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7/27/2019 A Dream That Was Not All a Dream Andre Delvaux Films
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A Dream That Was Not All a Dream
The Films of Andr Delvaux
"For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation
in which theory and film practice went hand in hand."
When the name of Belgian filmmaker Andr Delvaux, who died in 2002 at the
age of 76, is mentioned, those who know him immediately think of a mixture of
realism and a highly cinematic dreamlike essence that recalls magic realism. A
very suitable description of some of his most acclaimed films such as TheMan
Who Had His Hair Cut Short (De man die zijn haart kort liet knippen, 1965),
One Night . . . a Train (Un soir, un train, 1968), Rendezvous at Bray
(Rendez-Vous Bray, 1971), orBelle (1973). But the "dreamlike" tag alone isinsufficient to evaluate his oeuvre, which includes various works for television,
numerous short films, and documentaries. As Philip Mosley put it, Delvaux's films are noted for "an
aesthetic of formal rigour, of studied interiority, and of immersion in the multiple cultures of his native
land."1For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an
investigation in which theoryhe commonly quoted the works of semiologists such as Grard Genette and
Christian Metz and film practice went hand in hand.
Critics like Philippe Reynaert have defined Delvaux's films as a "rencontre des arts"("a meeting ofarts"). For him, film was a kind of a synthesis of all the arts. This idea of cinema is reminiscent of German
composer Richard Wagner's concept of "total work of art" (Gesamtkunstwerk). In his late writings, around
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1850-1851, Wagner developed the idea that opera should blend many forms including music, poetry, drama,
and painting. It's easy to find traces of this same belief in Delvaux's works, which aim to develop a creative
collaboration among many artistic fields. Of course, literature was one of his main sources of inspiration, but
so too were music and painting. Long before entering the motion picture industry, Delvaux studied piano
composition, and music had strongly informed many of his films, including Rendezvous at Bray (1971),
Belle (1973), and Met Dieric Bouts (1975).2This personal aim was an attempt "to bring together a musicalexperimentation with a cinematic experimentation (in a 'total art') through a brand new form of film
narrative."3
Being highly praised by a wide range of film critics and intellectuals, and having received prestigious
awards the BFI's Film of the Year in 1966, Prix Louis Delluc, and prizes in numerous film festivals
including New York, Montreal, Mannheim, and Hyres his career peaked during the 1960s and '70s.
Now, almost ten years after his death, just four of his films are available on DVD, and his erstwhile prestige
seems to be slowly evaporating.Andr Delvaux was born in 1926 in Hverle, in the Flemish province of Brabant. Following the
family tradition of music, he studied piano (counterpoint and fugue with Francis de Bourguignon) at the
Conservatoire Royal in Brussels. In 1948 he obtained a BA in German philology at the Universit Libre de
Bruxelles and subsequently began teaching at the Athne Comunal Fernand Blum in Schaerbeek. A
lifelong film lover, he had by then attended such beacons of cinephilia as the Ecran du Sminaire des Arts,
the biggest and most respected cine-club in Brussels, and the Cinema Museum (later the Belgian
Cinmathque). When he met Jacques Ledoux, who occupied a similar place in Belgian cinema to that of
Henri Langlois in France, Delvaux was invited to play the piano accompaniment to silent films at the Ecran.
"There I saw for the first time the great classic films. And I accompanied Metropolis with the piano many
times, also films by Murnau and Sjstrom."4In 1954 Delvaux met Stanley Reed, who had been invited to
Brussels by the Cinmathque. Reed was in charge of an educational division of the British Film Institute.
As a result of this meeting, the next year Delvaux organized a course introducing young students to film at
the Athne Fernand Blum. This resulted in a number of short films developed over the following years with
the collaboration of his students: Nous tions treize (1956), Deux jours d'et/Two Summer Days (1959,
also involving students from King's College, London), and Yves boit du lait (1960).
Between 1960 and 1966, Delvaux worked on at least five television broadcasts on different film
subjects for the Belgische Radio en Televisie (BRT), the Belgian public television company. These subjects
included film personalities such as Federico Fellini and Jean Rouch, a traveling exhibition on film organized
by Henri Langlois, an in-depth look at contemporary Polish cinemafocusing on filmmakers like Andrzej
Wadja, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Andrzej Munkand a "making of" show about Jacques Demy's The
Young Ladies of Rochefort (Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, 1967) dealing with the different professions
within the film industry.5It was also the BRT, in collaboration with the Ministerie van Nationale Opvoeding
en Kultuur (Belgian Ministry of Flemish Culture), that offered to produce Delvaux's film debut in 1965. By
that time, Belgian cinema was reduced to short films and documentariesthose of Henri Storck, Charles
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Dekeukeleire, and Paul Haesaerts, the most celebrated Belgian filmmakers. Delvaux's first feature put
modern Belgian cinema on the international map.
