André Delvaux--Guardian Obit
Hyfler/Rosner
A master of merging reality and fantasy, he put Belgian cinema on the map
Ronald Bergan
Tuesday October 8, 2002
The Guardian
Some years ago, the first name that would have sprung to the mind of the
ciné-literate filmgoer asked to name a Belgian director would have been
André Delvaux, who has died aged 76 of a heart attack. He could be said to
have put Belgian cinema on the map.
The film that made his international reputation was his first, The Man Who
Had His Hair Cut Short (1966), bravely made in Flemish. His other films were
shot in the more marketable French, one of the few compromises made by this
uncompromising auteur, who made only eight fiction features in 22 years.
That first title referred to a middle-aged lawyer's compulsive visits to the
barber, which symbolise the madness brought on by his idealistic love for a
pupil at a girls' school where he teaches. In the film, Delvaux revealed a
firm grip on material that veered between beauty and ugliness, illusion and
reality, and an interest in surrealism and beautiful, unobtainable women. It
was brilliantly shot in black-and-white by the celebrated Belgian
cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, who worked on Delvaux's first five
features.
Delvaux's love for the cin ema emerged in his early 20s, while he was
working as a pianist accompanying silent pictures at the Belgian
cinématheque - rather like the central character in his third feature,
Rendezvous At Bray (1971), a cryptic tale set during the first world war.
Born in Heverlee, near Louvain, he had studied piano at the Brussels royal
conservatory, while taking a degree in German philosophy at the Free
University, where he then taught literature. After becoming head of a
programme of film education for Belgian teachers, he began making television
documentaries, mostly on film directors, the most successful being a
four-part series about Federico Fellini in 1960. Two years later, he helped
found Insas, a film school that would produce many of Belgium's new
generation of filmmakers.
Delvaux's preoccupation with the merging of dream and reality - in the
tradition of Flemish painters from Bosch to Magritte, and his namesake Paul
Delvaux - continued with Un Soir, Un Train (1968), starring Yves Montand as
a nationalist Flemish professor living with Anouk Aimée, a French-speaking
theatrical designer.
One autumn evening, she disappears on a train journey, and he, in an unknown
region, begins to look for her, while coming to terms with himself and their
relationship. Sensitively photographed by Cloquet, this melancholy story of
lost love, intermingling past and present, reality and fantasy, contains, as
in most of Delvaux's films, an elusive image of womanhood.
In Belle (1973), a married, middle-aged professor, who has an incestuous
desire for his daughter, has an affair with a mysterious woman he meets in
the woods. Delvaux never reveals whether the woman is real or imaginary - as
he observed: "The imaginary can introduce things that haven't yet taken
place, but will happen in reality later on."
By contrast, Woman In A Twilight Garden (Femme Entre Chien Et Loup, 1978)
was more concerned with reality. Set during the German occupation of
Flanders, it tells of a woman torn between a resistance fighter and her
collab-orator husband. After such a grim tale, Delvaux's 90-minute
documentary, To Woody Allen From Europe With Love (1980), came as a
surprise, though both the Belgian and the American idealised young women and
shared a love for Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and surrealism.
In Benvenuta (1983), Matthieu Carrière plays a writer commissioned to
produce a film script from a cause célèbre novel written 20 years earlier by
the reclusive Françoise Fabian. He visits her in Ghent to discuss how much
was invention and how much autobiographical, a plot that allowed Delvaux to
play an elaborate game with reality and fantasy, and time and place, in a
series of painterly images.
His last, and most expensive, project was The Abyss (L'Oeu vre Au Noir,
1988), which followed a 16th-century Flanders physician and alchemist
wandering Europe to escape the Spanish inquisition, which is after him for
dissident writings, devilish medical practices and bisexuality. Written by
the director, the screenplay was a meticulous adaptation of the last section
of a 1976 Marguerite Yourcenar novel. With a reference to Flemish old
masters, its episodic style captured the brooding medieval atmosphere, but
was a relative critical failure and a box-office disaster.
Visually arresting as all Delvaux's films were, they sometimes hovered
between the poetic and the arty, leading to the criticism that he was
something of an image maker. But in these conservative times, his vision
should be cherished. I last saw him a year ago, when he was on the jury of
the international festival at Valladolid, in Spain, wearing a striking
fedora and expressing his undiminished passion for a cinema which tackled
philosophical and ethical questions in an aesthetic manner.
· André Delvaux, film director, born March 21 1926; died October 4 2002
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:antdck$kol$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
There's a Belgian film festival going on in NYC this week, and today I saw
this film, the only film of his I've ever seen. I hate to speak ill of
the recently dead, but what the hell. This may be one of the most boring
films ever made. Those compulsive visits to the barber were actually the
only fun in the movie. Probably no one cares what I think about Belgian
filmmakers or Belgian film (which in my limited viewing of about 5 films is
relentlessly grim and utterly humorless) but I couldn't resist annotating
my own post. Which probably no one read when I posted it anyway.
Carry on.