizes Tsai’s lifelong observation of Lee’s body moving through time and space.

This week’s agenda singles out three city films. Avila, present! starts its fall tour with Seagulls Die in the Harbour [Meeuwen sterven in de haven]. Ciné Mangiare shows Chaplin’s City Lights in open air. Monokino’s SHHH festival concludes with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. All three films capture part of the essence of urban life. Yet Sunrise and City Lights take place in invented cities built in LA studios, while Seagulls, shot around the Antwerp harbour, is grounded in its location. Nevertheless, the Belgian pioneering film professor André Vandenbunder argued that the use of the city in Seagulls is closer to that of the romanticized Rome in Roman Holiday (1953) than to Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). In Vandenbunder’s view, the actual city of Antwerp doesn’t play along. It’s as if it’s only seen through the perspective of the Belgian documentary school because nothing really happens on those streets, docks or market squares.

In all three films, a protagonist-with-no-name is attracted to a city woman. In Seagulls, he has murdered his unfaithful wife. In Sunrise, the adulterous man thinks he has drowned his spouse. Meanwhile in City Lights, the man saves the woman by rescuing someone from drowning himself. The latter’s famous waterfront set, reminiscent of the Thames embankment, is one of the many decors based on Chaplin’s London childhood. Although City Lights was originally set in Paris, the critic Robert Sherwood noted its “confusing resemblances to London, LA, Naples and Tangiers,” concluding that “it’s no city on earth and it is all cities.” Sunrise’s introductory intertitle rings true: “This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere, at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets… in the city’s turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.”

“Do I really exist or is this just a dream?” my six-year-old daughter recently asked me, out of the blue, when I put her to bed. In the final scene of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s little daughter disappears unnoticed while the couple muses about whether, after surviving all their “adventures”, “they were real or only a dream.” Cruise replies that ”no dream is ever just a dream.” With the film, Stanley Kubrick transposed the story of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle (1926) from Sigmund Freud’s fin-de-siècle Vienna to contemporary New York. In his review at the time, filmmaker and teacher Herman Asselberghs found Eyes Wide Shut to be “too much of Freud, too little of Lacan.”

On Thursday in Cinema Palace, Le P’tit Ciné organizes an exceptional screening of Jacques Lacan parle (1972). Restored for the occasion, the film is a rare record of Lacan’s 1972 lecture at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) where a young Situationist disrupts the 71-year-old psychoanalyst and vandalises his notes with water and flour. In a conversation with filmmaker Jorge Leon, the Belgian documentarian Françoise Wolff will present this film she made as a young RTBF journalist.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s self-invented Buddhist epigraph that opens Le cercle rouge (1970) states that people who are meant to meet will eventually do so “in the red circle.” And so was the fate of the students sitting around Lacan or the secret society’s red carpet circle in Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick said he gave up doing crime films because Melville already reached perfection with Bob le flambeur (1956). Yet Olivier Père’s reflection on Le cercle rouge equally counts for Kubrick’s final and finest work: “He doesn't film reality, but ideas, frozen dreams, bleak fantasies in maniacal detail.” To which Melville said: “I'm no documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream.”

Libération’s Julien Gester described the French filmmakers Guy Gilles and Philippe Garrel as cousins sharing a similar dark romanticism, the same inclination for a cinema of poetry and relics, still-life lyricism and lightning autobiographies. In L’amour à la mer (1965) – screening at KASKcinema this Wednesday – Guy Gilles plays Guy who has a profound relationship with another man (Daniel) in whom we can also recognize the director. In Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights... (1985), screening at CINEMATEK on Friday, Philippe Garrel’s alter ego is making a film with a friend called Christa, echoing the real-life relationship between Garrel and Nico (real name Christa). At the same time, Garrel himself plays the director of the film within the film, but he also appears as himself interviewing Chantal Akerman and Jacques Doillon.

In Eric de Kuyper’s Casta Diva (1982) – which he’ll introduce at CINEMATEK on Tuesday – we watch his life partner, Emile Poppe, among other of the filmmaker’s friends, performing simple tasks in real time. In 1970, de Kuyper praised Philippe Garrel’s La concentration (1968) for its mise-en-scène of bodies in space – a couple dressed in their underwear around a bed and two adjoining rooms. “Grandiose,” he writes, about how, after 45 minutes, a very long backward tracking shot of the forward movement of the woman reveals the space. Garrel’s film might have been somewhere in the back of his mind when designing the slow 900-degree camera rotation across the male bodies posing in a bare, wooden floor room at the end of Casta Diva.

