Week 8/2023

This week’s agenda offers three different perspectives on how space and living relate to each other. In La vie en kit (2022), architect-filmmaker Elodie Degavre revisits three Belgian participatory housing developments created in the post-revolutionary aftermath of May ’68 and in strict collaboration with the inhabitants of the building sites. In De cierta manera (1974), Sara Gómez also set her story in a new housing district, Miraflores, built by the very people who would live there, the former residents of a shanty-town just outside Havana. This was a product of one of the first collective efforts realized immediately after the triumph of Castro’s revolution. Alongside professional actors, some of the real-life characters of Miraflores play themselves.

Grands travaux (2016) also both documents and stages that which gives shape to the lives of a group of young students of a vocational school in the center of Brussels. The title refers to the major construction works that were carried out in the capital in the fifties and sixties, turning the city into a site of perpetual demolition and construction, as it is still today. A protagonist of La vie en kit, Brussels architect Lucien Kroll (1927-2022) always denounced the excesses of urbanisation and industrialization, and fought all his life against what modernism has left us: inhuman, brutal architecture that belies history. “There is something in the construction of narration which is present in architecture too,” Degavre noted. In a city struggling to take shape, Grands Travaux is also a search for form together with the youngsters who try to organize their lives inside of it, seeking a home, work, a future, and so on. Or as James Lattimer writes about De cierta manera, “story and context are insufficient concepts anyway when they’re as hopelessly intertwined as here.”

Grands travaux
Gerard-Jan Claes, Olivia Rochette, 2016
Grands travaux , Gerard-Jan Claes, Olivia Rochette, 2016, 101’

Grands travaux is set in the Institute Anneessens-Funck, a Dutch-speaking vocational school in the centre of Brussels where young students have come to learn a trade. The film both documents and stages that which gives shape to their lives: the practical assignments and classes at school, football, the oscillation of their love lives, as well as the ongoing search for housing and employment. Depicting daily life within the school walls, Grands travaux also aims to sketch an image of Brussels today, placing its youngsters at the very centre.1

  • 1From Olivia Rochette’s and Gerard-Jan Claes’ website.

EN

Bjorn Gabriels: It’s also striking that you don’t take the bird’s-eye view you’ve mentioned earlier, or include the perspective of various educational or social experts. You shoot from within the intimacy of these boys’ lives.

Gerard-Jan Claes: We wanted to find an intimacy with the boys. We could only attain it through the way we shot our film, but also because after a while they allowed us into their daily lives.

Olivia Rochette: The form of the film is partly guided by the youngsters themselves too. Grands travaux focuses on everyday actions of individual boys. Moments like these are usually omitted from films because of the need to zero in on conflict and the development of a storyline. This reminds me once more of Johan van der Keuken, for whom a film consists of images shot when you come into contact with reality, and not as an illustration of what you already knew in advance.

[...]

Gerard-Jan Claes: Grands travaux might be considered a tentative cartography of the vocational school Anneessens-Funck. We mapped the various spaces of a place where the fragments of a disintegrated city converge. Just like with Because We Are Visual and Rain, constructing Grands travaux was closely related to a tension between inside and outside, between private and public space, between darkness and light... Essentially, Grands travaux is about how we might create new spaces in film. It’s a flowing geography, a movement through the polymorphous spaces inhabited by the boys.

Bjorn Gabriels in conversation with Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes1

NL

Bjorn Gabriels: Daarbij valt ook op dat jullie niet het al eerder vermelde vogelperspectief innemen of inzetten op standpunten van allerlei experts in onderwijs en sociale zaken. Jullie filmen vanuit de intieme levenssfeer van de jongens.

Gerard-Jan Claes: We wilden een intimiteit vinden met de jongens. Die krijg je niet alleen door de wijze waarop je filmt, maar ook doordat ze ons na een tijdje toelieten in hun leefwereld.

Olivia Rochette: De vorm die de film krijgt, wordt mee gestuurd door de jongeren zelf. Grands travaux focust op alledaagse handelingen uit het leven van individuele leerlingen. Momenten als deze worden meestal weggelaten uit films vanuit de behoefte om zich toe te spitsen op conflicten of de ontwikkeling van een verhaallijn. Daarbij denk ik opnieuw aan Johan van der Keuken, voor wie een film bestaat uit beelden gefilmd tijdens je contact met de werkelijkheid en niet vanuit wat je er vooraf al over dacht.

[...]

Gerard-Jan Claes: Je zou Grands travaux kunnen beschouwen als een poging tot cartografie van de beroepsschool Anneessens-Funck. We brengen al de verschillende ruimtes in kaart van een plek waar de Brusselse verbrokkeling convergeert. Net als bij Because We Are Visual en Rain is de opbouw van Grands travaux sterk verbonden aan een spanningsveld tussen binnen en buiten, tussen private en openbare ruimte, tussen donker en licht … In se gaat Grands travaux over hoe we in film nieuwe ruimtes kunnen creëren. De film is een vloeiende geografie, een beweging door de veelvormige leefruimtes van de jongeren.

