CINEMATEK, Brussel

Johan Van der Keuken shot The Palestinians in 1975 in Lebanon, before the outbreak of civil war. The film provides a nuanced look at the issue of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Pull My Daisy is a high point in improvisational cinema and a signature film for the Beat Generation. Spontaneity was one of the Beat authors’ formal traits, and this film, too, involved a great deal of improvisation. Pull My Daisy is a high point in improvisational cinema and a signature film for the Beat Generation.

My Childhood was the first of three films based on director Bill Douglas’ memories of his own impoverished childhood in the Scottish mining village of Newcraighall. In this cruel environment, the boy learns to take care of himself. We see him grow up from child to adolescent—angry and bewildered but playful and affectionate.

Japanese video artist Toshio Matsumoto became best known for Funeral Parade of Roses. The experimental short film Atman, on the other hand, is a visual tour-de-force: In the center of a circle, Matsumoto places a figure wearing a Hannya mask. In the circle, he places the camera in 480 different positions. The film seems full of zooms and pans, but they are really the result of a clever edit.

Writer and poet Abigail Child has been a lynchpin of American experimental cinema since the 1980s. A recognised pioneer in editing, she focuses on the interplay between sound and image to create, in the words of L.A. Weekly, “brilliantly exciting work”, with a keen attention to form that helps examine established norms around narration and gender.

Nishikawa’s analogue films often focus on the process of filmmaking itself. Light, Noise, Smoke and Light, Noise, Smoke shows a deceptively complex interplay between fireworks shots taken during a summer festival and the sonic imprints the same images leave on the optical soundtrack.

In her films, German director and photographer Ulrike Ottinger parodies cinema conventions, searching for new forms of visual pleasure. In doing so, she constantly challenges the viewer’s position. Many of her highly stylised films also contain fantastic elements.

As a painter, sculptor, and writer, Marcel Duchamp greatly influenced 20th- and 21st-century conceptual art. His interest in the ‘fourth dimension’ is evident in his film Anémic cinéma, which consists of a series of spirals within spirals rotating in such a way as to create an optical effect—a classic of experimental cinema.

How does a blind child perceive reality? To explore this question, Johan van der Keuken spent two months in a specialised institution in the Netherlands. Blind child reveals a world hard to imagine: the endless struggle of those who cannot see to stay in touch with reality. Using the film medium, Van der Keuken depicts their unique worldview.

In 1965 filmt Johan van der Keuken zijn innemende buurmeisje Beppie terwijl ze door Amsterdam zwerft en op speelse wijze de wereld ontdekt. Met vriendinnen slentert ze door de stad en klopt te pas en te onpas bij buren aan.

He may never have enjoyed the fame of a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but many regarded Jacques Rozier as their equal. In his second short film, Rentrée des classes, a little boy throws his school bag into the river on the first day of school, which leads to a thrilling adventure.

One of the great masters of postwar Japanese cinema, rebellious filmmaker Nagasi Oshima was also one of his generation’s most politically engaged artists. Diary of Yunbogi is an ethereal montage of still images with dark, somber undertones based on photographs Oshima took during a study trip to South Korea in 1965.

Jean Vigo was a pioneer in what would later become the French New Wave. Zéro de conduite draws extensively on his own experiences at boarding schools and reflects Vigo’s anarchistic views of his childhood, sketching surreal acts of defiance in a repressive educational institution.

Crossing the Great Sagrada consists almost exclusively of outtakes from travelogues. The title is a pun on Crossing the Great Sahara, one of the popular travel films of the 1920s that documented “other cultures” in a way that reflected imperial, nationalistic, and often racist stereotypes.

Belgian film pioneer Henri Storck, born and raised in Ostend, made more than one documentary about his hometown. In Ostende, reine des plages, contemporaries James Ensor and Maurice Jaubert provide the music—a film about the “special happiness of being an Ostendian.”

Robert Fenz worked as a cameraman with Chantal Akerman and was one of the most committed filmmakers reviving avant-garde traditions for a long time until he passed away in 2020 at the age of 52. His films, mostly made on black-and-white 16mm, possess a rare energy and restless beauty.

Portuguese filmmaker Jorge Jácome often mixes science fiction with documentary elements. In Flores, the entire population of the Azores is forced to evacuate to the mainland when an uncontrollable infestation of hydrangeas floods the islands.

Artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowciz focuses on civil rights and gay identity within American popular culture. A few years before he died of HIV, he made Beautiful People.

Belgian Roland Lethem’s early work is heavily influenced by surrealists (Buñuel) and  Japanese cinema (Seijun Suzuki, Yoko Ono). Later, his films became increasingly political and also ecologically charged, although certain cruelty and pornography are never far away. Full of irrational images and diverse forms of symbolism, Lethem’s films seem to float between waking and sleeping states.

Dominique Loreau’s feature-length films are strongly anchored in a documentary reality: the actors play themselves and improvise from a predetermined framework that nevertheless welcomes coincidences and the passage of time. This methodology is already visible in her 1987 short film Zig-zags.

Conceptual artist Emily Jacir creates films and installations that focus on the oppression of the Palestinian people. In this intimate film, simultaneously a video essay and a diary, Jacir pleads to register  her childhood home and neighbourhood, “before a crime is inevitably committed.”

In an exercise of ironic self-awareness, Chantal Akerman tries to deal with her own procrastination by making a film about laziness itself. The film is part of a collective project in which seven women each are making a short film about one of the deadly sins.

Belgian filmmaker Samy Szlingerbaum directed the short film Le 15/8 in 1973 together with Chantal Akerman. He then made two short films of his own, including this nocturnal Insomnies, which rhythmically and associatively depicts the neon lights of the Belgian capital—like a dream. A mostly formal experiment of barely nine minutes. 

We can never get enough of Buster Keaton, The Great Stone Face of the 1920s. One Week is the first independent film he released himself, full of new stunts in and around houses and on ladders.

In his work, Georgian Mikheil Kobakhidze often opposed Soviet ideology. At first glance, Umbrella seems feathery light: a railway worker lives happily with his lover until an umbrella comes flying and gives the realistic a surreal touch.

Su Friedrich, a pioneer in American avant-garde cinema, writes, directs, and edits all her films. These are often a mix of the personal and political, ranging from home movies to video interviews and more classic narratives.    

Barbara Hammer is a pioneer in lesbian cinema. In her over fifty-year career, she has made both classic and more experimental films in which gender roles and female relationships are central.

Fool’s Mate, seen by some historians as one of the first films of the French New Wave movement, is perhaps Rivette's best-known short film—and with good reason: its tight camera work captures a mysterious romance.

Set in the deindustrialised mining city of Genk, Terril depicts the masculine dynamics within a working-class family. It patiently moves between these social codes and the landscape in which they manifest themselves.

Scorpio Rising is perhaps Kenneth Anger's best-known work. Set to the beats of 1960s pop music, the film follows a group of bikers and explores the occult, homosexuality, and Nazism. It also idolises rebellious public figures such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.

This French short film is highly regarded in many film history books. Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel wrote his first feat together with Salvador Dalí, based on their dreams.

The mystery of the filmmaking process is a crucial element in Robert Beavers' artistic signature. Winged Dialogue is characteristic of many of his films: at once lyrical and rigorous, sensual and complex. Mediterranean cities, landscapes, and cultural traditions unveil deeper personal and aesthetic themes. The sexuality of the body and the purity of the soul come together glowingly.

Nocturnal Butterflies is the only film entirely made in Servaisgraphy, a technique that fuses live-action and animation. The late Raoul Servais, a key figure in the history of Belgian animation, already experimented with this style in his film Harpya.

A documentary film about AIDS and one unconventional woman’s efforts to educate her small, Southern community. DiAna DiAna is a local hairdresser who transformed her beauty parlor into a center for AIDS and safe sex information.

Following a premonition, a young woman tries to persuade her fiancé not to go out to sea in his fishing boat, but the boy ignores her and sets out. Soon, a storm occurs, and the girl frantically tries to find out his fate.

A dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War.

A child's voice recites Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky while various objects, such as toys and dolls, fall apart and depict some of the scenes.

Two teenage girls from Brussels flee to Paris and try to survive there.

A detailed account of a failed bank robbery. A single take where over ninety people perform a meticulous choreography for the camera. The film recreates an actual event that took place in Stockholm in June 2006.

African migrants in Paris talk about everyday life and racism on the labour and housing markets.

Jean Vigo's very first film. The silent documentary shows Nice residents in their daily routines, and the prevailing social inequalities.

In Dominique Loreau's very first (short) film, a woman wanders the streets of Brussels, waiting to leave for the tropics with a man she happened to meet in a pub.