Joseph Losey’s The Servant is an indictment of the English class system. Losey, who was blacklisted by Hollywood for his communist sympathies, explores the reversal of power in the relationship between a butler and his wealthy employer. Through manipulation and deceit, the butler gradually gains control over his employer, who eventually becomes a prisoner in his own house. The theme of class struggle is reflected in a mise-en-scène that spatially opposes high and low spaces, with the staircase symbolically connecting the two.

A classic of neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià looks at post-war Italian society through the eyes of Pasquale and Guiseppe, two young shoeshine boys whose friendship and childhood innocence are put to the test as their environment pushes them into criminality. The first film to win an Oscar for best foreign language film, Sciuscià was praised for its truthful depiction of everyday life. Orson Welles is often quoted saying that, as he watched the film, “the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life . . .”

Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution is Godard’s critique of a technocratic world where technology represses individual expression. Somewhere in the future, secret agent Lemmy Caution is sent to the totalitarian city of Alphaville ruled by ALPHA 60, a supercomputer imposing its algorithmic logic and forbidding all forms of emotion, love and art. Combining elements from film noir, German expressionism and cinema vérité, Godard’s juxtaposition of genres and styles creates a dystopian image of a world where “weird has become normal”. In a time when algorithms are increasingly turning us into “slaves of probability”, as Lemmy Caution puts it, Alphaville reminds us of the importance of unpredictability.

An early film noir classic , Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity lets the viewer in on the dark plans of a housewife who seduces an insurance agent into murdering her husband. The downbeat, pessimistic atmosphere of American society in the 1940s is stylistically captured using low-key lighting, harsh contrasts and wide-angle lenses, making it the prototypical film noir that shaped the genre. Barbara Stanwyck’s morally ambiguous character barely made it through censorship. As the archetypical femme fatale, she would inspire many directors, not least Alfred Hitchcock, who complimented Wilder in the following words: “Since Double Indemnity, the two most important words in motion pictures are 'Billy' and 'Wilder'.” Double Indemnity is shown at Cinematek.

Wilder’s far-reaching influence is clearly visible in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, which uses similar stylistic devices to create a dark, cynical mood. However, the most important source of inspiration for this neo-noir thriller was Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blowup, which follows a photographer who discovers a murder by enlarging one of his photographs. Replacing photography with audio recording, De Palma creates a bleak vision of American society, permeated by corruption and violence. Blow Out is shown at Cinema Flagey as part of a cycle of De Palma’s films.

In Twice a Man, American-Greek avant-garde filmmaker Gregory J. Markopoulos transposes the myth of Hippolytus to 1960s New York. Experimenting with the relationship between narrative, editing and mise en scène, the film marks a turning point in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, which, from then on, would increasingly evolve towards an exploration of the essential parameters of the medium of film. Although released as a single-screen film in 1963, Markopoulos organized an alternative, performative screening in 1966, projecting two versions of the film side by side, one running forward and one running backward. Art Cinema OFFoff restages this screening, valuing film projection as an act of creation.

Trás-os-Montes by the Portuguese duo António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro is an unclassifiable piece of ethnographic fiction about a remote region in northern Portugal. Far removed from the capital of Lisbon, time appears to pass differently in the small villages that are connected through myths haunting the mountainous landscape. The way in which Reis endows daily life with meaning through well-chosen cuts and precise framing would inspire many Portuguese filmmakers in his wake, not in the least Glauber Rocha and Pedro Costa. Before the screening at KASKCinema, filmmaker Sakis Brönnimann will give an introduction.

Belgian filmmaker Annik Leroy is Artist in Focus at CINEMATEK all through autumn. Given carte blanche to pair her films with works she admires, this week she has chosen for us Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring’s Fluchtweg nach Marseille (1977). The essay film follows the trail of German emigrants who fled to Marseille during WWII. Its plot is structured around Anna Seghers’ novel Transit, in which the German-Jewish writer fictionalizes her experience of exile in France. Retracing her journey, the film dialogues with the book, bringing it to life as actors recite its passages. Through archival material, interviews and poetic images of contemporary France, the film evokes “flashes of the past in the present”, to use the famous words of Walter Benjamin, also a German exile who attempted to escape through Marseille.

