Issues

In de filmgeschiedenis zijn weinig figuren te vinden die een grotere stempel hebben gedrukt dan André Bazin (1918–1958), voor velen dé filmcriticus van de twintigste eeuw. Tussen 1942 en zijn vroege dood in 1958 schreef Bazin een indrukwekkend oeuvre van bijna drieduizend teksten bij elkaar, wat uitkomt op gemiddeld zowat één tekst om de twee dagen. Minder bekend zijn de honderden artikelen die hij schreef als televisiecriticus. Aanvankelijk deed hij dat om gezondheidsredenen: begin jaren vijftig dwong zijn fragiele toestand hem zijn dagelijkse activiteiten te staken, Parijs te verlaten en rust te zoeken in het kleine Bry-sur-Marne. Maar er was ook een inhoudelijke reden: voor Bazin maakte televisie volwaardig deel uit van de beeldcultuur in ontwikkeling, een evolutie die hij van nabij wilde volgen en becommentariëren.

Peu de figures dans l’histoire du cinéma ont laissé une empreinte aussi marquante qu’André Bazin (1918–1958), considéré par beaucoup comme le critique de cinéma du XXe siècle. Entre 1942 et sa mort prématurée en 1958, Bazin a rédigé une œuvre impressionnante de près de trois mille textes, soit en moyenne environ un texte tous les deux jours. Moins connus sont les centaines d’articles qu’il rédigea en tant que critique de télévision. Il s’y consacra d’abord pour des raisons de santé : au début des années 1950, sa condition fragile l’obligea à cesser ses activités quotidiennes, à quitter Paris et à se reposer dans la petite ville de Bry-sur-Marne. Mais il y avait aussi une raison de fond : pour Bazin, la télévision faisait pleinement partie de la culture visuelle en développement – une évolution qu’il voulait suivre de près et commenter.

Serge Daney (1944–1992) reste l’un des critiques de cinéma les plus influents du XXe siècle. Comme un pays qui « manquait encore » sur sa carte, le cinéma symbolisait une promesse d’universalité profondément ressentie par Daney. Il rêvait que le cinéma puisse créer un espace imaginaire commun, une citoyenneté mondiale des spectateurs, où les images nous relient sans exiger que nous nous ressemblions, nous permettant de nous situer en rapport avec le monde. Ce numéro, réunissant des contributions de critiques, d’universitaires et de traducteurs venus du monde entier, vise à réfléchir à la résonance toujours vive de ses écrits et de ses idées, nous rappelant la promesse de ce pays manquant qu’est le cinéma : un lieu imaginaire, mais néanmoins habité par « de vrais habitants qui parlent la même langue »

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) était un cinéaste et photographe néerlandais. À l'âge de dix-sept ans, il se fait connaître avec Wij zijn 17 (1955), un livre de photographies présentant des portraits de ses pairs. Un an plus tard, il rejoint l'école de cinéma IDHEC à Paris, où il découvre sa passion grandissante pour le cinéma. En tant que cinéaste, il se fait un nom avec des documentaires expérimentaux comme Blind kind (1964) et la trilogie Nord-Sud (Dagboek, Het witte kasteel et De nieuwe ijstijd, 1972-1974), dans laquelle il dépeint l'augmentation des inégalités mondiales. Il a réalisé plus de cinquante films.

Van der Keuken était également un écrivain doué sur le cinéma, une activité par laquelle il cherchait à définir sa pratique de cinéaste. « Pour moi, écrire était devenu parfois nécessaire, quelque chose vivait en moi, dansait devant mes yeux que je voulais saisir avec des formules hermétiques ou des bredouillements intuitifs, des épanchements spéculatifs ou des prescriptions sévères à l’adresse du monde. » Cette collection de textes de Johan van der Keuken constitue une première étape pour le redécouvrir non seulement comme cinéaste mais aussi comme l'un des écrivains les plus originaux sur le cinéma.

Johan van der Keuken (1938-2001) was a Dutch filmmaker and photographer. At the age of seventeen, he already made a name for himself with Wij zijn 17 (1955), a photo book of portraits of peers. A year later, he entered the Paris film school IDHEC, where he discovered a growing passion for filmmaking. As a filmmaker, he broke through with experimental documentaries such as Blind kind (1964) and the North-South trilogy (Dagboek, Het witte kasteel, en De nieuwe ijstijd, 1972-1974) in which he depicted increasing global inequality. He made more than fifty films.

