Seuls
Mental anguish is all that's present in the film Seuls / Alone (1989). Shot like a grungy medical documentary, Smolders and co-director Thierry Knauff intercut shots of several children at a Belgium psychiatric clinic. The kids are shown with forlorn expressions, twicthing their eyes, sometimes smiling, shaking, jumping, rocking their heads side to side, or smacking their heads with horrific glee against walls. It's a minimalist work that captures the intense monotony of lost and disturbed young minds, and maintains a gritty intensity. - kqek.com
Olivier Smolders
Thierry Knauff
Also Directed by Olivier Smolders
Some footage and shots of expressionless actresses seen in Ravissements are repurposed in La philosophie dans le boudoir / Philosophy in the Boudoir (1991), wherein Smolders takes extracts from the Marquis De Sade’s nutbar text and applies them to scenes of a man in a prison cell, and single or groups of women often standing with the same blank expressions as the man. Perhaps to characterize De Sade’s libertine philosophy and rude text as words and ideas worthy of anyone, Smolders alternates his actors, with several men portraying (presumably) the incarcerated De Sade. - kqek.com
Modest meditation on youth, life and mortality made up almost entirely from professionally made family films. What is more heart-rending than seeing pictures of people who have died? The aim of Mort à Vignole is to transcend the pain of a certain family and to come to terms with sensitive memories and family bonds. - IFFR
The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.
Ten films written and directed by Olivier Smolders too freely inspired by the work of Ignace de Loyola
Based on the real life story of Sagawa, a Japanese student who killed, dismembered and ate a young Dutch girl in Paris.
La part de l’ombre recovers the life of the Hungarian photographer Oskar Benedek, who disappeared the day his exhibition opened; what happened to him? - IndieLisboa
In a world overtaken by eternal darkness, the buttoned down entomologist abandons his phantoms to embrace the unknown.
On vacation in the countryside, a filmmaker thinks about the mourning of his parents. As their faces, and most especially their gaze, fades away, he starts meditating on masks as passages to the afterlife.
A small, empty boudoir slowly becomes populated by a series of young women, their still and open expressions gradually engulfing the screen, as a nun narrates an account of religious rapture. Belgian filmmaker Olivier Smolders continues a brilliant exploration of religious ecstasy, figured in and epitomized by the erotic, death-defying gaze of the camera lens, in this sublime black-and-white treatment set to excerpts from the theological writings of Saint Teresa of Avila. - Robert Avila
Also Directed by Thierry Knauff
Abattoirs is shot in black and white and has a very sparse soundtrack. Its takes are stark there is hardly a camera movement sometimes photographs are filmed. Furthermore, almost unique in the history of film the film has square pictures which add to its intensity. (miff.com.au)
Step by step, the film reveals a woman's way through life. As the lonely bearer of many different thoughts, she dances the worlds of her memories, feelings and experiences, discoveries and cheerful emotions.
Inspired by jazz musician Jimmy Giuffre's statement, 'I’m not afraid to play something simple', Thierry Knauff has created a cinematic exercise in capturing beauty, observing nature and being moved by film. He translated the way jazz musicians play together into an interplay of elements he saw on the Tisza River, a tributary of the Danube: rustling willow leaves, followed by the whirring of thousands of mayfly wings and a young girl's hair blowing in the wind. The film plays with abstract patterns and focuses on emerging life and the tough battle for survival in nature. Says Knauf, ‘Vita brevis is a poem of the moment, an evocation of the fragile and fleeting dance of life.’
Fragments of a text by Jean Genet – “Four Hours in Chatila” – are illustrated by summer images of a park in Brussels. The contrast between what is seen and what is said attempts to stop, to break the flow of information which tends to neutralize horror.
Anton Webern's "Langsamer Satz" for string quartet was performed as part of the "My GAIA" concert during the Festival's 2012 edition. Composed in 1905, "Langsamer Satz" is in traditional sonata form and in the key of C Major; it would be another twenty years before Webern turned to twelve-tone technique. "Langsamer Satz" premiered in 1962, seventeen years after Webern's death, and has the longest playing time of any piece in his body of work.
With light and shadow as dancing partners, Michèle Noiret enters and explores worlds that she evokes and challenges with her dance. She immerses herself and loses herself in them. The intoxication of dance and the enjoyment of pure cinema surrender to each other in a film in one fluid motion. As in certain dreams.
This experimental film examines the physical and emotional effect of violence as it is seen through the eyes of women around the world, ranging from a Irish mother explaining the use of "knee-capping" by the IRA to an Arabic woman describing how war and terrorism has impacted her country. Each woman who narrates uses her own native tongue, with nine languages represented on the soundtrack. While the film does not feature an original score, the Master Drummers of Burundi appear in one sequence. Wild Blue, Notes for Several Voices was screened as part of the Un Certain Regard program at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.