De tweede politieagent: “Jean, hebt ge ze?” [het spel vertraagt]Het kwade oog [Le mauvais oeil / The Evil Eye] (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1937)
Feb
4
Farmers Day
A farmer in the bottom of the screen holding a scythe against an imposing Flemish sky. DP: François Rents.
In the small East Flemish villages inhabited by non-actors, where the story takes place, one day, a vagrant shows up. The villagers say he has the evil eye. Mills burned and harvest cursed, they say. The man is cursed, by a deep sense of guilt, over something from the past that slowed down time.
– Herman Teirlinck, De vertraagde film (1922)
Het kwade oog occupies that small frozen moment between sound and silence. With an acute sense of what's possible in cinema, even more than in literature and theatre, Dekeukeleire applies what he had Eisenstein seen do to with his interpretation of Brecht's episches Theater (“epic theatre”).