Ward starts with his favorite movie of all time. “Rear windowBy Alfred Hitchcock from 1954. James Stewart plays a cameraman in a wheelchair who spies on his neighbors through the lens of his camera. He thinks there is a murder across the street from his apartment, but he’s not sure at all. It’s a movie about watching and what it all means, with loads of metaphors. But it’s also about being stuck in your home. This, in turn, has parallels with the shutdown we are in now. Rear Window, high-class cinematic art, which can be viewed on Youtube or Google Play.
CINEMATEK, the Belgian Royal Film Archive, is also providing titles from its incredibly rich library this week. They started this week with an absolute top title from our national cinema. This is “Jane Delman, 23 Trade Street, 1080 Brussels“.
It’s the amazing movie by Belgian director Chantal Ackermann. In 1975, she put herself on the map with this sober, but very telling, account of a lonely housewife with a young son. We only see three days in her routine. To earn a cent when her son is in school, she also works as a prostitute in that apartment in Brussels. The movie says much more than this short explanation suggests and is in fact a complete feminist classic. Ackerman also insisted on working with a female crew for this film. Some say this is the best or the most influential Belgian film ever. You can see it via CINEMATEK at home, which links to lumierefilms.be.
Our film connoisseur, Ward Veriken, is himself a huge fan of fashion movies by James Ivory, a British filmmaker who made huge hits in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with films like “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day”. But what is so clever is to take back one of his previous films, from 1987 ”MorrisThis is a movie adapted from an important book on homosexuality in Edwardian England, right before World War I where homosexuality was never accepted, and certainly not in the upper echelon. Title character Morris struggles with her feelings for men. He wonders all the time: ” How am I supposed to build a successful life when I apparently have to get along and I have to marry a wife and have children. ”Everything worked very well, because that was James Ivory’s style, but he could also put a real passion into it. It’s also great that We see how a number of young actors became world famous after that.Especially Hugh Grant who performs there in a very small version. Morris is a movie with a lot of restraint, but totally passionate and therefore heartily recommended.
Then we come to Netflix, which also offers a number of great titles from movie history. Not much, but there are irresistible titles, such as “JawsFrom 1975. It’s a Steven Spielberg thriller, who was only 30 years old at the time. Then he conquered the world with this extremely frightening account of the great white shark terrorizing a coastal town in America. This structure, in which the shark appears as minimal as possible to arouse the greatest possible fear in viewers, is irresistible. Be sure to check out ‘Jaws’ from 1975 on Netflix.
Finally, it is no longer any greater than anything classic:2001: Space FlightStanley Kubrick’s masterpiece from the late 1960s. In it, he takes us through the entire history of mankind and then finally to the future and into space, which he predicted in the late 1960s. The movie is about the struggle of people among themselves, but it is also about the struggle of people against machines, against artificial intelligence. All of those things that have become a reality today, which make Kubrick’s movie even more impressive. It’s also very intense and exciting intellectual cinema. You really have to see it to be able to share and this movie is also on Netflix.
