settima

jeanpainlevé

Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides [Liquid Crystals] (Jean Painlevé, 1978)

Feb

28

National Science Day – India

Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides (1978)

A scene that foreshadows computer-generated imagery. DP: Jean Painlevé.

Filmmaker, photographer and honorary surrealist Jean Painlevé made science films that verge on experimental art cinema. With custom-built camera setups, he explored the world above and below the water surface, and with that exposed human traits.

 

It's almost impossible to select one film from a filmography as vast as #Painlevé's. In honour of C.V. #Raman, lets go with his Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides.

 

It's on Ubu, in case you wonder.

Het kwade oog [Le mauvais oeil / The Evil Eye] (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1937)

Feb

4

Farmers Day

Het kwade oog (1937)

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.

De tweede politieagent: “Jean, hebt ge ze?” [het spel vertraagt]

– 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”).