This week begins with a screening of Retratos Fantasmas [Pictures of Ghosts] (2023) at KASKcinema. Set in Recife, the Brazilian coastal capital of Pernambuco, the film is a journey through time, sound, architecture, and filmmaking. It delves into the historical and human territories traced by grand movie theatres that were at one point central to social life in the 20th century. These venues, once full of dreams and progress, reflect significant shifts in social practices and are explored as part of a city’s cinema-infused cartography.

On Friday, De Cinema in Antwerp invites the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp to present a program of experimental shorts by Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren. “When making a film, the story is usually put in the foreground while the image stays in the background, that is, theater is preferred over cinema. When the relationship will be inversed, cinema will begin to live according to its proper meaning. […] The future belongs to the film that cannot be told,” proclaimed Germaine Dulac in 1928 – a principle that resonates in Maya Deren’s work as well.

We conclude the week at the Afrika Film Festival in Leuven with a screening of this year’s Berlinale winner, Dahomey (2024), by Mati Diop. In Dahomey, the return of twenty-six royal artifacts from the Kingdom of Dahomey to the Republic of Benin – after being looted by French colonial forces in 1892 – sparks debate among University of Abomey-Calavi students. When asked what spurred her to make the film, Mati Diop reflects: “I never envisioned what restitution could look like. Imagining it inspired a film about the odyssey of a looted artifact, projecting its homecoming into the future. It's a vision that stretches from the past looting to a speculative return in 2075, a narrative of cultural reclamation I thought I might never witness.”

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.

This week’s agenda features three films that are, each in their own way, profound critiques of the societies in which they are set.

On Tuesday, KASKcinema is showing Éric Rohmer’s L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque (1993), a satirical exploration of the push-and-pull of societal progress. A socialist mayor strives to build a culture and leisure center in a small French village but finds resistance because there’s a 100-year-old willow tree on the designated field. What ensues is as a study on the delicate balance between nature and human ambition. Rohmer combines two subjects dear to his heart, ecology and urbanism, in the only film he openly conceived as “political”.

Thursday marks the premiere of Sarah Vanagt’s new video installation, De Modellen, at Kanal in Brussels. As a starting point for her new work, Vanagt took walks with twenty young women and men from Molenbeek and Schaerbeek, two Brussels neighborhoods. She engages them in conversation about the place of work in young people’s lives, their expectations, ambitions, and role models, and about personal visions of the future and a society that is changing at lightning speed. The installation will be screened alongside her previous film, De Dragers (2022).

On the same day, De Cinema is screening Agnès Varda’s Le bonheur (1965). Inspired by the Impressionist painters, Varda’s film uses their vibrant colours to challenge our perception of happiness. “The appearance of happiness is also happiness,” Varda herself said on the subject. The film shows, and therein lies its critique, that the image of happiness is already perceived as happiness. As Belgian writer and critic Eric de Kuyper wrote in 1966, “Varda talks about the clichés we live with, and she uses those same clichés to do so.” Le bonheur holds up a mirror to society by making the treacherous world of appearances attributed to ‘real happiness’ all too transparent.

However diverse, the screenings in this week’s selection share a concern with dealing with the past, its representation, its reverberation in the present, the role images play in the construction of history, their possibilities, their shortcomings. 

A double bill on Monday in Art Cinema OFFOFF features Broken View by Hannes Verhoustraete, an essay film on the magic lantern and Belgian colonial propaganda. Like all media technology, this predecessor of the modern slide projector was a means to many ends and proved most effective in the construction of a colonial mindset. Exploring the tension between aesthetic experience and historical consciousness, the film attempts a deconstruction of the colonial gaze with its own construction of associations. Accompanying the film, Floris Vanhoof’s performance Fossil Locomotion, the “imaginary motion studies of my family's fossil collection”, touches the same media-archaeological nerve and offers its own perspective on the nexus between technology and historiography, technique, and poetics.  

On Friday, a program in the Brussels Art Film Festival also offers two films exploring the relationship between images and history. Milena Trivier’s Algorithms of Beauty explores the limits of human perception and image technology. In 1772, Mary Delaney “invented a new way of imitating flowers” with paper and scissors. Trivier’s essay film connects these exquisitely hand-crafted flowers to the eerily similar images of flowers produced by artificial intelligence, making time fold back on itself in twenty minutes. In Deborah Stratman’s mid-length Last Things, the inanimate world takes central stage. Michael Sicinski writes, “Rocks ‘remember’ without the burden of consciousness.” 

Derek Jarman’s The Last of England, a furious hymn decrying Thatcherism, screens at KASKcinema on Sunday. Jarman writes: “What do you see in those heavy waters? I ask. […] Lies flowing through the national grid, and bribery. All’s normal then? Yes. Where’s hope? The little white lies have carried her off beyond the cabbage patch.”

