Les amis du plaisir

This ethnographic film sends us the image of the man who eats, a stark look at Belgium. We spend about one-eighth of our days eating. Luc de Heusch films these repetitive gestures that seem trivial, yet reveal so much of a particular culture and a civilization. From morning to night, from the market installation to dinner, from the daily and fast meal to the feast, the ethnologist is interested in all social classes. Originally, an attempt of cinematographic ethnography, neutral and distant, intended to define the Belgians by the way they eat. In fact, Luc de Heusch films his contemporaries as if they were Papuans.

After Perséphone, his first film which he describes as “an experimental, mythological poem” and shoots under the pseudonym Luc Zangrie, he makes a portrait of playwright Michel de Ghelderode together with his friend Jean Raine. It introduces us to the world of a creator obsessed with and fascinated by death. If biographic references are present, they are only there in order to place the writer in the right setting: nostalgia for Bruges and Flanders, solitary wanders through a backward-looking, legendary Brussels. Ghelderode’s gravelly voice is the leitmotiv of the film, which focuses on rehearsals of his plays at the Théâtre de Poche and with the puppets of the Théâtre Royal de Toone. We accompany him into his study, a place of dreams and fantasy, full of baroque objects that define his world.

A bitter-sweet story of a young sales assistant and a truck driver trapped between their dreams and the economic depression.

The filmmakers find the Abruzzo National Park to be the most suitable place in Europe to film the wild fox, one of the most elusive and fearful animals in the forest, with its proverbial cunning that allows it to escape all the traps set by man. For five months, the documentary filmmaker and his assistants live in these forests, observing the landscape and its inhabitants: deer, bears, wolves, wild boars, and roe deer. They manage to gain the trust of a female fox, accompanying her, waiting for her, losing her, and finding her again.

The surrealist painter René Magritte questions the objective reality and emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relationship between an object, its image and its name: the evocation of mystery consists of images of familiar things gathered or transformed in such a way that they no longer conform to our ideas, whether naive or wise.

The Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, organiser of the COBRA movement, invents a graphic writing system