Agenda

An author tells the background of one of her novels to a young filmmaker. The love story of the novel and the passion between the two artists interwine in a magic realistic style.

“Benvenuta is a film whose photography really struck me.”

Alain Resnais1

“Naar verluidt zou Jean Daskalidès in 1983 voor André Delvaux een van de mooiste huizen van de Coupure Rechts gekozen hebben – Woning Langerock op de hoek van de Iepensteeg – als decor voor diens film Benvenuta. De raamvertelling over een gedoemde passionele liefde is gebaseerd op het boek La confession anonyme. Het werd in 1960 anoniem gepubliceerd, later bleek de Gentse schrijfster Suzanne Lilar de auteur te zijn. Protagoniste in de film is Jeanne, een oudere schrijfster die een boek schreef over de tragische liefde tussen een Gentse pianiste, Benvenuta, en een Italiaanse magistraat, Livio. De filmmaker François wil het boek verfilmen en ondervraagt Jeanne over de autobiografische achtergronden van het verhaal. Fictie en realiteit vermengen zich. Jeannes huis op Coupure Rechts en de Gentse couleur locale spelen een opvallende rol in het verhaal.”

De Coupure in Gent: Scheiding en Verbinding2

“Delvaux creates images which are both violent and restrained for this lofty, double-sided submission to passion, successfully conveying the emotions aroused by this other dimension to love. Whilst Fanny Ardent is the very incarnation of all mental extremes, it is perhaps the muted tale carried by the voice of Françoise Fabian which is the more disturbing. For the actual interweaving of the stories, the constant overlapping of time and place, Delvaux displays a directorial style rich in formal invention.”

Jacqueline Aubenas3

“How to choose between the couples Anouk Aimée and Yves Montand (Un soir, un train), Anna Karina and Bulle Ogier (Rendez-vous à Bray), or Fanny Ardent and Vittorio Gassman (Benvenuta)? Benvenuta was shot in Ghent, which never looked better or more mysterious. Benvenuta speaks to the darker side of love and its images suggest a muted violence, with lots of frames within the frame, wonderful set designs (that red room!) and masterful editing that weaves a story within the story, conflating different times and places. Delvaux himself described Benvenuta as a ‘liturgy of sex’.”

Bart Versteirt4

• 1François Thomas, “Interview with Alain Resnais: on Mélo,” In: Lynn A. Higgins (ed.), Alain Resnais: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 132. Originally published in Positif 307 (September 1986). Translated by T. Jefferson Kline. Delvaux's cinematographer, Charlie Van Damme, would go on to shoot Mélo (1986) for Alain Resnais.
• 2“Jean Daskalides (1922-1992): jazzmuzikant, technisch ingenieur, universiteitsassistent, gynaecoloog, filmregisseur en ook pralinemaker,” De Coupure in Gent: Scheiding en Verbinding (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), 194.”
• 3Jacqueline Aubenas, “Benvenuta,” In Marianne Thys (ed.), Belgian Cinema/Le Cinéma Belge/De Belgische Film (Gent: Ludion, 1999): 684.
• 4Emi Vergels, “Cinea’s Bart Versteirt selects 8 Belgian movies,” The Word Magazine, July 7, 2017.

Roger uses his son Igor to ruthlessly traffic and exploit undocumented immigrants. When one of the immigrants is killed, Igor is guilt-ridden and wants to care for the dead man's family against his father’s orders.

“De broers Dardenne filmen ‘tegen het op de loer liggende esthetisme, de namaak, al die artistieke trucs die ons het zicht op het menselijke ontnemen’. De camera doet niets anders dan het opnemen van de werkelijkheid die ‘daarvoor’ al bestond en ‘daarna’ nog zal bestaan, maar die alleen door de camera onthuld kan worden. Weer in de woorden van de regisseur: ‘We proberen het leven niet te bevriezen in onze opnames, maar te laten gebeuren, te laten ontstijgen.’ De personages bestaan dus buiten de cameralens die hen slechts kortstondig maar intens waarneembaar maakt: ze worden getoond zonder alles van ze te laten zien. In de allerlaatste scène van La promesse, op het station en als de aftiteling al in beeld verschijnt, zijn de geluiden van het station bijvoorbeeld nog steeds te horen en zo weet de kijker dat het leven daar doorgaat, ook buiten het scherm en de lens van de camera blijft bestaan.”

Marie-Aude Baronian1

“J’étouffe dans les images et la musique de ce cinéma qui ne peut imaginer qu’en bloquant les mouvements de respiration de la réalité. Fantasmes mais pas métaphores. Arrêt du transport, constriction, passage bouché. Au secours ! Contre ces images bouchons, ces images/musiques bourrées à craquer mais qui ne craquent jamais, contre ces images pleines et fermées, besoin irrépressible d’images et de sons qui vibrent, crient, frappent des pieds et des mains jusqu'à faire crever la bulle. Un trou. Un cadre.”