The last pick of the week is a special one. Fallen Leaves is Isabelle Huppert’s film of choice to accompany her State of Cinema, organized by Sabzian and Bozar on the 9th of November in the Henry Le Boeuf theatre. Melancholy and hope are not mutually exclusive in Kaurismäki’s simple yet humorous tale of love and loneliness in modern-day Helsinki. In his signature stylized, almost cartoonish aesthetic, the Finnish director follows lost souls as they stumble through life, treating them with sympathy and tenderness. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Huppert and French critic Jean-Michel Frodon.

To mark the publication of the new Dutch translation of Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima mon amour, De Cinema is showing the Nouvelle Vague classic – directed by Alain Resnais – on the big screen. Duras’s Nouveau Roman style, with its non-linear, narrative and fragmented perspectives, pairs perfectly with Resnais’s visual precision to develop an investigation of history, memory and the mediation of the past through images. Bringing together literature and cinema in an intermedial exchange, Hiroshima mon amour demonstrates their complementarity and shared sensitivity to the concept of time.

After the commercial and critical failure of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Gus Van Sant came back strong with To Die For. It’s a satirical black comedy about a young woman, brilliantly played by Nicole Kidman, who is willing to do anything to advance her career in television. “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV”, is the mantra she lives by as she manipulates her way to the top. Blending the genres of true crime and docudrama with Hollywood conventions, Van Sant created a highly self-aware film about fame and media that still resonates today.

The fifth instalment in his series Comedies and proverbs, Le rayon vert is Eric Rohmer’s take on romantic isolation. When her friend cancels their holiday, Delphine is suddenly left without plans for the summer. Wandering through Paris and taking the occasional trip abroad, she is unable to get rid of the sense of loneliness, despite the numerous encounters with family, friends and strangers. As always with Rohmer, weighty ideas are presented with lightness, and melancholy with hope. From the concreteness of everyday life emerge philosophical reflections that are as fleeting as they are eternal. 

Landscape in the Mist (1988) is the third instalment of Theo Angelopoulos’s “trilogy of silence.” Through the eyes of two young children, a brother and sister in search for their father who may not exist, the Greek director reveals the alienation in modern Greece, still haunted by ghosts from its past. Perhaps Angelopoulos’ most accessible film, it is also his most beautiful. With its modernist aesthetic, it underscores the bleakness of contemporary society through haunting scenes that continue to linger long after they disappear from the screen.

Jaws (1975) marks a turning point in Hollywood film production. By the end of the 1960s, the decline of the classical studio system combined with the rising popularity of television had led to a crisis that forced the industry to reinvent itself. After many failed attempts to draw audiences back to movie theatres, Steven Spielberg’s fast-paced thriller about a great white shark terrorizing a beach resort finally turned the tide. Strategically released during the summer months, the film’s overwhelming commercial success provided the industry with a new formula to reestablish its power: the summer blockbuster. The 35mm projection at De Cinema promises to make the iconic shark scenes jump at the audience as they should.

Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up (1990) hardly needs an introduction here. This very website took its name from the film’s main character, Hossein Sabzian, a conman who impersonates a famous Iranian director to convince a family to star in one of his films. It is a film about how lies, deception and illusion can ultimately lead to the truth. But above all, it is a film about (the love of) cinema.

Few documentary filmmakers are as conscious about their filmmaking as Nicolas Philibert. Rather than applying a preconceived method to his films, he lets the interaction with his subject dictate his approach to filmmaking, adapting it to their needs with great attention and care. For Philibert, each film is a reflection on the ethical and aesthetic conditions of filming people, whether they are school children, deaf people or, as in Sur l’Adamant, the patients and caregivers in a psychiatric center in Paris. The screening at De Cinema in Antwerp will be introduced by Linda De Zitter, clinical psychologist at L’Adamant and closely involved in the making of the documentary.

Like Philibert, Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is wary of any prefigured ideas when embarking on a new project, letting the dynamics on set determine what the film should look like instead. Tale of Cinema is perhaps the perfect introduction to his oeuvre which, considering its sheer size, can seem daunting to get into. With its mise-en-abyme story about two people reenacting a film within the film, Tale of Cinema is a crystal in which all of Hong’s other films are reflected, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi argues. The screening, which is part of an extensive retrospective at Bozar, will be introduced by writer and film curator Dennis Lim.

“A beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside,” is how Agnès Varda described her third feature film, Le bonheur. Told in bright yellow tones, the morally ambiguous story about a perfect marriage that begins to crumble when the husband starts an affair unveils an array of societal norms surrounding family, love and happiness. Borrowing its cliché aesthetic from the glossy, sun-drenched pictures of families in magazines and advertising campaigns, Varda’s societal criticism takes shape through the very forms it criticizes.

