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Film Secession, Antwerp (2026)

18/12/2025

What is most striking about this extraordinary sequence from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012, clips 1-3) is an elliptical and tantalizingly enigmatic form of montage.

The four-shot sequence registers as spatiotemporally coherent because of a series of matches and variations, with the right-to-left movement of camera, dolly, and figure in the second shot (clip 1) matched by the left-to-right movement in the third (clip 2), the shift from lateral to tunnel space in the first shot echoed in the third, and the fourth shot reworking these movements (clip 3).

We briefly lose the ability to distinguish camera and object, figure and ground at the beginning of the final shot (clip 3), which gives added resonance to the play with point-of-view in the third (clips 1-2). What seems to be a straightforward, over-the-shoulder setup becomes, in motion, something rather different. The repeatedly racked focus serves as a psychological correlate to the protagonist’s yearning for clarity and stability.

Anderson strongly evokes the work of John Ford, concluding the first shot with a dolly through a doorway much like the one that both opens and closes The Searchers (Ford, 1956, images 4-5).

Ford was the cinema’s great poet of passageways, liminal spaces, and transitions, and he gave a strong cinematic inflection to a visual tradition that was rooted in the conventions of Northern European genre painting (images 6-7).

In My Darling Clementine (Ford, 1946, clip 8), these tropes are brought together in a beautiful, if tentative, synthesis connecting the constitutive elements of social life with emblems – the flags and the church steeple - of a nation undergoing tumultuous change.

Anderson encourages a complementary meditation in The Master by having his flag pass at twilight underneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a different but equally charged icon in our technologically saturated age (clip 9).

Like Ford, Anderson links depictions of the past, here 1946 as seen from the perspective of 2012, to anxieties about the present, as if he were trying to locate the roots of our contemporary malaise.

Learn more in our Montage Exhibition. Follow the links in our bio.

14/11/2025

Discover some of the bold ways adventurous editing has been used to transform space, change perceptions, and introduce new creative possibilities in our Montage Exhibition.

Follow the direct link in our bio to begin exploring and learn more (including THE ALL-SEEING EYE, THE CREATIVE HAND, THE CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD SYSTEM, OZU AND THE MYSTERIES OF THE VASE, MYSTERY AND MECHANISM IN BRESSON AND DREYER, THE CREATIVE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE GODFATHER, ABEL GANCE’S POLYVISION, GODARD’S MONTAGE IMAGES, TARKOVSKY’S MIRRORS, and MONTAGE, MOVEMENT, AND THE SPACES OF MEMORY).

1. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
2. Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
3. Late Spring (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949)
4. The Godfather, Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

15/10/2025

In the culminating sequence of Close-Up (1990, clip 1), Abbas Kiarostami transforms what could be an infinitely recurring mise-en-abîme into an extraordinary movement towards deeper understanding. Neorealist pioneer Roberto Rossellini famously said, "To get at reality, you need tricks." For Kiarostami, this means using gaps in sound recording and clearly staged shifts in camera angle to create an impression of spontaneous discovery.

In our portrait films, both Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ryūsuke Hamaguchi describe Kiarostami as one of two contemporary Asian filmmakers to exert a formative influence. The other is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien.

With varying degrees of acknowledgment, both Hou and Kiarostami reworked the paradigms of Italian Neorealism, treating the work of directors like Rossellini as models to be worked through rather than simply emulated.

Hou's greatest films interrogate the complex history of Taiwan and the ruptures created by the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, which radically transformed the history of the region. In this respect, the under-rated Good Men, Good Women (1995, clip 2), a documentary/fiction hybrid about the creation of a fictional film derived from the narrated experiences of 1940s resistance fighters, is representative. Hou regards both the leftist idealism of the 1940s and the materialist narcissism of the 1990s with equanimity, using formal devices (camera position and movement, alternations between black-and-white and color) to set up distinctions that are blurred by the mirroring structure of the narrative.

In Syndromes and a Century (2006), Apichatpong combines elements of both approaches, and of the methods of the Surrealists, in a new way. The enigmatic ending (clip 3) once again demonstrates that it is the difficulty of capturing an always shifting reality that creates opportunities for renewal.

Discover the films, watch the portraits, and learn more on Film Secession. Follow the links in our bio.

