The Second Night

Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.

A playful, free, and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.

In Violin Fase, Eric Pauwels twirls the camera around the body of dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Through this process, Pauwels creates a new relationship between camera and dancer, but also between body and dance, dance and cinema. Consisting of a geometrical and minimalist choreographic structure filmed in four uninterrupted takes, the artist’s camera captures a woman dedicated to exploring the boundaries of physical exhaustion.

A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.

This film is a moving tribute to French filmmaker Jean Rouch. Pauwels, a former collaborator of Rouch, accompanies him on a trip to Japan. In this cinematic letter, which he himself calls “a journey into the memory”, Pauwels philosophises about the essence of cinema and, consequently, of life.

A personal travel notebook. A travel through Europe in search of thirty paintings of the iconic Christian martyr. The film is conceived as a voyage of initiation, an imaginary reportage... imaginary because without an original image of the Saint, all representations were possible.

A film on the gestures of work, those of a sculptor, a designer, a composer and dancers. A sketch of their relationship to the world subjected to the double gaze of fiction and documentary.

A summer film, of complicity, a film linked to the situation of "now or never" because it is born of encounters, availability, reflections or states of being in motion as time, ultimately a "snapshot" cinematographic.

Motorway, roads, villages of Northern France, Flanders. A man with a Super 8 camera films his route, the villagers and himself. Portraits, self-portrait. As the images unfold a young villager, Josse, is intrigued by the camera’s presence. For the cameraman the lens is an eye with which one films reality, for the villager the camera represents CINEMA, the magic of fiction. Josse accosts the cameraman and leads him across the fields where his girlfriend joins them. The outing becomes their production, with themselves in front of the camera. Games. Gradually diverted by Josse’s enthousiasme the film slides into moments of fiction, until its inevitable breakdown.

A conversation with filmmaker Eric Pauwels about his Cabin trilogy, which includes Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter (2000), The Dreamed Films (2010), and The Second Night (2016).