Although Ousmane Sembène had already earned international recognition with La Noire de… (1966), it was the satirical comedy Xala (1975) that led to the Senegalese director’s major breakthrough. Often called “the father of African film,” Sembène’s cinema provides a commentary on the tensions that shape Senegal’s post-colonial reality. In Xala, which is based on Sembène’s eponymous novel, he mocks the “new African bourgeoisie”, criticizing their hypocritical and corrupt behaviour.

Besides being Věra Chytilová’s first feature film, Something Different is also the film that ushered in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Through a double-narrative structure, it intercuts two storylines about a housewife and a gymnast. Although their lives never merge, parallels are drawn in how the female protagonists navigate a male-dominated society. While the conventional narrative structure and the cinéma-vérité approach are less radical than the surrealist experiments Chytilová would later develop in Daisies (1966), Something Different (1963) already shows signs of a nascent modernist desire to break with classical cinema. As the Czech filmmakers puts it: “If there’s something you don’t like, don’t keep to the rules – break them.”

As an ode to German filmmaker Wolfgang Kolb, who passed away last year, CINEMATEK shows two of his dance films. In Muurwerk (1987), Kolb engages with a choreography by Roxane Huilman. Rather than simply documenting or archiving it, he filmically translates the dancer’s movements to the screen, including the claustrophobic spatial awareness they convey. In Hoppla! (1989) Kolb adopts a similar approach, using the camera as a tool to interpret rather than record the work of Anne-Teresa de Keersmaeker, almost becoming part of the choreography himself.

As part of the Johan van der Keuken retrospective at CINEMATEK, French filmmaker and writer Thierry Nouel will present his documentary on van der Keuken, with whom he shared a close friendship. The documentary is both an ode to van der Keuken’s cinema and a portrait of the filmmaker himself. Nouel follows him to Paris, the city of his youth, and asks him about his films, offering a glimpse at van der Keuken’s intentions when filming. What happens when the filmmaker is the one being filmed? Van der Keuken becomes “L’arosseur arossé” in a film that integrates some of his stylistic traits. The film is followed by The Unanswered Question, van der Keuken’s filmic answer to the music piece of the same name by Charles Ives.

Those who missed the cycle of screenings of Meeuwen sterven in de haven (1955) organized by Avila last fall have another chance to catch this classic of Belgian cinema at KASKcinema. During a rather uninspiring period in the country’s cinema, Rik Kuypers, Ivo Michiels and Roland Verhavert joined forces to create a film that would mark the beginning of a new era of filmmaking in Belgium. Unlike their contemporaries, the trio was concerned with form and looked abroad for aesthetic inspiration, which earned them Belgium’s first selection at the Cannes film festival. The screening will be introduced by the publishers of the recently published book Belgische Cinema in 24 frames.

With Ma nuit chez Maud, Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Éric Rohmer looks at love through the eyes of a catholic, a Marxist and an atheist. In typical Rohmer fashion, casual encounters lead to general reflections about morality, carefully balancing lightness with heaviness. Yet, rather than merely illustrating philosophical ideas, everyday life in Rohmer’s films embodies abstract questions in its very concreteness.

In The Edge of the World, Michael Powell’s first major film, a remote Scottish island becomes the setting for a tale about the disrupting effect of modernity on local communities. When socio-economic changes make their usual way of life practically impossible, the islanders are torn between leaving their homes in search of a better future on the mainland and staying on their beloved island despite the grim prospects. While the film’s black-and-white documentary style is at odds with the thrilling technicolor aesthetic of Powell’s later films, it also contains a hint of surrealism that foreshadows the imaginative and fantastical approach he would soon develop through his famous collaborations with Emeric Pressburger.

Alfred Hitchcock, a close friend and major influence on Powell, had an ambiguous relationship with Hollywood. Although he worked within the commercial studio system for much of his career, his distinctive style makes him undeniably an auteur. Rope is perhaps the film in which his stubborn side is most apparent. With this huis clos about two friends hosting a dinner party after having committed what they consider the “perfect murder”, the filmmaker breaks the rules of continuity editing by making the story unfold in real time through a series of extremely long takes that are seamlessly edited together. With camera movement as the most important formal device, Rope relies entirely on the narrative power of mise-en-scène, making it one of Hitchcock’s – and by extension Hollywood’s – most experimental films.

