In Equinox Flower (1958) by Yasujiro Ozu, the composition of a familial home is turned upside down when a father decides to arrange his daughter’s marriage. In Ozu’s films, the Japanese home with its sliding doors becomes the narrative space that can be delicately stirred by opening a vantage point or turning the gaze away, for instance, to the window.

In Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the walls are solid and the windows show no sky. Jeanne Dielman fervently occupies herself with household chores, allowing no alteration of daily habits. Slowly, however, reality starts to resist: a shoe brush hits the floor. Ingrained gestures become corrupted. Chantal Akerman said in an interview: “Change is fear, change is opening the jail.”

In Stéphane Symons’s essay ‘Twee keer Ozu’ (‘Twice Ozu’), he quotes the Japanese culture critic Hasumi Shiguéhiko talking about “the threat of the destruction of the harmony of the whole” that is central to Ozu's cinema. This destabilization has everything to do with what Hasumi calls “meaningful details” that often “contradict the narrative structure”. Such details, gestures or events “pause the narrative flow” and constitute a “digression in the relationship with the intrigue”: they are “gaps.” In a new Dutch-language text on Sabzian, Dries Van Landuyt evokes how Jeanne Dielman has changed his way of looking at an ordinary plate in his hands: “Een krachtveld, een leegte die het bord samenhield, schemerde door de ogenschijnlijke massiviteit van het aardewerk heen. (A force field, a void that held the plate together, shimmered through the apparent solidity of the crockery.)”

The Moon and the Sledgehammer is a world apart from the interiors of the previous films. Philip Trevelyan made a cult documentary about a family that resisted modernity and remained in their forest south of London. Radically rejecting the prevailing curse of “push-button machinery” and the rigidity of the family home, they chose a shed in the ultimate messy constellation. 

“Cities, like dreams, are built from desires and fears, although the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides something else,” writes Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities (1972). How to write a line of history in the enmeshment of everyday desires and fears? Once one pulls a thread, the history of an entire country might emerge. 

Bernardo Bertolucci made a big gesture when he created Novecento (1976), an epic starting from 1900 and leading to the Second World War. Two boys are born in Italy at the same time: one as landowner, the other as a peasant.  As their friendship evolves, they take part in the class struggle. Film critic Joël Magny noted that “1900 can be read as a hymn to the people by a bourgeois, the adventure of a bourgeois who projects himself into the role of the proletariat by the means of a film”.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s debut film, Neighboring Sounds (2012), takes place in the city where he was born, Recife. He stated in an interview that “99 percent of Brazilian filmmakers are middle class or upper middle class or bourgeois, as I am, yet most of the time they’re making films about people they don’t know that much about and subjects they haven’t mastered.” Focussing on one apartment building, he tells a story of changes in Brazilian society and scrutinizes the middle class, whose “feet never touch the ground.”

The last film of the week is Fearless (1993) by Peter Weir, who also brought us The Truman Show. An architect survives a plane crash, then walks through the streets of his hometown devoid of fear. But without fear, he will discover, there is no desire.

This week Sabzian will present No quatro da Vanda by Pedro Costa (2000). The film displays a rare virtuosity in depicting Vanda and her community of immigrants and drug addicts in a Lisbon slum. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière wrote, Costa “placed himself in these spaces to observe their inhabitants living their lives, to hear what they say, capture their secret.” The film will be introduced by Gerard-Jan Claes. 

In the other two films we selected this week, the obsessive and elusive artistic processes of a composer and of a filmmaker are explored. Olivier Messiaen et les Oiseaux (Denise R. Tual and Michel Fano, 1973) is a portrait of the French composer, organist and ornithologist who lived between 1908 and 1992. He was a devout Roman Catholic who honored the divine through his music. He acknowledged the beauty of the creation and birdsong in particular. Messiaen could be often found in a forest listening to birds and transcribing their songs. 

Federico Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo depicts the life of Guido, a film director. Memories of his youth, romantic entanglements and the confusion of a megalomanic film project parade in an exuberant filmic arena. As he struggles with writing a scenario, Guido is relentlessly attacked by the film critic Daumier. Peter Bondanella wrote in his book on Fellini: “As a corollary of his emphasis upon visualizing the moment of creativity, Fellini also provides in Otto e Mezzo a devastating critique of the kind of thinking that goes into film criticism, particularly the kind of ideological criticism so common in France and Italy from the time he began making films up to the moment he began filming Otto e Mezzo.”
 

This week, history is woven by a mother in Zerkalo [The Mirror] by Andrei Tarkovsky, she passes on the spell of heredity in Paix sur les champs by Jacques Boigelot, and a man becomes possessed by the history he deliriously pyrsues in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Zorn Gottes.