Van der Keuken was also a gifted writer on cinema, an activity through which he sought to delineate his practice as a filmmaker. “For myself, writing was necessary at times, because something lived inside of me, floated before my eyes, that I wanted to grasp. With hermetic formulas or intuitive stammering, speculative ebullitions or harsh prescriptions for the world.” This collection of texts by Johan van der Keuken offers a chance to (re)discover him not only as a filmmaker but also as one of the most original writers on cinema.

On the occasion of the State of Cinema 2021, held by Nicole Brenez on 23 December 2021, Sabzian presents a small Dossier on the French film historian, scholar and curator, compiled in dialogue with Brenez herself. This compilation comprises texts on Theodor W. Adorno’s view on cinema, Harun Farocki, Marylène Negro, The House Is Black by Forough Farrokhzad, on the filmic correspondence between Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guérin, a keynote speech on the state of political cinema today, and an exclusive English translation of Brenez’s piece on René Vautier.

Selma Baccar was born in Tunis in 1945. At the age of 21, she began to create films with other women at the Hammam-Lif amateur film club. Her first short film, made in 1966, was a black-and-white film called The Awakening that tackled women’s emancipation in Tunisia. She moved to Paris to study film at the Institut de Formation Cinématographique (IFC), after which she worked as assistant director for Tunisian television. In 1975, Baccar directed her first feature film titled Fatma 75, which is considered to be the first feature film directed by a woman in Tunisia. In this “analytical film”, as Baccar has defined it, three generations of women and three forms of awareness are related — the period between 1930 and 1938 and the creation of the Union of Tunisian Women; the period between 1939 and 1952, which marks the relationship between the national struggle for independence and the women’s struggle; and finally, the period after 1956 to the present, concerning the achievements of Tunisian women with regards to the Code of Personal Status. Baccar’s activism for Tunisian women’s rights led her to an active political career.

Born in 1945 in Beirut, Heiny Srour studied Sociology in Beirut and went on to study Social Anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969, while pursuing a PhD on the status of Lebanese and Arab women and working as a journalist for AfricAsia magazine, she discovered the struggle of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf. Determined to make a film about this feminist movement, she spent two years doing intensive research and finding the necessary funds before setting out to Dhofar. The Hour of Liberation was completed in 1974 and selected at Cannes Film Festival, making Srour the first woman from the Third World to be selected at the prestigious international festival. In her next film, Leila and the Wolves (1984), she unveiled the hidden histories of women in struggle, in particular in Palestine and Lebanon, by weaving an aesthetically and politically ambitious tableau of history, folklore, myth and archival footage. Since initiating a feminist study group in Lebanon in the early 1960s, Srour has been vocal about the position of women, in particular in Arab societies, to this day.

Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was born and raised in Beirut. After completing her studies in economic sciences at the Sorbonne in Paris, Saab was invited by poet and artist Etel Adnan to work as a journalist. War came to Saab’s native Lebanon in 1975, and that same year saw the beginning of Saab’s filmmaking career with Lebanon in a Whirlwind, an account of the various forces and interests behind the incipient conflict. The war would last another 15 years, and Saab’s chronicling of its horrors — particularly in her remarkable “Beirut Trilogy” — is unequalled in both its ethical integrity and emotional impact. In 1985 she directed her first fictional work, A Suspended Life (1985), set in the same war-torn Beirut she had documented ten years prior. After the war reconfigured the whole country, in Once Upon a Time in Beirut (1994), Saab tried to rescue the cinematographic memory of the Lebanese capital in the same year that cinema turned 100 years old. Until her death in January 2019, Jocelyne Saab remained devoted to what she called her “two permanent obsessions: liberty and memory”.

Although there has been a notable rise of Arab female film directors in recent decades, the work of many pioneers tends to remain painfully neglected. The Out of the Shadows film programme, originally conceived for the Courtisane festival 2020 in Ghent, was intended to address this obscurity and revitalize the work of a diversity of filmmakers whose films remain overlooked and barely screened. Five of these filmmakers are presented in this Dossier: Atteyat Al-Abnoudy, Selma Baccar, Assia Djebar, Jocelyne Saab and Heiny Srour. In the words of Assia Djebar: “All of us, all of us who come from the world of women in the shadows, are reversing the process: at last it is we who are looking, we who are making a beginning. ”

Assia Djebar (1936-2015) was the first Algerian woman to attend the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles outside Paris. Between the ages of twenty and thirty, she wrote four novels. But in the mid-1960s, she decided to abandon writing in French, the language of Algeria’s colonizer. Cinema offered her new ways to approach language as well as the world of the women in her home region. To film The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua in 1975-77, Djebar went back to the mountain of Chenoua in order to listen and give voice to the oral histories as transmitted by otherwise silenced women. In 1980, she resumed her career as a writer with Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, a collection of stories expressing Algeria’s collective memory through polyphonic narratives by female voices. For her final film, The Zerda or the Songs of Oblivion (1978-1982), she spent two years sifting through archival footage shot by French colonizers in the first half of the twentieth century, weaving it into an alternative vision of the history of the Maghreb. As Djebar grew to be one of the most important figures in North African literature, she continued to raise the issue of women’s language and the circulation of women’s voices, all the while developing what she has termed her “own kind of feminism.”