Many of Johan van der Keuken’s films have political overtones, but few are as politically committed as Vietnam Opera and De Palestijnen, in which he explicitly takes a stand on two concrete political issues: the Vietnam War and the Palestinian question. Although less self-reflexive than his other films, these visual explorations of international politics are nonetheless shaped by van der Keuken’s characteristic perceptive style.

In the novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf experiments with the written word. Interweaving the interior monologues of six different characters, she writes into being their collective consciousness. That The Waves is essentially a literary experiment did not stop Annette Apon from adapting it to the screen. With her film Golven, she skilfully transfers the novel’s principles to the cinematic form, using the medium-specific properties of film to create a similar experience through different means. Where Woolf uses literature’s temporal dimension, Apon taps into film’s spatial potential to evoke the structure of consciousness. In a particularly beautiful scene, she lets her camera linger over the desks of an empty classroom, inviting the spectator to mentally inhabit the space in a way that recalls Akerman’s Hotel Monterey. Netwerk Aalst shows the film’s original 16mm print.

We stay in the classroom with a screening of early short films by Abbas Kiarostami at RITCS and KASK. Part of Sabzian’s Milestones series, the program contains a selection of educational films made by the Iranian director for Kanoon, the then ‘Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents’ in Tehran. Taking place in or around the school, the films engage with the children’s world which, intentionally or not, becomes a microcosm of Iranian society. Many scenes show signs of Kiarostami’s later style, foreshadowing feature films like Where is the Friend’s House.

Exergue - on documenta 14 by Dimitris Athyridis follows the run-up to the 14th edition of documenta, one of the most important festivals for contemporary art. Behind the scenes hides a horrifying institutional tangle driven by self-interest. The film shows an artworld populated by people who, although they claim to care about the world, are often completely detached from it. The 14-hour film is divided into four screenings at Bozar.

This week, Ghent will be the epicenter for cinema in Belgium, with its annual film festival kicking off on the 9th of October. From the extensive program, we’ve made a selection of films we are particularly looking forward to (re)discover. Among the selected films is Miséricorde by genre-crossing French director Alain Guiraudie, who continues his exploration of repressed desires and the social function of taboo through a murder mystery dipped in black comedy. After the screening, Nina de Vroome, member of Sabzian’s editorial board, will talk with the director about the genesis of the film and the interweaving of his practices as a novelist, screenwriter and director.

Also screened at the festival is the documentary Was hast du gestern geträumt, Parajanov? by Iranian-German filmmaker Faraz Fesharaki. Based on recorded skype conversations between the filmmaker and his family in Iran, the film depicts how intimate family relations are affected by state oppression. At the same time, it is a reflection on the camera’s double function of registration and construction, putting to the test Abbas Kiarostami’s saying that “the camera doesn’t lie.”

But before heading to Ghent, make sure to catch Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees at CINEMATEK in Brussels, the last installment of his Koker trilogy. The film revisits the series’ central motif, the relationship between art and life, through a love story that unfolds on a film set. As in his previous films, Kiarostami uses the dramatic potential of Iran’s rural landscape, letting his characters mark the vast mountain plains by drawing geometrical lines on the screen as they run or drive through them. Shot from a distance, the final scene culminates in an enigmatic ending that relies entirely on the expressivity of the protagonists’ movement through space while running through the olive groves.

Most filmmakers will acknowledge the importance of color in film. However, only a few of them consciously use it as visual tool to express meaning. Rather than a mere stylistic choice, filmmakers like Michael Mann, John Ford and Douglas Sirk consider a film’s color palette to be part of its content.

In Michael Mann’s Heat, everything seems color-coded, to the point where the color of a car will tell the viewer something about the intentions of the person driving it. Eliciting a sense of loneliness and isolation through various shades of blue, Mann’s cool palette is much more expressive than his taciturn characters.

John Ford, one of Mann’s primary influences, also makes intentional use of color. In the Western The Searchers he combines the vibrant and saturated colors of Technicolor printing with the large depth of field of VistaVision to produce vast, scenic landscapes in which the golden-brown desert sand sharply contrasts with the crisp blue sky. While these technologies were primarily introduced by film studios trying to compete with television by making their films more appealing, Ford taps into their narrative potential as well, using the high-contrast colors to make distinctions between characters and scenes.

