Art & Cinema Box set (3 DVD'S + BOOK)

Charles Dekeukeleire, André Cauvin, Paul Haesaerts, Pierre Alechinsky, Henri Storck & Luc de Heusch

The 1940s and 1950s can be considered the heyday of the experimental art film. In that era, leading filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Henri Alekan and Henri-Georges Clouzot presented the art documentary as a truly experimental genre that enabled them to combine cinematic experiments with artistic profundity. Also Belgian filmmakers such as Charles Dekeukeleire, André Cauvin, Henri Storck, Paul Haesaerts, and Luc de Heusch among others made important contributions to the development of the art film. Their films were clearly more than mere camera registrations of artworks but attempted at translating the perception of the original artworks into a truly cinematic experience. While some of their films demonstrated that cinema could become a useful tool for art analysis, others focused on the representation of artists such as Picasso, Magritte, Delvaux, Alechinksy, and Dotremont at work. Closely connected to or inspired by avant-garde currents such as Surrealism or CoBrA, these filmmakers were convinced that films on art should also be 'art films' in themselves, which are characterized by a self-conscious modernist or avant-garde aesthetic.

This publication brings together 3 DVD's with 19 of the most important films and a book with an essay by Steven Jacobs on the experimental art film in Belgium. Steven Jacobs is art historian specialised in photography and film. He is author of The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (010 Publishers, 2007) and Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He teaches modern and contemporary art at the department of Art-, Music- and Theatre Studies of Ghent University, Belgium.

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