Brussels, Chronicle of an Aesthetic Odyssey

Cinémathèque des BOZAR: Il padiglione sull’acqua

17/11 @ 14h00

Il documentario Il Padiglione sull'Acqua è un viaggio, estetico e poetico, nell’immaginario dell’architetto veneziano Carlo Scarpa e nella sua passione per la cultura giapponese.

Il Giappone rappresentò per l’architetto un universo ispirazionale ma fu anche il luogo dove egli morì, nel 1978, all’apice della sua carriera, ripercorrendo misteriosamente i tragitti del poeta errante Matsuo Bashō.

Attraverso le impressioni suggerite dal filosofo giapponese Ryosuke Ōhashi, la narrazione si sviluppa lungo il filo di una domanda, la domanda sul senso della bellezza. La possibilità di questa riflessione accomuna qui le opere scarpiane e l’estetica tradizionale giapponese.

Venezia, nella veste di porta verso l’Oriente e luogo di nascita di Scarpa, e l’esplorazione incantata delle sue opere, sono l’occasione per rievocare la poetica ed episodi emblematici della vita dell’architetto, restituiti attraverso le parole del figlio Tobia, dagli allievi e collaboratori, e dal ricercatore J.K. Mauro Pierconti.

Un sentimento di nostalgia colora tutta la narrazione. Una nostalgia per quell’evento raro che è la nascita di un artista. Seppur ora abbia abbandonato questa terra, lascia in dono le sue opere e la meraviglia che esse tutt’ora suscitano.

For Dreamers, Coffee shots, Orezza, eau de Saint-Georges !

Cinémathèque des BOZAR: Stalker

20/11 @ 21h00

The Sneaky Brilliance of Geoff Dyer’s “Into the Zone”
By Matt Levin August 15, 2017

I recently fell asleep in a movie theater. I think the movie is a masterpiece. An hour in, the three main characters, on an expedition into mysterious territory called simply the Zone, have just emerged from a slog through an aqueduct, shouting over the sound of crashing water. They each lie down, exhausted, on the brown-green moss that blankets the water’s edge. The characters speak with each other about where they are going, and for what. It is a late-night road-motel talk—fatigued, but searching. A character called Writer begins a monologue about fame, the future, technology, and soon it doesn’t matter, because he is talking to himself, in the shorthand that exists only in each individual head, using big, meaningless, opaquely personal words like “Life” and “Art.” What matters is the tone of his voice—soft and drifting and stretched seemingly over one long yawn. He is talking himself to sleep. A guitar drone intensifies. And as he went on, I found myself becoming heavily tired, too, and I slumped over. I had a dream that I cannot remember, except that it feels like a kernel lodged under my tongue, and involved a river. I woke up only when a tall man sitting next to me gently tousled my hair and told me in a stage whisper that I had spilled popcorn all over my lap. The characters are sitting up, awake now, listening to a voice telling them about his dream. In my memory of the film, there is a blank.
The movie was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, recently remastered and finishing its months-long run at the IFC Center. Geoff Dyer wrote about the film and his relationship with it for our Fall 2011 issue, in “Into the Zone,” an excerpt from his full-length book Zona. “Into the Zone” is, as much as an essay can be like a movie, an imitation of Stalker. The essay proceeds by summarizing each scene of the movie chronologically. Each scene summary takes on the pace and tone of the scene being described. When the pace picks up, so does Dyer’s prose, and his thoughts come quick and abbreviated. When the movie slows to a pan, or arrests on a static shot, so does Dyer, and he takes the placid moments to tell us things he knows, stories, about Tarkovsky: about Tarkovsky and his relationship with Michelangelo Antonioni, about the fights Tarkovsky had with Mosfilm over the meditative pace of Stalker, about Flaubert and style, inventories of films shown in other films, about time as it exists and is manipulated by movies, about his desire for a drink when he sees characters drinking, and finally, during the scene Dyer calls “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema”—the long, seemingly unbroken shot of the trolley ride into the Zone itself—about himself and things he wants and can’t have. “Into the Zone” is Dyer’s thought, in all its allusiveness and wit and sneaky brilliance, welded inextricably to the rhythms of Stalker. This is the only narrow path to Stalker—a film that is both direct and maddeningly slippery.