However, the most prominent colorist is undoubtably Douglas Sirk, whose so-called “technicolor-expressionism” reaches its peak in Written on the Wind. Conveying psychological states and emotions through formal cinematic elements rather than plot or script, Sirk’s use of color is an essential part of the film’s meaning. Associating each character with a specific color, intrigues are revealed to the viewer through color changes and combinations. When asked about the color in Written on the Wind, the director replied that he wanted it “to bring out the inner violence, the energy of the characters which is all inside them and can’t break through.” Female protagonists who are silenced by society are given a voice through the expressive potential of color.

Pickpocket shows Robert Bresson’s stylistic genius at its purest. Less predicated on the religious symbolism that permeates some of his other films, the simple narrative about a modern outcast who is stealing his way through life gives free rein to the filmmaker’s pure style. In Pickpocket, it is the form that makes the content. Meaning does not lie in that which is filmed, but emerges from how the profilmic is framed, cut up, and put back together into a rhythmic whole.

In Murnau’s Nosferatu, it is neither the camerawork nor the editing, but the mise-en-scène that makes the film. Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this 1922 masterpiece of German Expressionism makes creative use of cardboard, contrasted lighting, abundant makeup and exaggerated acting to generate images that look scary even to the contemporary viewer. All these elements are blended together and brought to life in eerie compositions. Considering Murnau’s skilful mastery of cinematic tools, it is hard to imagine that, at the time, the medium was still in its infancy. The screening at Le Cercle du Laveau is accompanied on a theremin.

Called the original romcom by some, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner is both outrageously funny and deeply moving. Although it is perhaps amongst Lubitsch’s less socially critical films, it nevertheless bears the famous “Lubitsch touch”, with its witty humour, rapid pace, indirect dialogue, and sophisticated yet simple plot about two colleagues who, while unable to stand each other in real life, fall in love through anonymous correspondence. The film’s comedic dimension stems from the ambiguity between the perspective of the characters, who ignore the complete scope of their situation, and that of the omniscient spectator who, in cahoots with the filmmaker, witnesses the unfolding of a series of misunderstandings. However, despite misleading them for comedic purposes, Lubitsch treats his fragile and endearing characters with empathy and kindness.

Fans of Chantal Akerman have been spoiled lately with restorations, film screenings, exhibitions and publications. This week, they’re once again in for a treat. On the occasion of the recent Dutch translation of Akerman’s autobiographical book Ma mère rit, Cinema Offoff invites author Niña Weijers, who wrote the introduction to Mijn moeder lacht. The conversation will be followed by two rarely shown films by Akerman: L’Enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée and Dis-moi. Both films revolve around motherhood, a theme that is central to Mijn moeder lacht and implicitly runs through Akerman’s whole oeuvre.

In Toute une nuit, love inhabits Brussels, its dark streets, taxis and hotel rooms. On a hot summer night, it brings some couples closer together, while driving others further apart. Despite its fragmentary narrative, the film flows, tying together separate elements through continuously changing connections without consolidating into a fixed whole. The mosaic-like form becomes an extension of the characters’ attempts and failures to connect with each other as they move through the night. The screening at CINEMATEK will be preceded by Insomnies, a short film by Samy Szlingerbaum, who collaborated with Akerman and plays a role in Toute une nuit.

Screened by Avila in no less than 12 different film theatres all over Belgium, Akerman’s recently restored Golden Eighties uses comedy to explore love. Set in a shopping mall in Brussels, a place where Akerman herself used to work as a saleswoman, the musical’s bright colours, choreographic movements, uplifting soundtrack and slightly ironic tone break with the minimalist style that defined her previous films. At a time when everyone wanted her to make another Jeanne Dielman, Akerman refused to repeat herself. Commenting on the logic of desire in an age of consumption and commodification, the film once again attests to the rebelliousness that has shaped Akerman’s work since the beginning.

Le banquet des frauders is a first in many ways. Besides being documentary filmmaker Henri Storck’s first (and only) venture into fiction, it is the first full-length fiction film made in Belgium after World War II, as well as the first international co-production. Funded by the U.S. Marshall Plan to stimulate Europe’s recovery, the film is a notable example of what one could call “European nation-building”. Serving as an allegory of a unified Europe with open borders, the film is set in a small village where the frontiers of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany meet. Although it began as a documentary project, Storck decided along the way that fiction better suited his vision for a filmic exploration of the relationship between language and identity in the post-war European context.

