A series of Olivier Smolders’ short movies, the author of Black Night, which has a chronicle on the website.
Synopsis
Adoration: a young man settles a movie camera fixed in a dark room. He invites in a young woman. They have a romantic dinner. Then, the young woman reads poetry, they drink wine seated on the carpet. The young man remains mute. A moment later, he murders the young woman by shooting her in the back.
Mort à Vignole: scenes of family movies, shot in 8mm and commented by the author himself. The comments are poetically and philosophically about life, death, the passing of time. The story starts with his stillborn child.
L’amateur: a man is talking to his missing wife to tell her his unusual activity which consists in shooting women agreeing to be naked in front of his lens.
Neuvaine: a man is talking about his youth through his punishment within a catholic institution.
Ravissement: beautiful woman faces, in black and white, are scrolling over Thérèse d’Avila’s pieces of writings. The nun describes her vision of the oration, in a passionate implication of her faith.
Pensées et visions d’une tête coupée : the painter Antoine Wiertz’s last will. He leaves all his work to the state. Dwarfs visit the museum where some of his masterpieces are interpreted.
Philosophie dans le boudoir: pieces of Sade’s texts, “inviting families to profusion”.
Point de fuite: one of the rare short movies in color. A teacher enters her classroom and notices, with astonishment, that all the pupils are waiting for her, naked and in silence… The class was supposed to be on perspective…
L’art d’aimer: the author, a man, tells a part of his childhood with his ill mother and Madam Claude, a sad housewife. Then, he discovers what he calls “life”.
Seuls: Smolders shoots autistic children in an institution.
Smolders is obviously an author. Through his short movies which can go far into intimacy, his talent of aesthete is obvious. Mort à Vignole dares the family novel, asking some existential questions which are sometimes conventional but always pertinent. An average audience could accelerate those family pictures if they did not mix nostalgia and sensibility as well as a long and complacent exposure of emaciated bodies on dissection tables. We have the same tone of a painful past, in Neuvaine where the content is much more tortuous (anticlerical?). Smolders is an entomologist: he perpetuates a black and white very detailed. The pitch of Adoration deals with a couple of insects in a jar where tragedy of love and murder will take place. The young man is at the same time the insect and the experimenter who is going to put off the other insect’s wigs. His necrophilic, mutilating and cannibal game, pointing at his guest, ends the setting of his fantasy in a morbid atmosphere. This short movie gets its inspiration from the news item about Issei Sagawa, the cannibal murderer, is very refined and is one of the most fascinating author’s movies. Smolders tries to reconstruct the character’s indifference which is probably right on a psychopathological level. Great perverts of that kind are barely sexually attracted by their victims, but take pleasure “nearby”, with their sufferings or the use of their body as an object. Beyond this squalid news item, the refinement of the shooting and of the photography highlights the subject of the movie at the expense of almost absurd scenes like when the victim to be reads Mallarmé and Nerval’s poetry to her murderer.
In a different register, the monochrome eroticism and some women’s beauty in the Amateur, help to forget the vacuity of the recited topic, one of the less interesting texts. One picture remains: the stunning reflection of the mirror delicately set on the first woman’s sex.
Beyond the “captured” image of the woman, Smolders is attached to themes or gimmick that we can find in Black Night: the native Congo, animality, trains… In the feature-length movie, sexuality is less present, but here it is recurrent: from the most pictured (Ravissement) to the most crude (La philosophie dans le boudoir). JF Stevenin’s voice in the latter is wonderful. Other pictures may cause uneasiness, like the naked child holding a pig (Pensées …) in an irritating surrealism which is the alibi of a visual transgression. The setting of the autistic children (Seuls) can also be troubling because it shows the stereotypes and their complexity in a stylized way.
One of Smolders’ main qualities is his capacity to go from realistic and concrete pictures to abstract excess, either shot or read. He hardly does without his bicephalous style, between writing and literature. His cinema is clearly intellectual and even cerebral. Smolders’ short movies are full of real moment of grace. The pleasure of the senses is present, going past the most pontificated aspects.
Bonus: Soundtrack of Nuit noire.
Spiritual exercices: soundtrack with the author’s comments.
Images amoureuses, images de mort (2003): Smolders comments on his art with images of the shooting.
Language: French - English.
Translated by Camille