Luc Dardenne2

“We zeggen tegen de acteurs: ‘Ga de trap op aan die snelheid, sneller, zachter, draai iets sneller terug, wacht voordat je de deur opent, iets langer, iets minder lang.’ Het probleem van de plans-séquences die we gebruiken, zijn de cuts in de film – er zijn er misschien maar 120. Als we met het ritme willen spelen, dan wordt het ritme binnen het shot belangrijk, niet enkel de cuts. Ook de bewegingen binnen het shot zorgen voor ritme in de film, zonder op voorhand goed te weten hoe precies. Soms schrappen we een dialoog om sneller te gaan. We zoeken en we improviseren verschillende kleine dingen.”

Luc Dardenne3

• 1Marie-Aude Baronian, “‘La caméra à la nuque’. Esthetiek en politiek in de films van de broers Dardenne”, Krisis, 2007. [Vertaald door Dianna de Esch]
• 2Luc Dardenne, Au dos de nos images (Paris: Les éditions du Seuil, 2005).
• 3Luc Dardenne in Gerard-Jan Claes, “Vragen voor Luc Dardenne”, Sabzian, 2018.

Two crooks with a fondness for old Hollywood B-movies convince a languages student to help them commit a robbery.

“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.”

Jean-Luc Godard 

“One of his most famous works is undoubtedly Bande à Part, a crime film that actually is not a crime movie at all. (...) The examples of this classic are known: after ten minutes a voice over resumes the story for those who have arrived too late, there is the classic four minutes dance scene, which was filmed in one shot (and later copied by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction), the scene in which the three protagonists are running through the Louvre museum in one minute (also done by Bertolucci, in The Dreamers) or that famous scene, in which the actors suddenly ask for silence and Godard switches off the soundtrack for one minute.”

Didier Becu1

“The viewer almost expects them to never go through with the robbery; nursing competing crushes on Odile, the men seem to be more comfortable in their imaginations than in the real world. They drive recklessly and aimlessly in a Simca convertible with the top pulled down, noir wannabes in an environment of uninspiring late-winter gray. Thanks to cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s superb black-and-white camerawork, Paris looks cold and empty, as though it were a resort town closed for the season.

Band Of Outsiders contains some of the medium’s most sublime images of the anything-goes possibility of youth, but it also captures the hopelessness and loneliness of being young with nothing to do. Whether they’re planning a crime or performing an impromptu dance routine, the trio is mostly motivated by boredom, and everything carries a tinge of personal darkness; after all, these are men named after writers who died young (Franz Kafka, Arthur Rimbaud), trying to seduce a young woman played by the director’s wife – who attempted suicide during pre-production, and came to the set straight from the hospital – and named after his mother, who had died in an accident a decade earlier. Artistic failure, death, and ruined relationships are heavy themes to smuggle into a deconstructed caper comedy that was supposed to be Godard’s most commercial project since his groundbreaking debut, Breathless.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky2

“It’s as if a French poet took an ordinary banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines; that is to say, Godard gives it his imagination, recreating the gangsters and the moll with his world of associations – seeing them as people in a Paris cafe, mixing them with Rimbaud, Kafka, Alice in Wonderland. Silly? But we know how alien to our lives were those movies that fed our imaginations and have now become part of us. And don’t we – as children and perhaps even later – romanticize cheap movie stereotypes, endowing them with the attributes of those figures in the other arts who touch us imaginatively? Don’t all our experiences in the arts and popular arts that have more intensity than our ordinary lives, tend to merge in another imaginative world? And movies, because they are such an encompassing, eclectic art, are an ideal medium for combining our experiences and fantasies from life, from all the arts, and from our jumbled memories of both. The men who made the stereotypes drew them from their own scrambled experience of history and art – as Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht drew Scarface from the Capone family “as if they were the Borgias set down in Chicago.””

Pauline Kael3

“A love of the cinema desires only cinema, whereas passion is excessive: it wants cinema, but it also wants cinema to become something else, it even longs for the horizon where cinema risks being absorbed by dint of metamorphosis, it opens up its focus onto the unknown. In the early years of cinema, filmmakers believed that the art that they were inventing would be a resounding success, that it would play an incredible social role, that it would save the other arts and would contribute towards civilizing the human race, etc. For Gance and for Eisenstein, nothing had been decided. For Stroheim or the young Buñuel, on the face of it, nothing was impossible. The evolution of cinema had not yet been indexed to the evolution of the Hollywood studio talkies, the war effort, the introduction of quality criteria (which, with hindsight, make studio productions look like the hand-crafted harbingers of industrial TV movies). As soon as that happened, the future of cinema was no longer anybody’s passion (even on a theoretical level). It was only after the war, after the early warning signs of an economic recession, followed by the New Wave kamikaze patch-up job, that the idea of another cinema, one that would open on to something else, was possible again.

