This week’s selection revolves around love, or rather, the difficulties of love. It was Shakespeare who wrote the following:

”If cinema be the food of love, play on:
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”

Or was it music, not cinema?

The selection starts on Monday in Ghent with a classic: Le mépris by Jean-Luc Godard (1963), in which the marriage between a writer and his wife is failing during a film shoot in Malaparte’s old villa on Capri (an island off the coast of Naples), played by Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot. Don’t miss out on Fritz Lang playing himself in this film about film.

Next up, Viaggio in Italia from Roberto Rossellini (1954) will screen in Brussels on Thursday. It was not well received at first, until being praised by the writers from Cahiers du cinéma. Truffaut even called it the first modern film. It’s a film about a married couple in crisis during their vacation in Naples. It is also the very film to which Le mépris is an homage.

Lastly, also on Thursday, we have Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first feature film, Præsidenten (1919), playing in Antwerp. Based on the eponymous book of Karl Emil Franzos, this silent film is set around 1900. It is about a Danish aristocrat and judge who must deal with the consequences of promising never to marry a commoner to his dying father. The screening will be preceded by a lecture from Wouter Hessels.

This week’s selection is about history. How does cinema reflect on the past?

The first film will be screened on Tuesday in Ghent and Bruges (and you can also watch it on Sunday in Brussels!): Goodbye, Dragon Inn by Tsai Ming-liang (2003). The film takes place in an empty cinema in Taipei, Taiwan, where the last screening of the wuxia (a genre about martial artists in ancient China) film Dragon Inn by King Hu (1967) will be shown. Goodbye, Dragon Inn marks a shift in the cinematic experience, in a communal sense, where we no longer regard watching film as a social activity in a public space.

On Thursday, we leave metafiction and enter Luchino Visconti’s full on period piece, Ludwig (1973). This four-hour long film is newly restored in 4K and will be shown at Palace in Brussels. It is the last film of his German trilogy. A film that Dirk Lauwaert described as “[a] return […] to cinema’s first gesture: a moving image thrown onto a screen in a dark room.”

Finally, Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) is playing at CINEMATEK in Brussels, where we witness a cinematic interpretation of the records of the trial of Jeanne d’Arc. In this historical work, Bresson, wanting to avoid making a period piece, opted to make the set design and costumes as plain as possible. He also worked mostly with non-professional actors in an attempt to move cinema away from theatre. Cinema had – and still has – to recognize itself as a proper artform, which Bresson renamed “le cinématographe”.

This week’s selection brings the power of imagination and dreams into play. Given that cinema leaves very few senses understimulated, how does cinema create space for the viewer’s imagination in parallel to the film unfolding on the screen?

The week begins with new works by Makino Takashi presented at Art Cinema OFFoff, followed by an online conversation with the filmmaker. In Takashi’s films, images become unintelligible through the layering of different materials, thus creating new images. “I don’t believe the images we have in our imagination and in our brain are so clear,” he argues, “it’s something very complicated… like dust, that sometimes looks like an image, but it’s actually not one. […] I think we have a complicated set of beautiful images in our brain. So I’m trying to approach that kind of image.”

Next up is La Jetée (1962) at Cinema RITCS: Chris Marker’s renowned science fiction featurette. The film exists solely of black and white still images accompanied by a scientifical voice-over that tells a story of Paris after World War III. Although set in the future, its strength is found in remembrance and imagination: thinking of a woman smiling and a man dying, imagining the movement of the photos. In this act of remembering, we almost forget that we are looking at endless copies – 24 frames per second – of the same image. The screening will be preceded by a presentation of philosopher Lieven De Cauter and his students.

Lastly, Godard’s sci-fi film Alphaville (1965) will be shown at CINEMATEK. Set in the year 2000, the film is famous for not using any special props and for being shot on location in Paris. In Alphaville,  materials of the present are transformed into that of the future, creating a perfect example of how our image of the future is just a re-imagining of the present.