Eric Pauwels
Directing
Biography
Filmmaker, writer and film lecturer Eric Pauwels started his career with what he calls ‘cinéma mémoire’, or ethnographic documentary. He obtained his PHD in cinematography in Paris with a documentary on the ‘possessed’ in Indonesia. Afterwards, eager to step out of his role of being a spectator, Pauwels begins to make dance videos and works of fiction. The latter are so-called ‘half films’: half documentary, half fiction. But which distance does one keep to one’s subjects? Pauwels’ answer is clear: eliminate the distance and become a subject amongst your subjects. For him, cinema and life should ideally coincide; fiction should penetrate documentary.
Known For
No description available.
Trois danses hongroises de Brahms
A playful, free, and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories knit together with different textures, a book of images where a filmmaker shows the images and the stories he wants to share.
Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter
No description available.
Hamlet ou les métamorphoses du jeu
Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels' meditation on dream, travel and film.
The Dreamed Films
This film is a moving tribute to French filmmaker Jean Rouch. Pauwels, a former collaborator of Rouch, accompanies him on a trip to Japan. In this cinematic letter, which he himself calls “a journey into the memory”, Pauwels philosophises about the essence of cinema and, consequently, of life.
Letter to Jean Rouch
No description available.
Face à Face
A film made of objects, faces and texts; of lost cats, of found pictures, cut-outs, recreations; a poetic subversion in diary form, one that breaks the calendar into a novel, driving relentlessly as a journey to the end of the world.
Journal de septembre
Motorway, roads, villages of Northern France, Flanders. A man with a Super 8 camera films his route, the villagers and himself. Portraits, self-portrait. As the images unfold a young villager, Josse, is intrigued by the camera’s presence. For the cameraman the lens is an eye with which one films reality, for the villager the camera represents CINEMA, the magic of fiction. Josse accosts the cameraman and leads him across the fields where his girlfriend joins them. The outing becomes their production, with themselves in front of the camera. Games. Gradually diverted by Josse’s enthousiasme the film slides into moments of fiction, until its inevitable breakdown.
Un film
A personal travel notebook. A travel through Europe in search of thirty paintings of the iconic Christian martyr. The film is conceived as a voyage of initiation, an imaginary reportage... imaginary because without an original image of the Saint, all representations were possible.
The Iconographic Journey: The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
On the death of his mother, a filmmaker makes a film to see how much her disappearance has changed his vision of the world. It is an opportunity for him to look back over his relationship with her: a relationship that made him a free individual, as a man and as a filmmaker. The second night is the final part of a trilogy that began with Letter from a filmmaker to his daughter, which was followed by Dreaming films. The making of this " Cabin Trilogy" is the fruit of fifteen years of work and reflection.
The Second Night
Invited to participate in a residency program in Split, Croatia, in October 2016, the film maker created this "little" video dealing with the theme of exile, expressing his thoughts on the matter in English.
To Split or not to Split
In Violin Fase, Eric Pauwels twirls the camera around the body of dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Through this process, Pauwels creates a new relationship between camera and dancer, but also between body and dance, dance and cinema. Consisting of a geometrical and minimalist choreographic structure filmed in four uninterrupted takes, the artist’s camera captures a woman dedicated to exploring the boundaries of physical exhaustion.
Violin Fase
No description available.
Pour Toujours
A summer film, of complicity, a film linked to the situation of "now or never" because it is born of encounters, availability, reflections or states of being in motion as time, ultimately a "snapshot" cinematographic.
The fragility of appearances
No description available.
Rites de Possession en Asie du Sud-Est
A film on the gestures of work, those of a sculptor, a designer, a composer and dancers. A sketch of their relationship to the world subjected to the double gaze of fiction and documentary.
The River Banks
No description available.
Improvisation
No description available.
Face à face (part of Pas de Danse)
A conversation with filmmaker Eric Pauwels about his Cabin trilogy, which includes Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter (2000), The Dreamed Films (2010), and The Second Night (2016).