Lost for over 45 years, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness, about a psychiatric hospital in Japan, is a horrifyingly beautiful masterpiece of early Japanese cinema. By the time the film resurfaced in 1971, its search for pure cinema had been overshadowed by other avant-garde films from the same period such as Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. However, Kinugasa’s experimental film language, which appears to stem directly from the troubled minds of his characters, is just as historically and aesthetically significant as that of his European contemporaries.

Another masterpiece of silent cinema – less experimental, yet even more electrifying – is G.W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora. A prime example of Weimar cinema, the film’s atmosphere, which combines exuberance with a sensitivity for social inequality, effectively captures the transformative period of interwar Germany. Despite Pabst’s innovative style, the film owes much of its brilliance to actor Louise Brooks. Her imperfect and at times awkward acting appears to undermine the director’s omnipotence, propelling the film to unexpected places.

As one of the first Arab films to directly address the Palestinian question, Al-Makhdu'un [The Dupes] (1972) by Syrian director Tewfik Saleh provides a nuanced exploration of the complex cultural and political issues that arose from the 1948 Palestine war. Saleh’s subtle approach allows for ambiguity and doubt, challenging the binary and oversimplified perspective through which the West tends to frame developments in the Middle East. The film’s criticism is directed not so much at the Zionist movement, but rather at the behaviour of the Arab world towards the struggle of the Palestinian people, which led to its censorship in several countries.

The political dimension of Total Recall (1990) is less obvious. Hiding behind a thick layer of Hollywood entertainment, lodged in the corners of the narrative, and stitched together by Schwarzenegger’s one-liners lies a reflection on colonialism and tyrannical governance. Although it is set in a dystopic future in the year 2084, the plot about a colonial regime justifying the killing of oppressed civilians as a way of “[restoring] order with minimal use of force” deeply resonates with the present. Dutch director Paul Verhoeven masterfully bends the conventions of sci-fi, deliberately activating their satirical potential without flooding them with irony.

Verhoeven’s compatriot Johan van der Keuken uses documentary strategies instead of fiction to explore social inequality under western capitalism. Het witte kasteel [The White Castle] (1973), the second instalment of van der Keuken’s North-South trilogy, interweaves images of a community center in Ohio, two factories in the Netherlands and a tourist destination in Spain. What binds these places is their close entanglement with the free market economy, which runs through them like a conveyor belt, as van der Keuken puts it. Repeating the same sequences in slightly different ways and combinations, the carrousel-like editing explores every possible connection between the images. The shifting dialectical relationships gradually reveal new meanings that challenge our discursive understanding of reality.

In Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’hiver, Félicie cannot choose between her two lovers. Not so much because she doesn't know what she wants, but because her feelings for them don’t even come close to her desire for Charles, a lost love she can’t seem to forget. What begins as a seemingly traditional love story gradually develops into a philosophical exploration of what it means to make a decision. How long should we hesitate? Can we ever be certain in a contingent world? Should we regret our mistakes? In his characteristic style, Rohmer discerns weighty existential questions in the lightness of everyday life. But Félicie couldn’t care less about her friend’s intellectual ramblings about Plato and Pascal. In the end, a decision needs to be made, which, when it comes to love, is far from philosophical.

People can change their mind, especially about love. In Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, Ellie is about to get married when she meets Peter, who is the opposite of her wealthy future husband in every way: charming, funny, and not a dime to his name. It takes a while for them to admit that they like each other, but the tension it generates is endearingly funny. The film became famous for its ingenuity in hinting at the erotic to circumvent censorship. As Capra shows, all you have to do to suggest the deepest passion is hang a blanket over a wire and let the viewer’s imagination do the rest.

What if you forget to decide what to do? The guests at a dinner party in Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador keep delaying their decision go home to the point when they are simply unable to leave. Trapped in the room by their own indecisiveness, they let go of their feigned decency, indulging in inordinate behaviour that brings out the worst in each of them. Buñuel’s surrealist portrayal of the ruling class reveals the repulsive hypocrisy of bourgeois morals.

“It’s the one with the fewest flaws,” said Indian director Satyajit Ray over his film Charulata. Based on a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, this delicate tale about a woman's forbidden desire for her husband's cousin opens with what is perhaps one of the most beautiful opening sequences in the history of cinema. Not only do the carefully orchestrated tracking shots and thought-out composition testify to Ray's cinematographic genius, but the scene also ingeniously acts as a microcosm of the film as a whole, foreshadowing aspects of its yet to unfold narrative though implicit hints and suggestions.