In Sabzian’s ten years of existence, can you believe that Heat (1995) never made it to the agenda? Flagey screens the film on 35 mm as part of their Michael Mann focus on Saturday. The same evening, CINEMATEK’s Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet Carte Blanche shows a double bill of Boris Barnet’s The House on Trubnaya (1928) and Le coup du berger (1956), on which Straub was Jacques Rivette’s assistant director. It’s been eight years since we lost Rivette; and next week, Bernard Eisenschitz will be signing his new book on Barnet after the screening of The House on Trubnaya at the Cinémathèque française. Then on Wednesday and Thursday, Eduardo Williams will be in Brussels for a masterclass in collaboration with the film students of KASK.

Movement is key in all four of this week’s films. L.A. has been described as a global gateway city, an interstitial space that perpetuates movement, and it’s precisely in underpasses, intersections, dockyards, and runways that Michael Mann situates Heat. Dante Spinotti, Mann’s DOP, described how he captured the Neil (Robert De Niro) and Eady (Amy Brenneman) balcony scene on location, overlooking Sunset Plaza, with a low frame rate and in front of a green screen to later turn it into “a surreal dream”. Driving off to LAX by night, the couple suddenly enters a tunnel bathed in sublimely overexposed white light but won’t find an escape. In the Straub-Huillet Carte Blanche, actions are marked out across a large vertical staircase set by Barnet or as a series of chess moves by Rivette. And in Williams’s The Human Surge 3, the interstices become manifest as it is composed of the 360-degree, eight-lens camera footage shot across multiple continents.

This week’s selection relates to the kind of films the critic Frieda Grafe once called neorealist “dissenters or latecomers” and their sensitivity to landscape. Youssef Chahine shot Cairo Station (1958) entirely on location at the train station. Its main square, with the giant statue of Ramses II still standing, becomes a microcosm for Nasserist Egypt in flux in the wake of the Suez crisis.

As part of its Classics Restored cycle this month, co-organizer of the former screening CINEA also tours with Bandits of Orgosolo (1961). Vittorio De Seta set his story of a wrongly accused shepherd-on-the-run in the Sardinian countryside and the surrounding harsh granite mountains of Barbagia, a dry, desolate and silent landscape. Writing on Bandits of Orgosolo in Cahiers du cinema, the French critic Jean-André Fieschi stressed that “neo-realism is not a school but a tendency, a force that is still active in cinema; we need it as much today, if only as a stimulus, as at the moment of its official recognition.”

Although Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950) is showing at De Cinema in Antwerp this Thursday as an ideal companion piece, we cannot but select the evening that Cinema Nova and LABO BXL dedicate to the worldwide network of 67 artist-run film labs that they’ve initiated. With her expanded cinema performance Pulsos subterráneos, Elena Pardo seeks to understand the struggle against corporate mining in the Mexican regions of Zacatecas and Oaxaca. With the love and attention similar to her fellow filmmakers Chahine or De Seta, she does so through the stories told by its inhabitants and the experiences evoked by its landscapes.

This week’s agenda offers three different perspectives on how space and living relate to each other. In La vie en kit (2022), architect-filmmaker Elodie Degavre revisits three Belgian participatory housing developments created in the post-revolutionary aftermath of May ’68 and in strict collaboration with the inhabitants of the building sites. In De cierta manera (1974), Sara Gómez also set her story in a new housing district, Miraflores, built by the very people who would live there, the former residents of a shanty-town just outside Havana. This was a product of one of the first collective efforts realized immediately after the triumph of Castro’s revolution. Alongside professional actors, some of the real-life characters of Miraflores play themselves.

Grands travaux (2016) also both documents and stages that which gives shape to the lives of a group of young students of a vocational school in the center of Brussels. The title refers to the major construction works that were carried out in the capital in the fifties and sixties, turning the city into a site of perpetual demolition and construction, as it is still today. A protagonist of La vie en kit, Brussels architect Lucien Kroll (1927-2022) always denounced the excesses of urbanisation and industrialization, and fought all his life against what modernism has left us: inhuman, brutal architecture that belies history. “There is something in the construction of narration which is present in architecture too,” Degavre noted. In a city struggling to take shape, Grands Travaux is also a search for form together with the youngsters who try to organize their lives inside of it, seeking a home, work, a future, and so on. Or as James Lattimer writes about De cierta manera, “story and context are insufficient concepts anyway when they’re as hopelessly intertwined as here.”

This week’s film selection features two expeditions by truck and one work, made with undocumented migrants, that rejects any finality. 

First up, we follow outlaws trucking leaky cases of nitroglycerin 218 miles through the Colombian jungle in Sorcerer (1977) by the late William Friedkin. 

Our second film of the week covers 116.500 miles in 112 days. Terres brûlées (1934) by the Belgian filmmaker Charles Dekeukeleire charts the course of the first successful attempt to travel from Brussels to the Congo by lorry. Commissioned by the Belgian government to map the roads between Belgium and its colonies, this expedition was mounted in 1934 by Captain Brondeel who invited Dekeukeleire to document the expedition on film.