Zerkalo is a story of childhood that is intertwined with a collective history. For Tarkovsky, the mother is a figure that is strongly linked to time and history. The filmmaker himself stated: “The Mirror is not a casual title. The storyteller perceives his wife as the continuation of his mother, because wives resemble mothers, and errors repeat themselves – a strange reflection. Repetition is a law, experience does not get transmitted, everyone has to live it.”

The inheritance of spirit is the premise of Boigelot’s Paix sur les champs. In this film, a woman is the bearer of powers which make ‘errors repeat themselves’, but she’s capable to transcend them as well. In the Belgian countryside, the grandson of a presumed witch will find out how much his rural community still believes in the peril of his lineage when he falls in love with the sister of a girl who supposedly died under his grandmother’s influence. 

Set during the expansion of the Spanish Empire in South America, the protagonist of Herzog’s film, Don Lope de Aguirre or ‘the Wrath of God’ as he calls himself, is a child of his times. Just like the Congo River in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the Amazon leads him and his band further and further into the phantasm of colonialism. Accompanied by the hypnotic soundtrack by Popol Vuh, Aguirre dreams of becoming the founding father of an empire. 
 

In this week’s selection, silence is brooding. Silence as a form of resistance, or as the effect of lovesickness; the inability to express oneself in the face of conflicting emotions. 

In L’adolescente by Jeanne Moreau, a 12-year-old girl goes to visit her grandmother for the holidays. During her stay in the countryside, she slowly becomes disconnected from her childhood, perturbated by a budding love for an older doctor. Her personal transformation takes place in the wake of the Second World War. A changing political reality which silently yet disruptively weaves itself into her intimate story. 

Le silence de la mer by Jean-Pierre Melville takes place merely two years after L’adolescente, but in an entirely different situation, namely after the occupation has taken place. In 1941, the Nazi-regime has consolidated itself and a German officer is stationed in a French family’s house. The only way the uncle and his niece can show resistance is by not speaking to him. But despite their silence, the officer talks to them, and the girl can’t shut herself off from listening. Little by little, the officer starts to stir the silence in her heart… 

Pierre, Jan Decorte’s first film, depicts one day in the lonely life of a Brussels municipal clerk. Decorte wrote: “A human being is to another person an inextricable secret. The ultimate meaning and motives of most of the actions he performs remain hidden from him.” Pierre seems to act in an unmotivated way, and yet every single gesture contains a mystery. In the evening, Pierre addresses a woman from his sports-club, they talk briefly and he invites her home. It’s not the words they exchange that is remarkable, but their silences. 
 

“Big ears listen with feet to the world as a jewel in the hand: it is night in America.” This sentence sounds like an exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis), but it consists, in fact, of the three film titles of this week that were all made last year.

Big Ears Listen with Feet was made by directing duo Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, whose films focus on the relationship between people and their surrounding architecture. In Bankok they followed Boonserm Premthada, who, deaf from birth, developed an architecture of the senses where sound vibrations become the voice of space. An architectural intervention closes space off to create intimacy and gives a tonality to all the emptiness it encompasses. If architecture is the organization of emptiness, then urbanism can be seen as a structuration of territory.

“Are animals invading our cities, or are we occupying their habitats?”, an animal caretaker sighs in It Is Night in America. Ana Vaz filmed in the Brasília Zoo, where stray wild animals are being taken care of. Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector once wrote: “Brasília is constructed on the line of the horizon. Brasília is artificial. As artificial as the world must have been when it was created. Brasília badly needs roaming white horses. At night they would be green in the moonlight.”

The World Like a Jewel in the Hand is an essay-film in which Arielle Aïsha Azoulay proposes a project of ‘unlearning imperial plunder’. As an Algerian Jew, she uses the camera to resist the extinction process of her culture and identity by the looting of objects that are still ‘held captive’ in museums and archives. By showing pictures, talking and singing, Azoulay and her collaborator, Nadia Ammour, propose a new form of historiography.

This week, we’ve selected three exciting film evenings that combine cinema, music and performance. This month and next, Cinema Nova in Brussels is presenting a focus on Iranian cinema, and a thematic film program on the relationship between humans and non-humans. During the Bestiarium Melting-Pot film evening, you will be treated to an “alcoholic lecture” by Dr. Lichic who will explain how to abandon your cumbersome canine companion during the holidays. After that, Laure Belhassen will present her bestiary of animal women. Femmes animales traces the history of depictions of women as animals. Finally, we will follow the artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss who, dressed up as a rat and a bear, have many adventures. 

On 15 and 16 September, Monokino presents once again  ‘SHHH’- a festival of silent films screened at the seaside, featuring work by Jasper Rigole, Isabelle Cornado, Helga Fanderl and many others. Film researcher Steven Jacobs will guide us through Ostend’s art and film history with an eye-catching film program. The starting point is Pour vos beaux yeux (1929) that Henri Storck made together with the surrealist Felix Labisse. We will see eyes and their gaze set against the backdrop of Belgian surrealism. Casper Jacobs will provide a live soundtrack. 