Possible, yes, but no longer with the conquering optimism of the early years (“you’ve seen nothing yet, cinema will be the art of the century”). Instead, it is accompanied by a lucidity tinged with nostalgia (“we’ve seen many films, cinema has indeed proved itself to be the art of the century, but the century’s almost over.”) There is an awareness that for a moment a perfect balance was struck (with Hawks, for instance), but that trying to reproduce it would be pointless, that new media are emerging, and that the material nature of the image is mutating. What is ambiguous about Godard, as well as his New Wave friends, is that his cinema straddles this change of direction. In a way, he knows too much.”

Serge Daney4

• 1Didier Becu, “Bande à part”, Peek a boo, March 2015.
• 2Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, ”Jean-Luc Godard's perenially cool Band of Outsiders returns to theaters”, AV Club, May 2016.
• 3Pauline Kael, “Godard Among the Gangsters”, The New Republic, September 1966.
• 4Serge Daney, ”The Godard Paradox”, Revue Belge du Cinéma, 1986, translation from Forever Godard, ed. Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt (Black Dog Publishing, 2004).

On a film set in Spain, cast and crew are waiting for the director to arrive. Boredom makes them engage in abusive power games and sexual intrigues. When the director finally shows up on set, mayhem ensues. Based on the filming of Fassbinder’s 1971 film Whity, Warnung vor einer Heiligen nutte offers a behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunctional dynamics of film production.

« Prenez garde à la sainte putain est le théâtre d’une annulation. L’acteur s’y dévore lui-même, abandonne et laisse derrière soi le corps plein des passions, pour devenir la figure polémique du dénuement qu’une violence innommable à force d’être évidente vous a infligé. L’effigie d’angoisse (honte, vilenie, lâcheté, indifférence, informe bêtise) que joue l’acteur révèle, comme les gestes saccadés des marionnettes les points d’attache aux fils qui les retiennent, ce qui détermine, instant par instant et jusqu’au plus intime, une telle déréliction. Le comédien imaginaire élaboré ici par Fassbinder est pitoyable et burlesque, défait par sa propre apathie ; l’acteur chargé de jouer cette morne silhouette dresse un constat d’accusation terrible et il invente le répertoire par lequel le jeu devient un réquisitoire contre la privation affective, contre la privation de soi. »

Nicole Brenez1

“A film about why living and working together as a group doesn’t function, even with people who want it to and for whom the group is life itself.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder2

"While Wolfgang Limmer claims that Beware of the holy whore is indeed more or less a documentary of what happened in Almeria during the shooting of Whity, the autobiographical and anecdotal interpretation tends to obscure some crucial features: first of all, the fact that with this film Fassbinder was able to analyse very clearly the dynamics of leader and led, and the emotional intimacy between victim and victimizer in any situation involving power, sexuality and creativity.

Equally lucid is the analysis of the mutual dependencies existing between Fassbinder and his team, ever since the days of the action-theatre, an experience here depicted from a great distance, the distance, however, reflecting also moral closeness and emotional empathy. This paradoxical stance allows Fassbinder to make out of the many kinds of 'whoring' necessary to the creative endeavour in a collective art such as theatre or film, a most elegantly interwoven, cogently developed, deceptively spontaneous narrative. In short, stepping back from what he suffered and made others suffer, while stepping towards what he knew best and cared about most, Fassbinder seems to have experienced neither personal catharsis nor moral enlightenement, but a technical breakthrough in respect of his story-telling skills and his control of the mise-en-scene of a large cast of characters, each of whom has a point of view to embody and a position to defend."

Thomas Elsaesser3

• 1Nicole Brenez, De la figure en général et du corps en particulier: L'invention figurative au cinéma (Louvain-La-Neuve: De Boeck Supérieur, 1998), 243-252.
• 2Michael Koresky, "Eclipse Series 39: Early Fassbinder," criterion, August 2013.
• 3Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 274-275.

Nightclub singer La Paloma (Ingrid Caven) succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby rich admirer (Peter Kern) and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband’s love has cured her, but her efforts to love him begin to fade as she discovers true love with her husband’s old school friend.

« Romantique et décadent à souhait ! »

Renato Berta, Schmid’s cinematographer1

« Autant dire que l’intrigue de La Paloma n’a aucune importance. C’est le traitement formel qui en a. Et je n'avais jamais rien vu d'équivalent. »

Renato Berta2

« La Paloma n’est pas un conte ou une parabole, mais une machine à faire rêver. »

Freddy Buache, former director of the Swiss Film Archive3

“La Paloma is about love, understood as an absolute fiction. It is not that love occasionally makes a mistake; rather, it is by its very nature a mistake. What one thinks is a bond with another person is revealed to be a new dance of the lonely self. Love thus becomes a medium of self-expression. The trivial template is deliberately chosen because it is supposed to be a film about a relationship, i.e. something that cannot actually be portrayed in real terms. The title could just as well be La Traviata, Isabelle d'Egypte, Die Unbekannte von Monte Carlo, Lulu or La Habanera. The story is thus only a trigger of pure imagination, i.e. an attempt is made to break up a trivial story with a horror ending and to tell it in its possible complexity. A ‘script’ has been dispensed with, since language is to be used very little and, in view of the structure of the film, can be seen more as a form of speechlessness. Another device is the use of music as a structural element, with a kind of leitmotif attached to each protagonist, each rising above the plot. This is especially true of La Paloma herself, who appears in all the irrelevant panoply of mannerisms of a down-and-out star in the specifically cinematic sense of that word. That is, she does not simply play a role (does not even play it just perfectly). She herself becomes an independent, aesthetic, unnecessary and at the same time unforgettable object.”