This landmark debut, TheMan Who Had His Hair Cut
Short, surprises us today as a showcase for Delvaux's maturity as a
filmmaker and his strong technical skills. This is especially striking
considering that it was shot in far from ideal conditionsin lessthan four weeks and for the relatively low budget of 1.5 million
Belgian francs.6The film is based on the eponymous novel7by
Johan Daisne, a poet, novelist, journalist, and film critic who was
considered a classic author in contemporary Flemish literature. He defined his style as a kind of magic
realism. "Of course, the book's appearance is not traditionally cinematic at all,"8Delvaux later remarked. In
fact, the novel is a long, single-paragraph stream of consciousness in which the main character, Govert
Miereveld (played brilliantly by Senne Rouffaer in the film), a schizophrenic professor at a female college,explores his platonic love for Fran, one of his students. So the main challenge for the filmmaker in adapting
the book to the screen was to find a cinematic narrative formula to keep the audience "inside the character"
throughout the whole film. Miereveld's point of view had to be exactly the same as the audience's. Watching
the film, it is now evident that "the biggest strength ofThe Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short is"
according to French critic Michel Ciment "to reconstruct in an objective form an inner experience,
showing us the world in Govert's eyes and, at the same time, showing us also his figure."9From that point
of view, the main importance of the film is that it prefigures both the narratives and structures of Delvaux's
following works; that is to say, his taste for subjective tales based on a single point of view not only
Govert's but also Mathias's in One Night . . . a Train, Julien's in Rendezvous at Bray, and Mathieu's in
Belle. Most of his films show "inner visions" that mix reality with imagination and fantasy. From that
combination of elements emerge fantastic atmospheres used to reveal what is hiding behind human
existence. In his own words, Delvaux always sought "the neverending mystery within things,"10a mystery
that is revealed not only by the images but also by his very personal use of sounds. The "suggestive rather
than descriptive use of image and sound identifies Delvaux as the cinematic heir to Symbolism . . . alert to
the possibilities of synaesthetic effects, of eerie symmetries, of intricate correspondences, rhythms and
rhymes."11Structurally, the film follows a dialectical outline: thesis (the ideal of Virtue represented by
Fran); antithesis (looking at Death in the autopsy scene);synthesis (the
murder of Fran); and coda (the newsreel and the shadow of a doubt: Is she
really dead?). The same tight intellectual construction marks many of his
subsequent films.
That is certainly the case with One Night . . . a Train, based again
on Daisne, this time on the short story"Der trein der Traagheid." Actually,
the screenplay is only loosely inspired by it, as the first half of the film is
completely original. It focuses on Mathias Vreeman (Yves Montand), a
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Flemish intellectual and lecturer who teaches literature at the university. Its first part is a very realistic
evocation of his daily life, a life characterized by a series of conflicts: with his family, colleagues, and even
his fiance Anne (Anouk Aime). In spite of his very logical and rational approach to life, he is so
insensitive to the things surrounding him that he is unable to enjoy it. On the other hand, the atmosphere of
the second part is dream-like and even nightmarish. All the conflicts (familial, linguistic, emotional)
reappear like a dark and distressing dream, but this dream of his is presented with an absolute appearance ofreality. By the end of the story, it is too late for regrets: Mathias loses Anne, who dies in an accident on a
train in which both are travelling. The whole film seems to be a metaphysical reinterpretation of the myth of
Orpheus. One Night . . . a Train has a very interesting structure: the two different parts (one real, one
dreamt) fit together perfectly. Delvaux uses a series of correspondences and symmetries between them (with
a mirror-like effect a mise en abyme) to unify a very fragmented tale. Variations (like, for example, in the
works of Schubert and Mahler) seem to be a definitive structural element. One Night . . . a Train, with its
two major French film stars, Montand and Aime, and a Twentieth Century-Fox release deal, remainsDelvaux's most celebrated film.