This week’s agenda showcases some iconic Hollywood movies that embody the pursuit of the “finished” film –  a sometimes difficult and long struggle.

Our first film, The Fly (1986), will be shown on Halloween in its final state. However, the film initially had multiple potential endings, as evidenced from some extra material available on YouTube. Director Cronenberg interpreted the film as an allegory of aging, describing it as “a compression of any love affair that reaches the end of one of the lovers’ lives.” He added, “Every love story must end tragically. One of the lovers dies, or both of them die together. That’s tragic. It’s the end.” Apparently, some of the considered endings could have had tragic consequences of their own.

In our second feature, it’s also the ending, among other elements, that director William Friedkin altered in The Exorcist (1979). The director’s cut, released in 2000 and promoted as "The Version You’ve Never Seen," includes 10 minutes of additional footage, updated CGI effects, and a subtly modified ending. The diverse versions reflect the contrasting perspectives of Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty. The revised ending clarifies some of the ambiguity about what truly possesses the girl in the film and somewhat reinstates the shaken faith, while the original theatrical cut left things in a more cynical light.

Our final film, famously beset by a tumultuous production, exemplifies the creative chaos resulting in multiple versions. Apocalypse Now (1979) had multiple versions over the years, even a five-hour long work print, all adding to the myth surrounding the film’s production. Martin Sheen’s heart attack, Francis Ford Coppola’s nervous breakdown, and Marlon Brando’s complex character all surely contributed too. Coppola observed that the filmmaking process mirrored the narrative’s journey, much like Captain Willard’s quest in the jungle – a search for answers and catharsis. What was changed in the 2019 final cut? It restores the previously omitted plantation scene but excludes the maligned Playboy Bunny scene featured in the Redux version.

After already re-releasing several restored features by Chantal Akerman, including Toute une nuit (1982) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Cinéma Palace in Brussels is premiering the release of the newly restored Les rendez-vous d’Anna this week. Akerman’s third feature film was not shot using a traditional screenplay; instead, it was based on a remarkable 90-page autobiographical prose text. In contrast to Jeanne Dielman, Akerman worked intensively on the rhythm of dialogues and monologues, aiming for them to become like “a chant, where the actual meaning of the sentences doesn’t really matter.” Lead actress Aurore Clément will be present at the première!

Our second film of the week, Araya (1959), is a recent rediscovery of Latin-American cinema. Steven Jacobs, when first confronted with the film in 2021 at the Cinema Ritrovato festival, said that it positively blew his socks off. Margot Benacerraf’s film portrays a day in the life of three families living in one of the harshest places on earth – Araya, an arid peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. “In those days, going to Araya was like going to the moon,” she wrote. To honor this desolate place and its inhabitants, Benacerraf crafted a composition in which cinematography, music, sound, and language combine to create a tone poem of incredible beauty.

Our final film, Johnny Guitar (1954) by Nicholas Ray, hardly needs introducing. Ray’s Western about a saloon owner named Vienna and her long-lost lover, Johnny Guitar, resonates with everyone who has ever watched the film. João Bénard da Costa, former director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa who reputedly watched it more than sixty times, wrote in a beautiful essay about the film: “To revisit the images (or sounds) of Johnny Guitar is to revisit our memory of them.” “Just as with very big things, you do not explain Johnny Guitar,” he continues. “You tell it (see it) again, again and again, like stories are told to children, until everything is known by heart and you learn that everything in them is right.”
 

Since 2017, Lietje Bauwens and Wouter De Raeve have been researching the redevelopment of the Northern Quarter in Brussels, using filmmaking and fiction to intervene in this ongoing debate. Our first pick of the week, WTC A never-ending Love Story, picks up where WTC A Love Story, their previous collaboration, left off. The duo, co-directing with Daan Milius this time, once again mobilises actors to set up different fiction experiments, challenging power relations involved in urban redevelopment and investigating both the history and the current state of resistance in the Northern Quarter. The premiere of WTC A never-ending Love Story is accompanied by the screening of their previous film.

Staying with megalomaniac building projects, our second film of the week is Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s actor-nemesis, plays Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald who intends to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle. The scene where Herzog transports a steamship over a steep hill caused wide controversy over the years. “I’m aware of my reputation of being a ruthless madman,” Herzog responds to Paul Cronin, “but when I look at Hollywood – which is a completely crazed place – it’s clear to me that I’m the only clinically sane person there. As my wife will convincingly testify, I am a fluffy husband.”

After screening Farrebique ou les quatre saisons (1946) on Sunday, Cercle du laveu in Liège continues its September/October “Peasantry” cycle with John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). This timeless adaptation of John Steinbeck’s eponymous novel follows an Oklahoma family who is driven off their family farm and forced to join the great migration to the West during the years of the Great Depression. Despite their endless battle against capitalist forces and classist prejudice, Ford imbues his characters with grace regardless of their hardships, no doubt aided by the beautiful cinematography of Gregg Toland.

