The film director André Delvaux was known as “the godfather of the Belgian film industry”, having put his small country on the film map after his first feature film, The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, won international acclaim in 1965. His works often mingled realism and fantasy in a style labelled “magic realism”. Though his films tended to find more favour with critics than public, he had great success with such titles as Un soir, un train (One Night . . . a Train, 1968) and Rendez-vous à Bray (Rendezvous in Bray, 1971).
Before the advent of Delvaux, Belgium had been known as a country that enthusiastically promoted international cinema via several film festivals and had an enviably extensive archive in its Cinemathèque Royale, but could boast no native film industry. Too small a country for a commercial film to make a profit through domestic success alone, and further fragmented by bilingualism, Belgium was once described by the director Billy Wilder as “the most unnecessary country”, and most of its creative talent (including the director Jacques Feyder and the writer Georges Simenon) moved to France. Delvaux brought Belgian film to an international audience at a time when there was no financing for film-makers in the country. The film critic Philippe Reynaert said, “Everybody in Belgian cinema owes something to him. He opened the doors.”
Delvaux was born in 1926 in Heverlee, near Louvain. While studying German philosophy at the Free University of Brussels he also attended piano classes at Belgium’s Royal Conservatory. He initially worked as a language and literature teacher at the university, but a spare-time job playing piano for silent movies at the Belgian Cinemathèque started a love of the cinema and in 1955 he made a short film with his college students, Nous étions treize (There Were Thirteen of Us).
He was made head of a programme of film education for Belgian teachers and organised a seminar on the language of film at the Free University’s department of sociology. In 1960 he made a four-part series about Federico Fellini for Belgian TV, followed by several other director profiles for television. (In England, the director Ken Russell was making his name in a similar way with his television films about composers.) In 1962 he was one of a small group who created INSAS, the film school which would produce most of the country’s new generation of film-makers.
Belgian TV and the Belgian Ministry of Culture co-produced Delvaux’ first feature film, De Man die zijn haar kort liet knippen (The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, 1965), adapted from a 1947 novel, L’Homme au crâne rasé, by Johan Daisne, a disciple of the style called magic realism. The film told of a lawyer’s secret obsession with a pupil at a school where he teaches. When the couple meet years later the girl has become a famous actress and the lawyer is losing his sanity, his encroaching madness symbolised by his compulsive visits to the barber.
The film made no concessions to commercial cinema, but revealed traits of the director which would permeate his work – the contrast between dreams and reality, beauty and ugliness, conveyed in a pictorial style which paid self-conscious homage to Flemish old masters. It won several international awards, including a British Academy Award, though some critics were baffled by its strangeness.
Central to the film was an autopsy sequence, now famous, which is terrifying even though nothing of the procedure is shown. The instruments seen beforehand and the evocative soundtrack produce the horror. Marion Hänsel, now a distinguished director, said,
It was the first Belgian film I ever saw. I was 16 and never forgot it. It looked nothing like I was used to seeing in westerns, French comedies or Italian neo-realism. It spoke a strange language, but it was mine. It showed a strange city and a strange country but they were mine. The everyday worlds that I knew were shown to me differently. The rhythm as well as the melody of the words were on another level of reality and swept me to “another place”.
Delvaux’ next film, Un soir, un train, featured two major stars, Yves Montand and Anouk Aimée, in a symbol-laden tale of lost love as Montand (as a Flemish professor living with a French-speaking theatre designer) seeks his sweetheart when she disappears on a train journey on an autumn evening. The director, who also wrote the script, again displayed his sensitive mingling of moods as the film merged past and present, the real and the imaginary.
Delvaux described his interest in the hazy line between truth and fantasy as part of his Belgian heritage. The film historian Cathy Fowler wrote,
From Surrealists such as Paul Delvaux and René Magritte, and from the magic realist novelist Johan Daisne, he is said to take a preoccupation with the blurred border between reality and imagination. He also shares with Flemish painters such as Bosch and Brueghel an obsession with beauty linked to death and decay.
Rendez-vous à Bray, his third film, was a French-Belgian co-production and won the Prix Louis Delluc. In Belle (1973), Danièle Delorme played a mysterious woman encountered in the woods by a professor (Jean-Luc Bideau) who harbours an incestuous affection for his daughter. There were complaints that in this instance it really was impossible to discern the real from the fantasy, or to be sure whether the woman actually existed. Delvaux responded enigmatically, stating, “The imaginary can introduce things that haven’t yet taken place but will happen in reality later on.”
Delvaux, who wrote most of his film scripts himself, fashioned another woman of mystery for Benvenuta (1983), in which Fanny Ardant was a reclusive authoress whose 20-year-old novel is to be filmed. A screenwriter visits her to find out how much of her novel was autobiographical, prompting shifting moods of time and place, reality and fiction. Delvaux’ other films included a documentary, To Woody Allen from Europe with Love (1980), in which Delvaux also appeared, chatting to Allen, and Babel opéra (1985), featuring extracts from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
His last film, L’Oeuvre au noir (The Abyss, 1988), was in competition for the Palme d’Or in Cannes. It was the director’s most expensive movie and his first period film, telling of a 16th-century Flanders physician who wanders Europe to escape the Inquisition, who seek him for his allegedly devilish practices and his bisexuality. Despite a fine central performance by Gian Maria Volonté, the film was considered plodding and episodic.
In 1992 Delvaux took an acting role in Marion Hänsel’s film about an unborn child talking to its mother, Sur la terre comme au ciel (In Heaven as on Earth).
In 1991, he was awarded the Plateau Life Achievement Award (named after Joseph Plateau, a pioneer of cinema technology) at the International Film Festival in Ghent.
André Delvaux suffered a fatal heart attack in Valencia just hours after giving a speech about cinema at the World Arts Meeting. —The Independent