Farrebique ou les quatre saisons (1946), the first full-length film by Georges Rouquier, depicts the everyday life of a family of French farmers in the postwar period following the rhythm of the different seasons, evading the classic division between fiction and documentary, allowing the reality of details to thrive with a great sense of poetry. The controversy around the film brought into sharp focus the limitations and paradoxes of some of the denominators that have been used ad nauseam to divide and evaluate the cinematic landscape: documentary and fiction, authenticity and duplicity, asceticism and artfulness. This Dossier, comprising a long interview with Rouquier, a reflection on the polemic at the time, and texts by André Bazin, Jean Painlevé, Georges Sadoul and James Agee, presents a portrait of the “case of Farrebique”.

Al-mummia [The Mummy] (1969) is the only full-length film by the Egyptian screenwriter, costume and set designer, and filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam (1930-1986), which is also known by its alternative English title The Night of Counting the Years. Finding inspiration in a historical event that took place in 1881, on the eve of British colonial rule, when it was brought to light that a tribe had been secretly raiding the tombs of the Pharaohs in Thebes, the filmmaker rigorously crafted a haunting meditation on identity, loss and legacy. This small dossier brings together a selection of conversations with and writings on Abdel Salam, as well as the complete screenplay of Al-mummia and some of the drawings that he sketched in preparation for the film.

This Issue aims to trace the development of Hong Sang-soo’s remarkable body of work through a collection of essays and interviews that were written and published between 2003 and 2018. Assembled here for the first time, they give an enlightening insight into his cinematic universe, which keeps expanding as a variety of variations on an aphorism that he himself has sketched out in one of his drawings: infinite worlds are possible.

In samenwerking met Goethe Institut Brussel publiceert Sabzian voor het eerst een tiental Nederlandse vertalingen van de Duitse filmcritica Frieda Grafe, de “Königin der deutschen Filmpublizistik”. Grafe noemde haar kritieken treffend “beschreven films” omdat ze zich concentreerde op het voor de lezer inzichtelijk en levendig maken van haar manier van kijken naar films. Haar stukken trachtten de wereld van een film voor de lezer open te vouwen, (schijnbaar) doorzichtig te maken. “Ik probeer de algemene kleur van een film voor de lezer te reconstrueren uit mijn indrukken en inzichten om hem of haar zelf tot conclusies of veronderstellingen te brengen.”

Boris Lehman is al meer dan vijftig jaar een uitzonderlijk figuur in de Belgische filmcultuur. In zijn autobiografische oeuvre brengt hij zijn eigen leven en dat van de inwoners van zijn stad Brussel in kaart. Lehman onderneemt in zijn films pogingen om zijn eigen cinema te definiëren, een queeste die leidde tot een oeuvre van zo’n vijfhonderd films. Hetzelfde doet hij in teksten waarin hij zich bijzonder helder uitspreekt over zijn eigen werk en die tevens gelezen kunnen worden als een ode aan cinema. Dit dossier bundelt enkele van deze teksten: een aantal conversaties met Boris Lehman en stukken waarin hij reflecteert op het werk van anderen.

Boris Lehman est depuis plus de cinquante ans une figure exceptionnelle dans le paysage cinématographique belge. Son œuvre autobiographique rend compte de sa propre vie ainsi que celle des habitants de la ville de Bruxelles. Dans ses films, le réalisateur tente de définir cinéma – quête qui l’a conduit à construire une œuvre d'environ cinq cents films et à rédiger de nombreux textes où il s’exprime sur son propre travail et qui peuvent également être lus comme une ode au cinéma. Ce dossier réunit certains de ces écrits, quelques conversations avec lui ainsi que des réflexions sur le travail d’autres réalisateurs.

At the turn of this century, the Chinese documentary maker Wang Bing entered film history when he boarded a freight train with a small rented DV camera and started filming the industrial district of Tiexi in northeastern China. This Issue aims to trace Wang Bing’s trajectory by way of a series of writings and interviews, published between 2009 and 2018, accompanying the ongoing ventures of a filmmaker who has taken on the invaluable task of weaving a map of this other China, to film the trials and tribulations of a land in flux.