German director and animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger is best known for her 1928 masterpiece The Adventures of Prince Achmed for which she cut the silhouettes herself and photographed them to make stop-motion films. Reiner's dreamy images find a musical pedant in Pak Yan Lau's free sound palette. This Brussels-based musician took some mysterious films such as Caliph Stork (1954) and The Magic Horse (1953) as a starting point and, while improvising with an arsenal of instruments and electronics, will perform a beautiful fairy-tale film concert for young and old.
 

This week, we are highlighting two film classics and one new release.

Night of the Hunter (1955) is Charles Laughton’s only film. He described it as a “sort of Mother Goose Tale”, but the film has influences of silent era expressionistic cinema, of film noir suspense, and of the musical. As Adrian Martin wrote, “it is as if the very fabric of the surreal universe created by Laughton is woven in and through the magical effects and properties of singing – especially when we reach the unlikely duet of Rachel and Powell, during their tense nocturnal stand-off, harmonising to ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ – one of the most disquieting and wondrous scenes in all cinema.”

Les Diaboliques by Henri-Georges Clouzot was released in the same year as Night of the Hunter. This film doesn’t feature a diabolical false preacher, but two infernal women instead: the wife and the mistress of a school principal who are both out for murder. The film similarly acknowledges the conventions of film noir, yet it disrupts them. According to Bosley Crowther, “it is a pip of a murder thriller, ghost story and character play rolled into one. (…) Everything seems to be set up for one of those ghastly little psychological tales of genteel mismating and frustration, when – bing! – the mischief begins.”

The latest documentary by Nicolas Philibert, Sur l’Adamant, will be released in Belgian theatres this week. With his crew, Philibert followed the patients and caregivers of a psychiatric day center called Adamant, which is situated on a boat floating on the Seine in the center of Paris. The first screening in Flagey will be in the presence of Linda de Zitter, clinical psychologist and founding member of Adamant. 

What does it mean to view filmmaking as a political act? Three filmmakers each approached militant cinema when they documented social struggle as an indictment, as a tool of contemporary historiography or as a laboratory of the future. 

In 1976, Barbara Kopple listened to the radio and heard about a miners’ association in Harlan County, USA, that was fighting for the right to have a union. She loaned some money and went to film the Miners for Democracy. Kopple’s involvement in the movement was not only through filming. She said: “We wore machine guns with semiautomatic carbines.”

Combining political activism, film criticism and filmmaking, the practice of Brazilian Glauber Rocha as an artist and activist was intertwined. Black God, White Devil (1964) accounts the story of a man who kills his corrupt employer and becomes an outlaw who starts to venerate a violent, self-proclaimed saint. Stoffel Debuysere wrote that “in Glauber Rocha’s work, the myths of the people, prophetism and banditism, are the archaic obverse of capitalist violence, as if the people were turning and increasing against themselves the violence that they suffer from somewhere else out of a need for idolization.”  

Relaxe (2022) is the first film of Audrey Ginestet, who is also a bassist in the band Aquaserge. The documentary is not about Aquaserge but about the band’s clarinetist, Manon Glibert, who was arrested in 2008 for ‘criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity’, sabotaging high-speed lines in France. What came to be known as the group the ‘Tarnac Nine’ consisted of five women and four men who moved to a rural area in France in order to live communally, away from consumerist society. Audrey Ginestet made a portrait of Manon while she prepares herself for her trial.  

This week we settle down at three screenings where cinema and film criticism meet.

KASKcinema in Ghent will screen Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux by Jean-Luc Godard. In an article published by Sabzian, Frieda Grafe wrote: “The pre-formed units of meaning Godard inserts into his narrative are a kind of critical device, variants of both the theme and the way the film is shaped. It is a parody of the still ubiquitous essentialist separation of form and content.” The film will be introduced by film scholar Eduard Cuelenaere.

Eric de Kuyper, who plays an important role in Belgian film culture, will introduce the screening of Shanghai Express by Josef von Sternberg. De Kuyper characterises von Sternberg as a “paradoxical filmmaker”, who seemed to submit to each and every Hollywood cliché while managing to unmask them at the same time. The film will be followed by a discussion on de Kuyper’s work as a film critic. In the coming weeks, Sabzian will republish a number of striking texts from his remarkable oeuvre, with a new commentary by de Kuyper.

La terre de la folie by Luc Moullet will be shown at Cercle du Laveu in Liège, which is run by a collective of volunteers who created the conditions of a technically high quality cinema while inhabiting a social multi-usage space. 

Moullet, former film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, once wrote that “the filmmaker criticizes, and the critic praises.” Le Monde called the film “reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist documentary Terre sans pain, revisited in this instance by the combinatory art of Georges Perec.”