Daniel Schmid4

“Daniel Schmid heeft totaal geopteerd voor de door en door artificiële wereld, die hij met meesterlijk brio ensceneert. Geen enkele gevoelsdissonante meer (zoals bij een Werner Schroeter), maar een demonisch uitwerken van het valse, het conventionele, het theatrale, het cliché onder al zijn vormen. De cineast is hier de meesterlijke marionettenspeler, die de hele filmwereld via touwtjes doet bewegen. Er is geen greintje emotie meer, maar een gewilde en constante mise-en-scène van melodramatische gevoelens. Het is, zo men wil en via een omweg: de totale herwaardering van de opera- en melodramaconventies, maar dan niet van iemand die er zelf aan participeert (zoals, weer eens, een Schroeter die in vele gevallen zelf het slachtoffer wordt van zijn mise-en-scène: maar dat maakt zijn films juist zo broos, tenger en touchant); maar er integendeel totaal afzijdig van blijft. De film is juist zo snijdend, omdat Schmid nooit zelf aan zijn constructie participeert – zoals bvb. een Fellini, van wie het zelfmedelijden me irriteert – maar er aanhoudend baas over blijft.”

Eric de Kuyper5

• 1Renato Berta & Jean-Marie Charuau, Photogrammes (Paris: Grasset, 2021), 145. Renato Berta shot all of Daniel Schmid’s films except one early short and some images of his last project.
• 2Renato Berta & Jean-Marie Charuau, Photogrammes (Paris: Grasset, 2021), 148.
• 3Freddy Buache, “Une machine à faire rêver: La Paloma de Daniel Schmid,” Cinéma, 3 (1974), 67.
• 4Press kit of the film for Cannes' Semaine de la Critique 1974. Reproduced online in Das Sommerkino für Daniel Schmid, July 29 - August 6, 2016. Own translation from German to English.
• 5Eric de Kuyper, “La Paloma,” Film & Televisie, January 1975, 46.

Anna, who is in her mid-forties and the owner of a rose farm, lives with her son Albert on a Mediterranean beach in Portugal. Albert is in love with a young Italian - yet he does not love him in a “conventional” way, but in the way he also loves his roses. Finally, he kidnaps the object of his desire. He locks the man up and feeds him his perfectly cultivated roses.

“In my films I want to live out the very few basic human moments of expressivity to the point of musical and gestural excess – those completely authentic feelings: life, love, joy, hatred, jealousy and the fear of death – without psychologising them.”

Werner Schroeter

“What Schroeter does with a face, a cheekbone, the lips, the expression of the eyes…is a multiplying and burgeoning of the body, an exultation.”

Michel Foucault

“Werner Schroeter will one day have a place in the history of film that I would describe in literature as somewhere between Novalis, Lautréamont, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; he was an ‘underground’ director for ten years, and they didn’t want to let him slip out of this role. Werner Schroeter’s grand cinematic scheme of the world was confined, repressed, and at the same time ruthlessly exploited. His films were given the convenient label of ‘underground’, which transforms them in a flash into beautiful but exotic plants that bloomed so unusually and so far away that basically one couldn’t be bothered with them, and therefore wasn’t supposed to bother with them. And that’s precisely as wrong as it is stupid. For Werner Schroeter’s films are not far away; they’re beautiful but not exotic. On the contrary.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder1  

“Der Rosenkönig ist ein schlimmer Traum, in dem das Erwachen dem Entsetzen gleicht, so viel scheinheiliger Schönheit, die vorüberrauscht, im Anblick vertraut zu haben. Statt einer Geschichte gibt es Fragmente, statt einer Erzählung ein Kamera-Poem für drei Körper, drei Stimmen. Einzig die Kinder aus Sintra erinnern daran, dass der Film ein reales Gelände, Landschaften aus Portugal, abbildet. Die Kinder tauchen als Gruppe auf, als Voyeure und Lauscher, die gespannt verfolgen, wie sich auf der Rosenzüchterei die Mutter Anna, ihr Sohn Albert und dessen Gehilfe Arnold in ein tödliches Dreieck verstricken. Die Rose, einst Attribut der Heiligen, scheint in Schroeters Staffellauf von Rosalia von Palermo der Elisabeth von Portugal übergeben. [...] Die ihren Sohn besessen liebende Mutter fragt ihn, der abgöttisch den schönen Gehilfen liebt, welcher sich in wiederkehrenden Bildern, einem Ritornell, nachts nackt in den Fluten des Atlantik treiben lässt, woran der Sohn denke. Die Antwort, deren Wunschbild gerade gezeigt wurde, geht unter in einer Arie, die überblendet wird von Geräuschen außerhalb geformter Kunst. Jede Geste, jeder Blick könnte das Ende der Welt anzeigen.”