For Dreamers, Coffee shots, Orezza, eau de Saint-Georges !

Cinéma Palace : CITIZEN KANE

21/11 @ 20h30

Famously sitting at the top of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s debut, about newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, remains an enduring classic.

The 26-year-old Orson Welles, already renowned for his work in radio and theatre, used the unprecedented artistic license offered to him by RKO to create a fictionalised portrait of one of America’s most powerful men – press baron William Randolph Hearst. Charting the rise of Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles himself) – who decides to start a newspaper with his inherited fortune – Welles’ film is a classic story of the corrupting effects of power.

The use of deep-focus photography (keeping both foreground and background in focus) and abstracted camera angles, the non-chronological narrative structure and overlapping dialogue, were just some of the myriad formal innovations that Welles brought together for his groundbreaking debut. Such novelty and controversy proved a curse for Welles, whose career never enjoyed such indulgence again.

“Citizen Kane remains the ultimate commentary on American culture since the early 20th century. It conveys America’s inherent polarities (individualism vs collective impulses; libertarianism vs puritanism; innocence vs corruption; the underdog mentality to rebel against oppression vs the impulse to rule over the masses through duping strategies) via a deft synergy of form and content. It has never been more rewarding to screen and talk about this film than in our current political moment.” Roy Grundmann

“The former champion still feels like a grand summation of film’s early development as an artform and a glimpse of the future, too. At the same time, it’s a hugely entertaining portrait of the media narcissism and demagoguery that underscore American politics.” Scott Tobias

“It still amazes for its formal bravado, a barrage of cinematographic strategies which retain their innovative resonances. The film’s reputation as representing the apogee of an ossified ‘canon’ of outstanding films should not minimise its qualities – it deserves to be so recognised. It combines the restless energy of its subject with formal experimentation which demonstrates the artistry of filmmaking as a collaborative enterprise when new technical approaches were being explored.” Sarah Street

“Sadly, it’s fashionable now to chip away at its greatness. This temptation should be resisted. The audacious American masterpiece of the 20th century, not only for its cinematic innovations and storytelling vigour, but for how accurately it dissects the ‘American character’.” Eddie Muller

“What else is there to say about Kane? It will always be remembered for novelty, for vision, for the sheer audacity of its existence.” Oris Aigbokhaevbolo

“The ultimate in movie baroque. Welles’s film is a twisted pearl – glorious, florid, overweening – about crazed ambition and the virtues and innocences it crushes in its wake.” Nigel Andrews

“A film that amply rewards repeated viewings, revealing new depths, new nuanced details, new mysteries. There is no greatest film, but if there were, for me this would surely be the strongest contender.” Geoff Andrew

“What, I’m going to leave this off, so I can look more like a wild individualist? A brilliant cinematic mind jumps into the medium, determined to see what he can make it do. It may not invent anything but it packs in a ton of radical creativity and unconventionality.” David Cairns

Cinémathèque des BOZAR : Mea Culpa by Patrick Tass

23/11 @ 19h00

Mea Culpa by Patrick Tass

Lies and guilt are at the core of Patrick’s relationship with his mother Randa. Over the years, he collected their audio messages and video calls. He now transforms them into a portrait of her life in Lebanon and his in Belgium. By turns moving, provocative and hilarious, Mea Culpa questions the links between national and sexual identities for a young Palestinian emigrant.

**Projections – Screenings

• Casablanca Arab Film Festival, Morocco, 09/2024
• Alternative Edinburgh Film Festival, UK, 08/2024
• Festival de cinema En Ville ! 02/2024**

For Dreamers, Coffee shots, Orezza, eau de Saint-Georges !