For economic reasons, Delvaux needed to continue working
within the French movie industry for his next work. Rendezvous at
Bray is another literary adaptation; this time the source is the
nouvelleLe Roi Cophetua12by surrealistic French writer Julien
Gracq. Also an essayist, critic, journalist, and playwright, Gracq
was considered a cult figure in contemporary French literature by
the time the film was made in 1970. Carefully paced and
mysteriously atmospheric,Le Roi Copethuais inspired by vivid
memories of the past the friendship between the nameless narrator (Julien Eschenbach in the film) and
Jacques Neuil in the years prior to the Great War. Gracq himself left us a colorful picture of Delvaux's
adaptation of his work, used by the filmmaker "as an invitation to the journey, like a trampoline."13As
usual, the director's approach to adaptation meant a selection of some of the elements in the novel(the
setting and atmosphere, the three main characters, some situations and even dialogues, and its two central
images: Goya's engravingLa mala nocheand Burne-Jones's paintingKing Cophetua and the Beggar Maid),
combined with some new characters (especially that of Odile, played by Bulle Ogier) and situations. But the
main difference between book and film is in the structure. The film, fragmented and tilting between the
present and the past, is constructed through numerous flashbacks. Delvaux uses the form of the musical
rondo (A, B, A, C, A, D . . .) to organize present (A) and past time (each one of the flashbacks being B, C, D
. . .). He will continue to make frequent use of musical structures to construct his films but never again with
such perfection as in Rendezvous at Bray. The way in which the past is nostalgically evoked by vivid
memories gives the film a Proustian patina.
Delvaux's exploration of magic realism in cinema continued with Belle and Benvenuta (1983). The
first, an original screenplay by the director, tells the story of the poet Mathieu Grgoire (Jean-Luc Bideau)
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and his amour foufor Belle (Adriana Bogdan), a beautiful stranger created (or not?) by his imagination. In
this film, it is even more difficult to separate reality and imagination than in his previous works. In fact
Delvaux, who cited the French romantic poet Grard de Nerval as one of the Belle's major influences, tried,
in his own words, to create a film "based on the alternation of reality and dream, one flowing into the other
with no end."14For Mathieu, as for Nerval, "the dream is a second life,"15and, as it comes to an end, it is
almost impossible for him to separate the two as his dreamt life has a striking real-life effect. Joseph Martyhas pointed out how in Belle, following the surrealist principle,"life and death, reality and imagination, past
and future . . . stop being noticed as a contradiction."16Instead of the symmetrical, easily distinguishable
two parts ofOne Night . . . a Train, here reality and dream are combined freely and alternately from one
sequence to another. But, as in that earlier film, there are enough correspondences and similarities between
Mathieu's real existence (with his family and friends in Spa) and his imaginary inner life (represented by
Belle and the Hautes Fagnes forests) for the audience to be able
to distinguish between them.On the other hand, Benvenuta, based on Suzanne Lilar's
La confession anonyme, was Delvaux's last attempt at magic
realism. Such significant and personal elements as "poetry,
magic, erotic longing, and the omnipresence of death" which
"pervade Andr Delvaux's carefully crafted fiction films,"17all
reappear in this film. So Benvenuta can be easily seen as the summing-up of his "magic realism" cycle. In
it, the director's own metaphysical and spiritual aspirations (drawing on influences from the Flemish mystics
Hadewych and Ruusbroec to magic realism's own neo-platonist tradition) are sublimated. That's why Jean-
Nol Vuarnet has defined the film as a sort of "mysticism of love."18But dealing, like many of Delvaux's
films, with sexual desire, the mystical elements differ from those in his previous works. A quote from Livio
(Vittorio Gassman), one of the film's main characters, gives us the key to the essence of this particular brand
of mysticism: "In the sexual act, I never look for anything but the soul." This is what all Delvaux's films
express. However, by the late 70's, he felt that the possibilities in magic realism were running out. He
admitted: "I should turn to something else."19. And so he did.
In the years between 1975 and 1985, Delvaux shot three full-length films and a medium-length one.