Karsten Witte2

“Eine Rose blüht im Zeitraffer auf, die Schauspielerin Magdalena Montezuma schiebt ihren mageren, vom Tod gezeichneten Körper durchs Bild, ihre Füße hinterlassen Spuren im Sand, ihr Blick schweift himmelwärts, von einer zerschnittenen Rose tropft Blut - kein Zweifel, in Werner Schroeters neuem Film Der Rosenkönig kündet alles vom Tod. Schroeter hat mit diesem Werk seiner Schauspielerin Montezuma, die Ende 1985 gestorben ist, ein Denkmal gesetzt. Die ist im Film jedoch nicht nur die Rose, die verblüht, sondern auch Besitzerin einer Rosenfarm in Portugal und Mutter eines Sohnes. Dieser ist von der Idee der vollkommenen Rose besessen und von der Liebe zu einem schönen Kirchendieb, den er am Ende tötet und in seinen aufgeschlitzten Adern Rosen bettet; den Toten trägt er in den Garten, während die Farm niederbrennt. Schroeters Film, der in den nächsten Wochen in einigen Programmkinos läuft, raunt wieder mal von Kitsch, Poesie Traurigkeit und einer Wehmut, die einen fast zerreißt. Mit diesem Rosenkönig, der auch vom Tod einer bestimmten Ästhetik im deutschen Film kündet, hat sich Werner Schroeter selbst übersteigert. Das ist auch ein Triumph, um so mehr, als ihm das Treibhaus öffentlicher Filmförderung verschlossen war.”

Der Spiegel3

• 1Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Chin-up, Handstand, Salto Mortale–Firm Footing: On the Film Director Werner Schroeter, Who Achieved What Few Achieve, with Kingdom of Naples,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, eds. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing. (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 101. Fassbinder’s article was first published in Frankfurter Rundschau, 24 February, 1979.
• 2Karsten Witte, “So viele Lieder,” Die Zeit, 23 January 1987, 51.
• 3“Schroeters Rosenkönig,” Der Spiegel, 25 January 1987.

After being humiliated at school for having her first period, Carrie discovers she has telekinetic powers. When the bullying gets out of hand at senior prom, she uses her newly discovered gift against her classmates and teachers, setting in motion a disastrous chain of events.

“Brian De Palma’s Carrie was terrific. He handled the material deftly and artistically and got a fine performance out of Sissy Spacek. In many ways, the film is far more stylish than my book, which I still think is a gripping read but is impeded by a certain heaviness, a Sturm und Drang quality that’s absent from the film.”

Stephen King1

“The key was that Sue is us. She’s the surrogate for the audience. She, like us, could be standing there tormenting Carrie, only to realize what she’s done and have a moment of conscience that forever changes her life and everybody else’s.”

Lawrence D. Cohen2

Mike Childs and Alan Jones: Unlike the novel, Carrie’s telekinesis was basically played down in the film. Why?

Brian De Palma: I felt the telekinesis was basically a device to trick, and I wanted to use it as an extension of her emotions – her feelings that were completely translated into actions, that only erupted when she got terribly excited, terribly anxious and terribly sad. […] I never wanted to use it arbitrarily, floating stuff around. In a movie that’s kind of boring.

Brian De Palma in conversation with Mike Childs and Alan Jones3

• 1Eric Norden, “Interview with Stephen King,” Playboy Magazine, June 1983.
• 2Douglas Keesey, Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2015), 98.
• 3Mike Childs and Alan Jones, "De Palma Has the Power!," Brian De Palma: Interviews, ed. Laurence F. Knapp. (Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 2003), 41.

“Come on, you apes! You wanta live forever?”

Unknown platoon sergeant, 19181

“[…] Starship Troopers was more me reflecting on American politics – to a certain degree, domestic American politics. There’s a lot of parallels with what happened after September 11, of course – not just in the obvious ways of shooting rockets in tunnels, at the Taliban, or the ‘Arachnids’ in the movie – but also in the function of propaganda and spinning. 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.”

Paul Verhoeven2

”It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste, that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe.”