Bjorn Gabriels in gesprek met Olivia Rochette en Gerard-Jan Claes1

FR

Olivia Rochette: Sans qu’on ne doive leur expliquer quoi que ce soit, Barry, Mamadou, Achmed et Abdi ont très vite compris ce qu’on recherchait. Au fur et à mesure, nous avons tous compris quel ton ou quel rythme il fallait adopter pour le film. La rencontre de ces jeunes garçons a été décisive dans le processus du tournage. Ils étaient vraiment spéciaux et très ouverts, du fait de leur jeune âge aussi. Le contact avec les élèves plus âgés était plus difficile.

Gerard-Jan Claes: Grands travaux joue avec une certaine mise en scène, mais le point de départ reste cependant l’observation. Nous ne voulons pas que la forme soit dictée par une idée, mais essayons de prendre comme point de départ les gens et les endroits que nous rencontrons. Il s’agit donc d’un cinéma documentaire. Souvent, on trouve la distinction entre cinéma et documentaire redondante. Ainsi, le cinéaste Johan van der Keuken disait : « La lumière sur l’écran est toujours fictive. » Mais pour nous, il y a quand même une différence en ce que la tension dans le cinéma documentaire est tout à fait différente. Van der Keuken en était pleinement conscient. À la fin de son deuxième film Herman Slobbe (1966), qui traite d’enfants aveugles, il rend cette tension explicite. Quand il quitte le garçon Slobbe, Van der Keuken dit en voix off: « Tout dans le film est forme. Herman est une forme. Au revoir, gentille forme. » Cette tension entre réalité et forme est inhérente au cinéma documentaire. Le cinéma fictif par contre, ne joue pas avec cette tension et répond selon nous à d’autres enjeux.

Bjorn Gabriels en conversation avec Olivia Rochette et Gerard-Jan Claes1

screening
Cinema RITCS, Brussels
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
De cierta manera
Sara Gómez, 1974
De cierta manera , Sara Gómez, 1974, 78’

Trained as a musician and ethnologist, Sara Gómez’s docu-romance-drama was the first Cuban feature film directed by a woman. Through the prism of a new couple, teacher Yolanda and factory worker Mario, De cierta manera examines the complexities of marginalised lives in 1970s Cuba.

EN

Pelicula de largometraje sobre algunos personajes reales y otros de ficción

Feature film about real people and some fictitious ones

Opening credits1

 

“De cierta manera achieves a special power. Sometimes it is obviously documentary, and at other moments it is obviously fiction, but there are times when you don't know. Perhaps this is its greatest strength and its greatest charm. Sara used cinema to raise questions for herself – to investigate reality – but she was also interested in creating answers to these questions through the process of making a film. This is what she did in De cierta manera. From the direct testimony to the fiction, she allowed us to understand things that are much deeper than mere appearances reveal.”

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968) who supervised the completion of the film after Sara Gómez’s premature death at the age of thirty-one2

 

“De cierta manera seems a bit careless, a little awkward, almost as if it had been let loose on its own, but it also succeeds in penetrating our reality to an uncommon degree, producing an impact which is somehow charged with poetry. I think that it is there above all that our reality is shaped. I see this film as a kind of model; I think it is quite extraordinary.”

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea3

 

“Sara Gómez provocatively combines fiction sequences with documentary footage, and her playful use of form is both startling and purposeful. The film begins abruptly, as if in midscene, with a documentarylike record of a workers’ meeting; the credits are followed by an actual documentary segment on housing development in the early 60s, complete with didactic voice-over. Sections that seem to be dramatic are later revealed to be documentary, while other apparently dramatic scenes are interrupted by discursive sequences. The film’s form questions itself, as do the characters.”

Fred Camper4

 

“A work of formal radicality and political wisdom, De cierta manera moves far beyond the couple’s immediate surroundings, as Sara Gómez’s restless curiosity expands outward in all directions at once, leaving fiction behind to embrace the essay and the documentary and taking real people along for the ride: Afro-Cuban traditions, post-Revolution social policy, the biography of a boxer turned musician, urban development, the shadow cast by colonialism, the roots of machismo. Story and context are insufficient concepts anyway when they’re as hopelessly intertwined as here: the love between two people born out of a remarkable director’s expression of love for Cuba, community, and cinema itself, ambivalent, hopeful, assured.”

James Lattimer5

  • 1The credits list names separately under the headings ‘actors’ (actores) and ‘real people’ (personajes reales).
  • 2Cited in Susan Fanshel, “De cierta manera,” A Decade of Cuban Documentary Film 1972-1982 (New York: Young Filmmakers Foundation), 33.
  • 3Julianne Burton, “Individual fulfillment and collective achievement: An interview with Tomas Gutierrez Alea,” Cineaste, 8 (1), 1977, 10 & 14.
  • 4Fred Camper, “Critic’s Choice: One Way or Another,” Chicago Reader, 10 March 2000.
  • 5James Lattimer, “Historiography - Remeasuring the revolution: De cierta manera,” Viennale, October 2021.
screening
Cinema ZED, Leuven
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
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