Those were the years of what critics dubbed hisfilms de recherche("research films")20, three
unconventional nonfiction films including With Dieric Bouts (Met Dieric Bouts, 1975), To Woody Allen,
from Europe with Love (1980), and Babel Opra (Babel Opra ou la rpetition de Don Juan, 1985). The
first one is a medium-length film produced to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the
Flemish painter Dieric Boutsin 1475. Delvaux and Ivo Michiels, his co-screenwriter and one of his closest
collaborators, had two aims here: first, to equate their artistic capacities with those of Bouts, and second, to
track their common Flemish experiences. A very personal, even autobiographical film, With Dieric Bouts is
most importantly proof of the filmmaker's love for the culture and landscapes of his country. To Woody
Allen, from Europe with Love is not only a portrait of the New York director during the shooting of
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Stardust Memories (1980), but also, and above all, a film about the craft of filmmaking. Finally, Babel
Opra, Delvaux's least-known film, is probably also his most unconventional and thus his most difficult to
classify. Taking the form of a musical comedy, it combines rehearsals of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni at
the Thtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels (real rehearsals, as they actually happened) with a fictional
story about a film director (Franoise Beukelaers) planning to shoot a film version of the opera. Once more,
reality and fiction go hand in hand in a film that unites theatre, music, and a deep reflection on mise enscne. All three of these "research films" show Delvaux's desire to experiment with film genres and
aesthetics and to take his own filmmaking a step further.
Woman Between Wolf and Dog (Een Vrouw Tussen Hond en Wolf, 1979) and The Abyss
(L'oeuvre au noir, 1988) are among Delvaux's last fiction films. The first deals with a subject still taboo in
Belgium in the '70s, when the film was made: collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation.
In France, this had already been the subject of the controversial Marcel Ophls documentary Le chagrin et
la piti (1969) and Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1974). But if one film most influenced Delvaux in hisdecision to make Woman Between Wolf and Dog, it was Resnais and Duras's Hiroshima, mon amour
(1959). In fact, the female lead characters in both films are essentially different visions of the same woman.
Woman Between . . . is a very realistic melodrama, not so different from what was known in classical
Hollywood as "women's pictures," set in WWII. As in Delvaux's old and long-cherished project Karl et
Anna,21Lieve is a woman in between two men. She hesitates between her Nazi collaborator husband
Adriaan (Rutger Hauer) and her lover Franois (Roger Van Hool), aResistencemember. The filmmaker and
Ivo Michiels make use of the story, a common love triangle, to present a thorough and detailed depiction of
a period marked by feelings of shame and guilt. One of the film's high points is the fine psychological
portrait of Lieve, as played by Marie-Christine Barrault.
Watching The Abyss for the first time, we immediately feel
as if we were seeing a sort of posthumous film. As in the cases of
Dreyer's Gertrud (1964), Tarkovsky's Sacrifice (Offret, 1986) or
Huston's The Dead (1987), for example, it feels like a filmic
testament, a kind of final lesson on cinema as Delvaux understood
it. Although adapted from Marguerite Yourcenar's novelL'uvre au
noir22, it is easy to see Znon (Gian-Maria Volont) as an
extension of the filmmaker himself. Adolphe Nysenholc23has used
the expression "intimate film" to describe The Abyss, a tag that can
be also used to describe his whole oeuvre. But of all Delvaux's films, it is in fact the one that deals most
literally with the spiritual aims of his creator. The protagonist is Znon, a doctor and an alchemist in 16th-
century Flanders. Against the orthodox philosophical and religious dogmas of the era, he pursues a wider
range of knowledge that leads him to a spiritual purification: what alchemists call unio contrarium. While
The Abyss has the elements of a huge historical epic, it centres on the interior life of Znonhis beliefs,
wishes, contradictions, and remembrances. In the same stoical way that Znon accepts his death, Delvaux
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then accepted the end of his career in films. "Very nostalgic,"(24) he left some long-cherished projects
unfilmed and retired to a quiet life, attending tributes, retrospectives, and master classes. He passed away
quietly, as he had lived, of a heart failure in one of those classes.
Filmography
1965 De Man Die Zijn Haar Kort Liet Knippen (The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short)
1968 Un soir, un train (One Night . . . A Train)
1971 Rendez-vous Bray (Rendezvous at Bray)
1973 Belle (Belle)
1975 Met Dieric Bouts (with Dieric Bouts)
1979 Een Vrouw tussenhonden wolf(Woman Between Wolf and Dog)
1980 To Woody Allen, from Europe with Love
1983 Benvenuta (Benvenuta)
1985 Babel Opra ou la rpetition de Don Juan
1988 L'uvre au noir (The Abyss)
Notes
1.Mosley, Philip: "The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short," in Ernst Mathijs (Ed.): The Cinema of the Low
Countries, London, Wallflower, 2004, pp. 77-85. (12) Most notably in With Dieric Bouts (1975), in which
the structure is inspired by the musical compositions of Dufay and Machault. For the influence of music in
the films by Delvaux, see Nysenholc, Adolphe:Andr Delvaux ou le ralisme magique, Paris, ditions du
Cerf, 2006, pp. 129-155
2.In Lara, Fernando (Ed.):Doce miradas sobre el cine europeo (El autor y su obra), Valladolid, Junta de
Castilla y Len, 2003, p. 76.