David Roth3

”In Starship Troopers, the Western and science fiction genres find a new generic partner: melodrama or, more specifically, nighttime TV soap melodrama in the tradition of Beverly Hills 90210 (1990-2000) and Melrose Place (1992-1999). The love interests of the main characters develop in pure soap-style, not only in the cliché, card-board cut-out acting styles but also the plot. […] They embody the ideal, depthless human, the Los Angeles plastic surgery aesthetic, that has been popularized by soaps and shows like Baywatch. Perfect bodies, flawless faces, perfect big white teeth and big fake smiles (so wonderfully mastered by Richards).

[…] In prediciting future outcomes, Verhoeven also retraces the myth of America’s frontier past. We are presented with Western allusions that include John Wayne-style dialogue (‘saddle up!’ and ‘come on you apes. Do you wanna live forever?’); the desert backdrop of Klendathu (that recalls the iconic wilderness expanses of Western landscapes such as Momument valley); and dances and music, complete with toe-tapping fiddle music that plays to tune of ‘I wish I were in Dixie’, harking back to movies such as John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).”

Angela Ndalianis4

• 1Beginning of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers
• 2Margaret Barton-Fumo, Paul Verhoeven: Interviews (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2016).
• 3David Roth, How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat, The New Yorker, July 6 2020.
• 4Angela Ndalianis, Science Fiction Experiences (New Academia Publishing, LLC, 2011).[/fn 
   

Love story between a young docker and a factory girl against the background of the 50-day great dockers’ strike of 1950, when the employees of the port of Marseille stopped work to protest against the war in Indochina.

« Je ne me considère pas comme un « cinéaste », à l’image de mes amis professionnels de Paris, je me considère simplement comme un fils de docker qui a la chance de savoir se servir d’une caméra. »

Paul Carpita1

“We recorded the daily life of the people in the disinherited quarters of the city, and of the angry dockers at the port [...] I wanted to create a film of fiction which was fed by the burning reality that we were living. To do this, I was obliged to shake up the norms of narrative.”

Paul Carpita2

« Pour Carpita, l’interdiction a été réussie parce qu’elle portait finalement sur le style du film (Un cinéma sauvage, rapide, furtif, improvisé, immaitrisé, mais dont la liberté de ton, de jeu, d’écriture, ne cesse de se porter, en amont, vers RENOIR, et, en aval, vers la future « Nouvelle Vague »). Défaire les censures [...] ne serait jouable qu’en allant chercher ce que toute bataille contre les censures officielles laisse dans l’ombre : les formes empêchées, les manières de cinéma écrasées ou dominées par les normes d’une économie, d’une période ou d’une caste. »

Jean-Louis Comolli3

• 1Paul Carpita, as cited by Michel Henry in « Il faut éteindre ce soleil qui cache tout. Paul Carpita à Marseille » Libération, 2003.
• 2Paul Carpita, as cited by Ronald Bergman in “Paul Carpita obituary”, The Guardian, 2009.
• 3Jean-Louis Comolli, Libération, 1989.

One of the ineffably lovely domestic sagas made by Yasujiro Ozu at the height of his mastery, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is a sublimely piercing portrait of a marriage coming quietly undone. Secrets and deceptions strain the already tenuous relationship between a childless, middle-aged couple as her city-bred sophistication bumps up against his small-town simplicity, and a generational sea change – in the form of their headstrong, thoroughly modern niece – sweeps into their household. The director’s abiding concern with the intricacies of family dynamics receives one of its most spirited treatments, enlivened by a wry, tender humor and buoyant expansiveness that moves the action from the home into the baseball stadiums, pachinko parlors, and ramen shops of postwar Tokyo.

“Oudere Japanners zeggen dat Ozu de meest Japanse van alle regisseurs is, onbegrijpelijk voor het Westen. Voor veel jonge mensen is hij te traditionalistisch, denkt en werkt hij te ahistorisch. Ozu is een zencineast die in de positie van toeschouwer en afwachtende de wereld niet wil veranderen, maar zich vlak en onverschillig maakt als een waterspiegel en gereed is voor de indrukken van de wereld. De camera is bij het draaien steeds een fractie van zijn blik verwijderd: de ruimte geeft een versplinterde indruk.”

“Older Japanese people say that Ozu is the most Japanese of all directors, incomprehensible to the West. For many young people, he is too traditionalist, thinking and working too ahistorically. Ozu is a Zen filmmaker who, in the position of the one who looks and waits, does not want to change the world, but makes himself flat and indifferent like a surface of water, ready for the impressions of the world. When filming, the camera is always a fraction off from his gaze: the space gives a fragmented impression.”

Frieda Grafe1

“‘When life is empty,’ Watts writes, ‘with respect to the past, and aimless with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled with the present.’ In Zen art the sense of the ‘infinitely expanded present’ is nowhere stronger than in the art of tea (cha-no-yu). The tea ceremony celebrates the present tense through a meticulously predetermined ritual. In the sixteenth century as many as one hundred rules for cha-no-yu were laid down, determining everything from the subjects to be discussed during tea to the depth of the lacquer on the tea caddy. Rather than occupy the mind, these minute rules free it, enabling it to think of nothing, to be timeless, or in the words of a famous Zenrin poem, to be ‘sitting quietly, doing nothing.’ Similarly, Ozu’s films portray the ‘aimless, self-sufficient eternal now’ (ekaksana). ‘His characters... are living in the now,’ Richie writes, ‘and they have no history... When a person dies in Ozu’s world (which is often) he is merely and instantly gone. There are no ghosts in Ozu as there are in Resnais and Bergman. The past barely exists for Ozu.’”