This week’s selection features a series of fantastical creations. 

On Monday, Art Cinema OFFoff leads the way with a program of films by Pierre Clémenti. OFFoff invited Clémenti’s son Balthazarto present the new 4K restorations of À l'ombre de la canaille bleue (1986) and Soleil (1988), his father’s last two films. Clémenti’s hallucinatory sci-fi-noir À l'ombre de la canaille was his sole narrative feature, and it may also be his masterwork. Shot on 16mm, Clémenti’s dystopian vision of Paris is called Nécrocity, a hedonistic netherworld where state police (with the chief played by Clémenti himself) chase gangsters through  hazy, heroin-fuelled nightlife.

Introducing our second film, Paul Verhoeven’s classic Starship Troopers (1997), requires a small jump to a different kind of dystopia altogether:. Although not well-received upon release, the film’s blend of genres and American TV soap-like tropes gained special acclaim in the post-9/11 era. As Verhoeven himself said, “In some ways, it's a pleasure that it all became true, but on the other hand, there's not much pleasure that it came true.”

Our last film, Malá morská víla [The Little Mermaid] (1976) by Czech filmmaker Karel Kachyna, is an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale. Unlike Disney’s recent reboot, this adaptation is most faithful to the grim morality of the original story. Known for its beautiful costume design and optical ingenuity to achieve an underwater effect, the film stands out for its musical score composed by Zdeněk Liška, who also composed music for Spalovac mrtvol [The Cremator] (Juraj Herz, 1969) and Ovoce stromu rajských jíme [Fruit of Paradise] (Vera Chytilová, 1970). Fittingly, the score was release on the Finders Keepers label.

Starting off the week on Monday is The Red Shoes (1948), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film follows a young ballet dancer torn between her love for a composer and her dedication to becoming a prima ballerina. Martin Scorsese, who counts the film among his greatest inspirations, once said of the film: “The ballet sequence itself was like an encyclopedia of the history of cinema. They used every possible means of expression, going back to the earliest of silent cinema.”

Fittingly, the next selected film is Martin Scorsese’s own After Hours (1985), a film that blends screwball comedy and film noir to tell the surreal story of a man’s wild journey through the streets of New York City after a chance encounter with a woman. Made in the wake of The Last Temptation’s cancelation, it remains one of Scorsese’s lesser-known films.

Also screening on Saturday is India Song, directed by Marguerite Duras in 1975, a film that defied traditional cinema with its unconventional aesthetic and anachronistic setting. The film tells the story of a married French ambassador who becomes infatuated with a mysterious woman in India. As described by Ivone Margulies, India Song is a “hypnotic chant d’amour” in which she subverts traditional cinematic techniques by using dialogue that “hangs as if in doubt, creating a sort of echo chamber where the present is continually being troubled.”

The annual Classics Restored Festival is entering its second week. From its treasure trove of recently restored films, we’d like to highlight Dolgie Provody [The Long Farewell] (Kira Muratova, 1971) and Chikamatsu monogatari [The Crucified Lovers] (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954). And to close this week’s selection, a special screening of White Epilepsy (2012) by Philippe Grandrieux.

Although shot as early as 1971, Dolgie Provody [The Long Farewell], Kira Muratova’s second feature film, was withheld by Soviet censors for nearly two decades, only to be finally released into circulation at the time of perestroika in 1987. Calling her film an “exercise in editing” in Cahiers du Cinéma, Muratova’s films are deeply rooted in the work of montage. “If you start editing as early as I do, at a certain moment you know all the material by heart. In bed at night, you continue editing. Like a chess player who has the chessboard constantly in mind, even while sleeping.” The film was the subject of Claudio Pazienza’s State of Cinema in 2019. He praised the intimate language that runs throughout her work, describing it as: “an écriture that minutely analyses an era, the end of a world. An écriture that sees.”

On Sunday, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Chikamatsu monogatari [The Crucified Lovers], one of the films closing the festival at Buda, tells the tale of forbidden love struggling to survive in the face of persecution. Contrary to Muratova, Mizoguchi’s film style was indebted to the art of mise-en-scène. Jacques Rivette: “If music is a universal idiom, then the same goes for mise-en-scène: it is this language that should be learned to understand ‘Mizoguchi’, not Japanese.” Asked the question what he understood mise-en-scène to be, Mizoguchi replied: “It’s man! One must try to express man adequately.”

On the occasion of Philippe Grandrieux’s new staging of Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner at Opera Ballet Vlaanderen this month, Cinema Cartoon’s in Antwerp shows Grandrieux’s White Epilepsy on Sunday. Two of his other films, La vie nouvelle (2002) and Un lac (2009), will also be screened in the next weeks.