Forbidden desire is also at the heart of Valeska Grisebach's Sehnsucht, a slice of life portrait of a volunteer firefighter whose brief affair with a waitress leaves him conflicted. Like many of her colleagues from the 'new berlin school,' Grisebach's fiction films are greatly informed by her background in documentary filmmaking. By using documentary strategies, she shapes reality into fictions, or rather, uncovers the fictions woven into the fabric of reality. A key element in this interplay between artificiality and authenticity is the use of non-professional actors, whose real lives inevitably shine through in their acting, fusing their own story with that of their character.

One of the peculiarities of the history of Belgian cinema – if such a thing even exists – is that it began with a Frenchman. In 1909 Alfred Machin was sent to Belgium by the French production company Pathé to set up the first Belgian production studio, for which he directed several films himself. The selection of short films shown at DeCinema aptly illustrates Machin's position between tradition and modernity. Although the themes and plot are of the most traditional melodramatic kind, the cinematography and editing show his eagerness to explore the possibilities of the new medium.
 

Few filmmakers have had such a radical influence on the history of cinema as Robert Bresson, whose uncompromised style has even given rise to its own adjective.

"Bressonian" to the core, Philippe Dumont's Hadewijch is in many ways indebted to the French master. Not only does the clash of the protagonist's excessive devotion with societal norms evoke Procès de Jeanne d'Arc, Dumont's elliptical editing and rigorous framing also earned him the label of Bresson's stylistic heir. After an excruciating mystical search for the presence of God, the protagonist eventually finds spiritual salvation in the world itself. As in Bresson's films, the immanent becomes an expression of the transcendent.

Marguerite Duras does not shy away from calling Bresson the greatest filmmaker of all time. Her admiration for Bresson's modest yet decisive approach to filmmaking informs many aspects of Nathalie Granger, Duras's subdued exploration of domestic space. Contrary to most of Duras's films, which tend to rely on dialogue, the absence of speech in Nathalie Granger lets the space of the house speak for itself. Duras's universe is drenched in a disquieting silence and the bodies that occupy it suggest an uncanny history without revealing it.

Un lac is the film in which Grandrieux's idiosyncratic style reaches its purest form. On the surface, the shaky camera and blurry images seem far removed from Bresson's ascetic and precise mise-en-scène. However, what binds both Frenchmen is their focus on the body and their obsession with the meaning enclosed in bodily gestures. As Grandrieux himself puts it: "the way that he [Bresson] frames hands, body parts, is an aspect of his work that is unbelievably classical and at the same time powerful." Much like Bresson, Grandrieux believes that cinema can generate its own meaning. Rather than producing "filmed theatre," he combines sounds and images to create a new way of writing that does not depend on that which is represented.

When De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen [The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short] was released in 1965, André Delvaux's debut was instantly written off by Belgian critics. Luckily, it was well received abroad, particularly in France, where respected filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais praised the film for its inventive articulation of time and memory. This short detour abroad eventually convinced Delvaux's compatriots to reconsider their rash opinion. In their defense, it takes some attention for the film's genius to strike the eye. In De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen, Delvaux's magic realist style is at its subtlest. The interaction between image and sound generates an uncanny atmosphere that implies rather than expresses. In the restoration by CINEMATEK, this suggestive exploration of the border between reality and imagination comes to its own.

Jean Renoir's La règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game] also needed some time before it was recognized as a masterpiece. At its original release in 1939, it was widely criticized for being "incomprehensible" and most of all "unpatriotic". It took two decades and thorough re-editing for it to be regarded not only as Renoir's best film, but also one of the best films of all time. After it's rediscovery, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and Alain Resnais praised the film's complex social criticism and recognized its influence in their own work. Renoir's satirical depiction of the European class system testifies to a deep understanding of the artificial conventions and protocols that govern social relations and thereby constitute "the rules of the game".

Written on the Wind (1956) provides a welcome burst of color in this largely black and white selection. By reflecting the emotional malaise of the protagonists, Douglas Sirk's unconventional use of glossy technicolor forms a constitutive element of the film's meaning. Style and content become closely intertwined in what Sirk himself has called "a film about failure". To ensure that the restoration came as close as possible to Sirk's distinctive color palette, Criterion hired the color grader of Todd Haynes, arguably the most Sirkian of all directors.