A favourite film, director, or producer for Luc Besson's birthday (1959).

 

Having only seen three of Delvaux's films, I feel I can safely say his work is hypnotic, but not in the common sense. We see a world through both Delvaux's and his protagonists eyes, and experience their duality as one. This displacement is a recurring theme in Delvaux's work, the work of a man raised in one world and speaking the language of another, both worlds bearing the same name, Belgium.

 

This slow tear is also the theme is his best known film, De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen [The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short] (1965), in which a schoolteacher loses himself after a pupil graduates. When we think we are firmly seated in Delvaux's universe, we fall back, like that moment just before sleep sets in. And again, in his tragically under-seen Belle from 1973. Now it's a poet who finds a woman living in a ramshackle hut in Belgium's peatland, her language an unknown. With only one main speaker, the duality forms in the poet's words, in his attempts to give her root.

 

And so do we, the viewers. We hang on to that root, Delvaux's, only to sink back into our own loss of words.

Green for Irish-American Heritage Month (USA)

“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”

– caption

“Our past doesn't belong to us.”

For Idus Martiae, the Ides of March, a scene showing the main character's back.

 

Olivier, a carpentry teacher at a youth rehabilitation center, has a new apprentice, 16 year old Francis. Fascinated by the boy and his unspoken backstory, he starts following him around.

“With these shots from the back and the neck, we hope to confront the spectator with a mystery, the impossibility of knowing and seeing. The face and the eyes should not try to express a situation that already sufficiently stirs up the spectator’s interests. This expression would direct, limit or even prevent expectations, whereas the back and the neck allow the spectator to go deeper, like a car driving into the night.”

– Luc Dardenne, via [spoilers]

“The Dardennes' brothers’ camera follows Olivier in his enigmatic, ominous obsession with the boy and almost constantly films him up close and from behind. In the absence of a true gaze, the back turns into a face that speaks but doesn’t explain anything, “a body that becomes a vibrating membrane”, as Jean-Pierre Dardenne so beautifully put it.” (via)

A favourite non-Hitchcock mystery for National Hitchcock Day (USA)

“You're a foreigner and you're lost.”

“Three days ago, at exactly 0600 – because that is really not the time – on February 5 – because that is really not the date – this freighter, which shall be nameless, sailed from a certain Far Eastern port. Its destination: The Port of Los Angeles, Wilmington, California. This is fact.”

– narrator

Close quarters: US premiere of 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016).

 

A filmmaker (Akerman) reluctantly hosts a guest (the always imposing Jeffrey Kime) in her already cramped quarters. His increasingly expanding presence in volume, sight and sound are insufferable for the quiet cineast.

Strategy for Bobby Fischer's birthday (1943).

 

People meticulously plan, move, and countermove in response to an invasion.