Paul Schrader2

• 1Frieda Grafe, “How to Orient Yourself in Ozu Films,” Sabzian, 2 February 2022. Originally published as ‘Wie sich in Ozu-Filmen orientieren’ in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1973.
• 2Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 59.

A film star, helps a young singer and actress find fame, even as age and alcoholism send his own career on a downward spiral.

“I destroy everything I touch.”

Esther Blodgett

“Those who have blissful recollections of David O. Selznick’s A Star Is Born as probably the most affecting movie ever made about Hollywood may get themselves set for a new experience that should put the former one in the shade when they see Warner Brothers' and George Cukor's remake of the seventeen-year-old film. And those who were no more than toddlers when that classic was starting floods of tears may warm themselves up for one of the grandest heartbreak dramas that has drenched the screen in years.”

Bosley Crowther1

“Judy Garland and James Mason are the leads (although she looks tired and worn, and he gives such a remarkable performance as the washed-up, decaying star that he brings a bloom to the movie). This updated version is a terrible, fascinating orgy of self-pity and cynicism and mythmaking. Garland's jagged, tremulous performance is nakedly intense; her musical numbers include the capering ‘Born in a Trunk’ and the dark, heavy torch song ‘The Man That Got Away.’”

Pauline Kael2

“George Cukor’s direction, briskly paced, combines heartbreaking tragedy, out-of-this-world musical entertainment and rib-splitting comedy into a coordinated whole that can only be compared for sheer cinematic know-how with Gone With the Wind. This is a picture that’s worth seeing over and over again. It should be good for endless revivals.”

Jack Moffitt3

Esther: What is it? What is it that makes him want to destroy himself? You’ve known him longer than anyone else. Tell me what it is. Please. I don’t care, just tell me.

Oliver: Don’t you think I’ve tried through the years to know why?  To help him? I don’t know, Esther. I don’t know what the answer is.

Esther: Well, I’ve got to find the answer. You don’t know what it’s like to watch somebody you love... just crumble away, bit by bit...and day by day in front of your eyes. And stand there helpless. Love isn’t enough. I thought it was. I thought I was the answer for Norman. But love isn’t enough for him. And I’m afraid of what’s beginning to happen...within me. Because sometimes I hate him. I hate his promises to stop...and then the watching and waiting to see it begin again. I hate to go home to him at night. And listen to his lies. Well, my heart goes out to him because he tries. He does try. But I...hate him for failing. I hate me too. I hate me...because I’ve failed too.

“It is in this scene that we reconcile Garland as both Esther and Norman, where we see the lines blur between truth and fiction. Garland had ascended to the stars long ago, and, at this point in her career, had very recently crashed and burned, rejected from the very studio that both created her and enabled her darkest tendencies. Garland may be playing Esther here, but she is also the bearer of Norman’s experience – this scene is both uncomfortable and resonant because of the truth that lies behind the words she speaks.”

The Statuesque4  

• 1Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: ‘A Star is Born’ Bows; Judy Garland, James Mason in Top Roles”, The New York Times, October 1954.
• 2Pauline Kael, “A Star is Born: Review”, The New Yorker, 1954.
• 3Jack Moffitt, “‘A Star is Born”, The Hollywood Reporter, September 1954.
• 4The Statuesque, “Judy Garland in A Star is Born”, www.thestatuesque.net, May 2020.

Leaving Europe to look for Akiko, Jean-Noël discovers her city, the exotic Tokyo. A documentary on everyday life in Tokyo, its Kabuki theater, its nostalgic Takenokozoku dances, its thousands of suit-and-tie executives, its geishas, its Western style marriages, its tranquil green areas, its pulsating nightlife... Yet, the commentary, which deliberately often strays away from the images, throws into question the objectivity of the documentary film. Here, what we see is inseparable from the experience of its young maker as he cast a loving eye on a people and its culture.

“Satori Stress could be taken for a straightforward documentary on everyday life in Tokyo but for the commentary which, purposely counterpointing the images, immediately contradicts this impression. We are caught out by the apparent simplicity of the film but the words betray a latent subjectivity and establish a fictive discourse.

The presence in the film of the cameraman and the woman sound recordist could be seen as blatantly narcissistic if the presence of the woman, seen by the man with the camera, did not reflect upon the nature of the documentary.

