Filmmaker Edmond Bernhard gives us his impressions of an everyday Sunday in Brussels. The following subjects are dealt with, in chronological order: an empty dormitory at a boarding school, a museum without visitors, children playing hide-and-seek, children playing with a ball, the changing of the guard at the Royal Palace in Brussels, a shoot-out, the overflowing stands in a football stadium... There is no conventional voice-over, but tremendous feeling for image aesthetics. The film was commissioned by the National Ministry of Education and Culture with the instruction that it dealth with "the problem of spare time". Edmond Bernard literally and figuratively went to town and evoked the emptiness and boredom in particular.
EN
“Dimanche was supposed to be a didactic film, intended to evoke the problem of leisure. Bernhard diverts the order and outwits the trap of the ‘thematic’ film. Without resorting to any form of commentary, making use of extraordinary images sublimating common spaces (the boredom of Sundays, the changing of the guard, children playing, a runner in the woods, a football match, …), he constructs with a nifty montage an exceptional work dealing with the sense of void and the fossilisation of the world.”
Boris Lehman1