3.Sojcher, Frdric:Andr Delvaux, le cinma ou l'art des rencontres,Paris, Seuil/Archimbaud, 2005,p.
199.
4.Fellini (1960, 4 episodes); Jean Rouch (1962, 5); Cinma, bonjour (1958); Le cinma polonais (1964,
9); and Derriere l'cran (1966, 6). All of them were produced by the BRT.
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5.For these and other production details, check out my PhD dissertationEl realismo mgico en la obra
cinematogrfica de Andr Delvaux(Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2008):
http://eprints.ucm.es/8147/1/T30498.pdf.
6.Daisne, Johan:De Man die Zijn Haar Kort Liet Knippen, Brussels, Manteau, 1948.
7.Delvaux in Apr, Adriano; Comolli, Jean-Louis and Narboni, Jean: "Entretien avec Andr Delvaux" in
Cahiers du cinmaNo. 180, July 1966, pp. 62-66.
8.Ciment, Michel: "Le silence du monde" inPositifNo. 82, March 1967, p. 54.
9.Delvaux to Boujut, Michel in Combat, 02/14/1968.
10.Mosley, Ph.: Op. Cit., p. 81.
11."Le Roi Cophetua"is included in Julien Gracq'sLa Presqu'le, Paris, Jose Corti, 1970. An English
translation of the nouvelleis available:King Copethua, New York, Turtle Point Press, 2003.
12.In "Une collaboration sans nouages" included in Julien Gracq'sEn lisant en crivant, Paris, Jose Corti,
1981.
13.Delvaux inRevue belge du cinmaNo.7/8, 1977.
14.Nerval, Grard de : Aurelia suive de Lttres Jenny Colon, La Pandora et Les chimeres, Paris, Le Livre
de Poche, 1972. English translation :Aurelia and Other Writtings, Boston, Exact Change, 1996.
15.Marty, Joseph : "Le chant des rendez-vous imaginaires"inL'Avant scne du cinmaNo. 226, April
1979, p. 5.
16.Colvile, Georgiana M. M.: "Between Surrealism and Magic Realism: The Early Feature Films of Andr
Delvaux"in Katharine Conley and Pierre Taminiaux (Eds.): Yale French StudiesNo. 109 (Surrealism andIts Others), New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 115.
17.Vuarnet, Jean-Nol : "La femme aux deux visages"in Nysenholc, Adolphe (Ed.):Andr Delvaux,
Brussels, Revue de l'Universit Libre de Bruxelles, 1994, pp. 229-234.
18.Delvaux in Sojcher, Frdric: Op. cit.,p. 56.
19.See Borgomano, Laure y Nysenholc, Adolphe:Andr Delvaux. Une uvre, un film: L'uvre au noir,
Klincksieck, ditions Labor-Mridiens, 1988, pp. 22-31.
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9/9
20.Delvaux worked in 1970 on an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Leonhard Frank. The novel has
been filmed several times by such filmmakers as Joe May and Mervyn LeRoy. It was supposed to be a
German-French-Belgian coproduction, but it was finally cancelled as an American major production
company was developing a very similar project at the same time. The book is a realistic, if sentimental,
account of a soldier who seduces his comrade's wife.
21.Yourcenar, Marguerite :L'uvre au noir, Paris, Gallimard, 1988. There is an English translation
available : The Abyss, New York, Noonday Press, 1997.
22.Nysenholc, Adolphe. (2006): Op. cit., p. 114.
23.Lara, F.: Op. Cit., p. 90.
Santiago Rubn de Celis is a film critic and historian. He holds a PhD in communication and has published
books on Jules Dassin and Blake Edwards. A contributor to the Spanish version ofCahiers du cinema, he
lives in Spain.
August 2011 |Issue 73
Copyright 2013 by
Santiago Rubn de Celis
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4-10-13
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