14/10/2025

Josef von Sternberg's debut feature The Salvation Hunters (1925) already demonstrates the meticulous composition, gestural rhymes, graphic tension, and plastic force that would soon make him one of cinema's preeminent stylists.

Made independently for $5,000 and shot on location throughout the Los Angeles area, the film received the backing of United Artists after Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were cajoled into a private screening (lead actress Georgia Hale would co-star in The Gold Rush the next year). The Salvation Hunters was celebrated at the time for unadulterated realism, but it now seems like a unique synthesis of pictorialist atmosphere, Symbolist psychology, and Expressionist space. Its mood and sensibility anticipate the postwar filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.

We are honored to present this beautiful restoration for the film’s centenary, courtesy of our partners the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Austrian Film Museum .

The soundtrack originates from the debut performance of Dreamscope Trio at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna on June 24, 2025. It was mixed by Eduardo Raon.

Dreamscope Trio is a newly formed ensemble consisting of , Laura Naukkarinen, and Eduardo Raon, three internationally acclaimed silent film musicians who, after decades of accompanying the classics of cinema, have come together to explore new artistic territory.

This special presentation of The Salvation Hunters is available to all on Film Secession through the direct link in our bio.

13/08/2025

“Humanism does not consist in saying: 'No animal could have done what we have done,' but in declaring: 'We have refused to do what the beast within us willed to do, and we wish to rediscover Man wherever we discover that which seeks to crush him to the dust.'

True, for a religious-minded man this long debate of metamorphosis and rediscoveries is but an echo of a divine voice, for a man becomes truly Man only when in quest of what is most exalted in him; yet there is beauty in the thought that this animal who knows that he must die can wrest from the disdainful splendor of the nebulae the music of the spheres and broadcast it across the years to come, bestowing on them messages as yet unknown.

In that house of shadows where Rembrandt still plies his brush, all the illustrious Shades, from the artists of the caverns onwards, follow each movement of the trembling hand that is drafting for them a new lease of survival – or of sleep.” - André Malraux, The Psychology of Art (1947)

“The true condition of man is to think with his hands,” Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont declared in a seminal Personalist text of 1936. Hands are also the conduits for creative acts, and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (1508, image 6) is the locus of the association. André Malraux beautifully distills the tradition in the passage above.

As these clips demonstrate, one of Marcel Ophuls's most striking contributions to documentary form was his obsessive focus on hands, as cinematic variations on spatial repetition, expressions of singular human personalities, and constitutive parts of comparative montage clusters.

Throughout The Sorrow and the Pity (1969, clip 1) and The Memory of Justice (1976, clips 2-5), his epic about the Nuremberg Trials, Ophuls uses subtle gestural rhymes to elicit comparisons between modes of physical expression and thought.

These repeated shots of hands also help to provide what Ophuls aptly calls "a sense of structure" in the final chapter of our four-part portrait film.

Follow the links in our bio.

1. The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969)
2-5. The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophuls, 1976)
6. The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo, 1508, Vatican)

17/07/2025

Stanley Kubrick’s extraordinary Barry Lyndon (1975, clips 1 and 6-8) is the greatest cinematic exploration of 18th century aesthetics.

The “Grand Manner” advocated by Joshua Reynolds and Britain’s Royal Academy of Art (1768-) fused the approach to topographical precision introduced by painters of the Northern Renaissance (image 2) with the spatial idealization of 17th century France (images 3-5).

The French emphasis on rationalized order manifested itself in both the balanced Arcadian landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and the physical gardens designed by André Le Nôtre during the long reign of King Louis XIV.

Claude’s paintings (image 3) are remarkable for their focus on shifting qualities of light and the use of both natural features and human figures as compositional devices that draw the viewer’s eye gracefully into the distance.

By comparison, the structuring of physical space in Le Nôtre’s gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte (1661, image 4), and even more grandly at Versailles (1685, image 5), was overtly theatrical and predicated upon a proto-cinematic play with optical illusion. While ambling along demarcated paths, the viewer simultaneously takes in a series of shifting vistas and becomes part of the larger design.

In this sequence, Kubrick combines these approaches, merging several actual spaces into a composite that filters the eighteenth century through its own artifice. The sequence begins with the formal garden at Compton Acres (clip 1) and ends with a view of the lake constructed at the Palace of Blenheim by “Capability” Brown (1773, clip 8 and image 9).