 “Joy means not being aware that you are going from point A to point B.” This motto comes from Elie Maissin who co-directed the third film of this week together with Mieriën Coppens. Premiering as part of the Contour Biennale, Malgré tout (2023) illuminates the harrowing, compelling actuality of undocumented migrants. It’s a collection of short films that stand alone but are also part of a growing series made in collaboration with the Brussels activist collective La Voix Des Sans Papiers. Each of these films exists despite everything, malgré tout. 
 

“Life is a long, long chain of dreams drifting into one another,” Gertrud muses in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s eponymous 1964 film. Her words sum up this week’s film selection of three reveries. Dreyer’s Gertrud is a hopeless romantic who pursues an idealized notion of love that will always elude her and who must try to come to terms with reality. The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette called it a somnambulist’s film, a telling of a dream. 

Similarly, Otto Preminger considered his all-black cast musical adaptation of Georges Bizet’s Carmen as “really a fantasy, the world shown in the film doesn’t exist.” He shot Carmen Jones (1954) in pioneering Cinemascope format and Deluxe Color. Dreyer also dreamed of filming Gertrud in color. And maybe on 70 mm film, too, critic Tag Gallagher added. Carmen and Gertrud both are independent women who live by their own rules and discard the men in their lives. 

Perhaps no one was more fascinated by dreamlike sensations than the Surrealists. In Marcel Mariën’s L’imitation du cinéma (1959), a young man with a strong desire to be crucified spends a night with a prostitute embellished with a dream. At the end, we literally see the cinema lights coming back on and one of the characters leaving the movie theater in plain clothes. Once in the street, he sees an image from the film: a boy reading against the background of a Tigra poster. He knocks the book out of his hands and the film is over. “During the solitary walk after the screening (heading for some café or other), the last scraps of twilight reverie are shaken off,” Herman Asselberghs wrote in his notes on Roland Barthes’s ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’.

Featuring a selection of landscape films that are haunted by death, resilience and resurrection, this week’s selection is a testimony to the power of landscape.

Together with Courtisane, Art Cinema OFFoff pays tribute to the recently deceased Jean-Marie Straub by presenting a triple bill that includes Straub’s first solo film, Le genou d’Artemide (2008). After the death of his partner Danièle Huillet in 2006, Straub continued to make more than twenty short films. They were described by Claudia Plummer as “mourning-works, acutely indebted to Huillet’s past presence and present absence.” On May 1, the date of her birth, two of these films will be shown on new 35mm prints with English subtitles.   

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2009) was shot in Lesotho, South Africa, where Mary Twala Mhlongo plays an 80-year-old widow who’s busy preparing for her own funeral after the loss of her last remaining relative until she takes up the resistance to the construction of a dam that would wipe her community and ancestral burial ground off the map. Sadly, the leading actress passed away herself shortly after finishing this film. 

Travelling across three valleys and continents, from Lesotho’s Valley of Tears (Phula ea Meokho) to behind the mythical slopes of Etna in Straub-Huillet’s Schwarze Sünde, we continue onwards to cross the Americas in Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002). In this first part of his Death Trilogy, we get lost on a hike through Death Valley. A work of creative geography across the California desert, Argentina, and parts of Utah’s Salt Flats, Gerry will be screened in open air at De Koer in Ghent with a new live soundtrack by Ananta Roosens on violin and Mostafa Taleb on a Persian bowed string instrument called the kamancheh.

The highlight of this week is the Courtisane festival that’s taking place from Wednesday night to Sunday night. Next to our Courtisane selection, we made a regular agenda for the first half of the week with three films about labour and its global, cultural shifts. 

In À nous la liberté (1931), René Clair presents an anarchist satire on monotonous factory work. An inspiration for Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Clair’s revolutionary early sound film offers a condemnation of prison-like working conditions, Stalinism and industrial dehumanization.

A sobering, fly-on-the-wall look at the 21st-century’s globalized economy, the observational documentary American Factory (2019) offers a kind of update of À nous la liberté. Filmed over three years, direct cinema veterans Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert obtained unique access to film in a Chinese-owned windshield factory in Ohio. Cultural tensions rise between the Chinese workers and managerial staff who were brought in and the American employees, who are expected to follow Chinese labour practices. 

The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is coming to Bozar in Brussels to present his latest documentary Rohingya (2021) which was, just as his previous films, refused by the major streaming platforms and film festivals such as Cannes because of interference by the Chinese authorities. A continuation of Human Flow (2017) and The Rest (2019), the film focuses on the plight of refugees, in this case the ethnic Muslim minority of the Rohingya who were forced out of Myanmar in 2017 and fled to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, the world’s largest refugee camp. Shot over several months, the film observes in long, uninterrupted set-ups the community’s daily life, social rituals, routines and the camp’s unique landscapes. Working outside the camp is restricted or forbidden by the authorities in order to avoid undermining natives’ job prospects.