Infatuated, the authors cast a loving eye on a whole people and a dying culture. The mask of deceptive superficiality is cast aside to reveal a living mystery - an almost human truth. That which is seen becomes inseparable from that which is lived; objectivity is put in question. But is the lived experience an absolute criterion? ‘Every statement implies its own opposite’ according to the Buddhist saying. And doesn't love also signify derision?”

Benoit Boelens1

A Few Words of Introduction by the Director

Three strange events, which happened to me at different times in my life, come to mind. Two are connected with death, the third with love.

In the first, I am trapped on a high mountain, clinging to a rock, with night falling, unable to move forwards or backwards - at the slightest movement I make stones fall into the precipice right underneath me. In the second, I have a serious crash on a motorbike, just I am leaving an old place of pilgrimage where witches’ sabbaths used to be held. I can still remember the colour of the grass, which was a brilliant green. The mountainous, deserted place was lost in the mist of a tropical island.

In the last, I am in the Grand Place in Brussels where I meet Akiko. Akiko, a Japanese girl, is passing through Brussels to renew her visa. A few months later I decide, on the spur of the moment, to look for her in Paris. Five minutes after my arrival I find her.

At the end of the year Akiko returns to Tokyo and I decide to join her there. A month and a half later, I land in Tokyo for the first time in my life, with my Aaton and a hundred kilos of luggage... Since my return to Europe I have lost trace of her again. All I have left of her is this last postcard of an autumn landscape with a lake and a mountain in the background, dated the 17th September. Akiko writes that she is ill; that it's nothing serious and that I mustn't worry. She also says that she is not allowed to leave the hospital ...She wishes me strength and asks me “not to lose my head”.

From my first strange encounter I am left with the memory of fear, from the second with a broken collar-bone and from the third a film - called Satori Stress.

Brussels, December 18, 1983

Jean-Noël Gobron2

“The starting point for this feature, shot entirely in Tokyo, was the encounter between its director, Jean-Noél Gobron, and a young Japanese woman Akiko Inamura, working for Japanese television in Brussels. This experience then directly inspired Gobron to sketch out a film which would tel the day-by-day story of an affair between an itinerant filmmaker and a television presenter in Tokyo. His approach to this filmic journal was to be fluid and hands-on, working like a painter, in small strokes: hence his refusal to write a fixed screenplay, allowing himself to construct the film ‘over the course of time’. Jean-Noél Gobron decided that shooting would proceed entirely along the lines of improvisation with a stripped-down crew, and then in post-production the footage was reworked and edited in collaboration with the writer Benoit Boelens. The film mixes two levels of writing – documentary and fiction - in a very personal manner. To the first register belongs the discovery of the different faces of a strange foreign country: brushes with traditional Japan in the shape of its theatre, temples, beliefs and philosophies; street-scenes of contemporary Japan, with hand-held camera... In the second register there unfolds the ephemeral story of a love affair, quietly, like a confidence whispered.”

Serge Meurant3

“Deze film wordt omschreven als een docudrama. Halfweg de film verklaart de auteur toch liever geen klassieke documentaire te draaien. Hij twijfelt over de opnames die hij maakt. Die opmerking typeert de hele film. De meeste beelden geven zonder commentaar de indruk van een klassieke, zij het mooie documentaire over Tokyo te zijn. De tekst verloopt echter in contrapunt, geeft cynisch commentaar bij de beelden, beschrijft de teloorgang van een cultuur terwijl de beelden en de geluiden er de resten van tonen: theater, dans, klederdracht. Bij het prachtige gewoel in de metro van Tokyo leest Gobron ademhalingstechnieken voor, die tot het perfecte evenwicht, de rust moeten leiden. Het is de remedie tegen Satoristress. Wat deze film echter vooral tot een docudrama maakt is de intieme commentaar die Gobron over (het verlangen naar) zijn Japanse vriendin uit. De liefde voor Akiko is evengoed het thema van de film als hun liefde voor Tokyo en de Japanse tradities. Gobron toont ons een eigenaardige mengeling van morele normen: niets is zo gewoon als naakt in Japan, maar onder westerse invloed is seks commercieel en taboe geworden, zodat Gobron niet bij zijn lief mag slapen onder het Japans ouderlijk dak: eerst trouwen. Akiko voelt de kloof tussen hen beiden beter aan dan hij zelf, hij is een vreemde. De film eindigt waar Gobron Japan verlaat, Akiko achterlatend. Wat hij echter naar Europa meebracht is een overtuigende, trotse liefdesverklaring aan een vrouw en een land, die bovendien getuigt van een ongewone, intelligente kijk op een tanende cultuur.”

Johan De Vos4

• 1Benoit Boelens, “Press Kit Satori Stress,”.
• 2Jean-Noël Gobron, “Press Kit Satori Stress,”.
• 3Serge Meurant in Le cinema Belge. De Belgische film. Belgian Cinema, research and coordination by Marianne Thys (Brussels: Ludion & The Royal Belgian Film Archive, 1999)/
• 4Johan De Vos, “Satori Stress”, Andere Sinema, april 1984.