Throughout, acts of looking and being seen are connected to both the conventions of optical point-of-view and to the paradigmatic formal device of the 1970s: the zoom lens. By slowly collapsing planes together, Kubrick highlights the confluence of presentation, perception, position, and power.

The layered illusionism is deepened by the anachronistic use of Franz Schubert’s Romantic music - Piano Trio in E-Flat, Op. 100 (1827) - which draws out the deep wells of emotion lying beneath the refined surface of characters that are, like us, prisoners of time.

Follow the links in our bio.

02/07/2025

"Joan [of Arc] is the sum of a mysterious operation. She proves that there is a world that is closed to us but that opens itself to her through a naive alchemy of her senses. She places in broad daylight the profound night in which our acts normally take place."
—Robert Bresson (1962)

Florence Delay (1941-2025) was a brilliant writer and a member of the Académie française. She wrote eloquent books on Arthurian legends (1977) and on the poet Gérard de Nerval (1999), and she will forever be remembered as the lead in Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962).

Bresson's purest, most distilled accomplishment, it was the first film in which he totally eliminated extra-diegetic music. This strengthened the sonic motifs – creaking boards, echoing footsteps, etc. (clip 1) – and made the film spatially immersive. Yet the fact that the objects given life by these sounds remain largely offscreen further emphasizes Joan’s decentered position within her environment, highlighting the contradiction between the physical existence of this unremarkable-looking shepherdess and the intense drama of her inner life.

Herein lies the central paradox of Bresson’s cinema: the body is made acutely present through its connection to a world of objects given weight through the mental synchronization of image and sound, but it is also a shell, a container for an underlying essence that, like the sacred, can be hinted at but never represented directly. This tension between body and spirit courses through all Bresson’s films to varying degrees, but there is a perfect harmonization of form and theme in the final section of The Trial of Joan of Arc.

After Joan recites her final lines (clips 1-2), Bresson cuts away first to a cross being raised before her (clip 2) and then to an enigmatic pair of birds (clip 3). Briefly accompanied by the sound of fluttering wings, the film’s final shot begins enveloped in smoke, which slowly dissipates to reveal an empty, blackened stake. Iconography is explicitly visualized in a way that brings the film to a formally perfect close, pointing towards a world that is ordinarily hidden and providing an image for which there can be no meaningful countershot.

29/06/2025

“And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen…
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”
- William Blake, Preface to Milton (1810)

As the chief exemplar and avatar of the visionary Romantic tradition, William Blake (1757-1827) looms large in the imagination of many adventurous filmmakers. John Boorman’s treatment of Arthurian archetypes in Excalibur (clip 10), for example, builds upon Blake’s rooting of mystical quests and sacred metaphors within the landscapes of England and Ireland.

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” were equally influential on a later generation of American filmmakers deeply informed by Romantic art and poetry. In an astonishing coincidence, this is most vividly expressed in two landmark American films released within a few months of each other: Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978, clips 1-6) and The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978, clips 7-9).

Both films are paradigmatic examples of the 1970s interest in bounced light by European cinematographers working in America like the Spanish Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven) and the Hungarian Vilmos Zsigmond (The Deer Hunter). In the work of Almendros and Zsigmond, stronger light enters the frame after being reflected off another surface, creating a softer and more diffuse effect (particularly acute in clips 1, 3, 5, and 8).

Malick (clip 2) and Cimino (clip 7) opened their films by connecting Blakean fire imagery to intense factory sounds. These motifs are reworked over the course of the films. Thus, the furnace sounds of clip 2 are transformed into the machinery noises of clips 1, 3, and 4, while the fire imagery is given new meaning in clips 4-6.

The more Promethean imagery and sounds of Cimino's opening (clip 7) are developed psychologically in the titular hunt (clip 8) and the closing search (clip 9).

All these elements are powerfully drawn together in the apocalyptic endings (clips 6 and 9).

Learn more on Film Secession. Follow the links in our bio.

1-6. Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)
7-9. The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978)
10. Excalibur (Boorman, 1981)

29/06/2025

We have invited Arnaud Desplechin to participate in a series of filmed discussions in Antwerp on July 6th and 7th, in conjunction with partners across the city.

Energetic, comic, and attentive to the possibilities of cinema and of life, Desplechin's films demonstrate the enduring relevance of François Truffaut's dictum, "Every shot, four ideas." He is one of the most dynamic figures in contemporary cinema, with a style that pushes through surface naturalism to something altogether more mysterious.

It is Desplechin's unique combination of erudition, innovation, and humor that inspired our Film Secession portrait film and Exhibition. The discussions at De Cinema and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts will complement and enrich what is already there, exploring Desplechin's influences, method, melding of space and myth, and imaginative transformation of visual and poetic references.

Events begin at the Zomerfilmcollege at De Cinema, from 7 pm on July 6th. The program includes "Intimate Journeys: A Film Secession Conversation," a 35mm screening of My Golden Days (2015, clip 1), and a post-screening Q&A.

Everything continues Monday afternoon with "Cinematic Legacies of Flemish Art" (images 2-6) in the galleries of , beginning at 2 pm on July 7th.

We will conclude that evening with "If We Shadows Have Offended" and a 35mm screening of A Christmas Tale (2008, clip 7). That event begins at 7:30 PM on July 7th.

A program of coming-of-age films Desplechin co-curated continues at De Cinema for the rest of the week.

The filmed conversations will be added to our Exhibition later in the summer. Follow the links in our bio to learn more.

All paintings courtesy in Antwerp.

1. My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin, 2015)
2. Madonna at the Fountain (Jan van Eyck, 1439)
3. Saint Barbara (Jan van Eyck, 1437)
4. Landscape with Diana and Actaeon (Kerstiaen de Keuninck, Late 16th Century)
5. The Adoration of the Magi (Peter Paul Rubens, 1624)
6. The Education of Mary (Peter Paul Rubens, 1630-1635)
7. Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) and the spaces of French Flanders (Roubaix) in A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)

26/06/2025

Here is the preview video for our Exhibition on Peter Delpeut and Dutch Poetic Cinema (clip 1), along with extracts from our portrait films with Delpeut (clip 2), and composer Loek Dikker (clip 3). Delpeut speaks about some of the unique characteristics of early cinema and Dikker speaks about the importance of improvisation to film music (including the piece used for our preview video).

Both topics are central to the films Delpeut and Dikker made together, and they are explored in great detail in our Exhibition. In addition to the two portrait films, it includes INTO THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS, ROMANTIC AGONIES, FOUND FOOTAGE AND THE MIRROR OF HISTORY, and ON JONAS MEKAS AND THE CINEMA OF MEMORY.

The associated program in our Cinema includes all of Delpeut's major films alongside many beautifully tinted silent film restorations courtesy of in Amsterdam.

Follow the links in our bio to begin exploring.

15/06/2025

In As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000, clips 1-4 and 10), Jonas Mekas declares "I am a Romantic, I believe in Romanticism." This takes the form of a Grail quest for a paradise that is always slipping away.

Often misunderstood as the work of a quixotic nostalgist, Mekas’s best films are structured around a complex tension between the perpetual present-tenseness of the onscreen images and frequent reminders on the soundtrack that they are fragments of memory. Mekas’s voiceovers periodically highlight the gap between the time when his footage was filmed and the moment of editing. This sometimes turns into open doubt about the relationship between a filmed moment and a lived memory (clips 2-5 and 9).

As with the Romantics, memory is understood to be an active, creative force that is embattled and unstable. Its vehicle is the compulsive film record Mekas produced, mostly with a handheld 16mm Bolex, throughout his life (clips 3-5 and 9). His films are elaborate attempts to map out the process the creative mind goes through in sifting through the fleeting events passing before it.

In this context, Mekas’s obsessive use of the Prelude from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) is telling. It appears frequently in As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (clip 1), He Stands in the Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1985, clip 6), and Lost Lost Lost (1976, clips 7-8), almost always connecting images of traveling with footage of friends.

For Mekas, filmmaking was a salvage operation, an attempt to use partially recalled "bits" of the past to stave off a deeper forgetting, because "too much" has already been lost (clip 9).

Follow the links in our bio to learn more.

This post is dedicated to the memory of P. Adams Sitney (1944-2025, clip 10), teacher, mentor, and friend.

Clips 1-4 and 10. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)
Clip 5. Paradise Not Yet Lost (1980)
Clip 6. He Stands in the Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1985)
Clips 7-9. Lost Lost Lost (1976)

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