Olivier Smolders

A young teacher is the victim of a cruel joke. When she enters the classroom, all her pupils are naked, standing near their bench. Their clothes are heaped up on the podium.

Based on the real life story of Sagawa, a Japanese student who killed, dismembered and ate a young Dutch girl in Paris.

In a world overtaken by eternal darkness, the buttoned down entomologist abandons his phantoms to embrace the unknown.

A bereft filmmaker asks a series of women to pose nude for his camera in this striking and moody short film by Belgium's Olivier Smolders. The silent encounters act as counterpoint to a contemplative internal monologue musing on love, loss and the subtle power-plays of aversion and desire underway in an atmosphere pervaded by an irresistible erotic gloom. Filmed in a lustrous black and white, the themes explored find their perfect compliment in the stark, fascinated, all-embracing gaze of the camera. - Robert Avila

The theme of death is heavily interwoven in Smolder’s surreal salute to Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz, a Hieronymus Bosch-type artist whose work centered on humans in various stages in torment, as depicted in expansive canvases with gore galore. Smolders has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up, using quotes from the long-dead artist, and periodic statements by a historian (Smolders) filling in a few bits of Wiertz’ life.

Some footage and shots of expressionless actresses seen in Ravissements are repurposed in La philosophie dans le boudoir / Philosophy in the Boudoir (1991), wherein Smolders takes extracts from the Marquis De Sade’s nutbar text and applies them to scenes of a man in a prison cell, and single or groups of women often standing with the same blank expressions as the man. Perhaps to characterize De Sade’s libertine philosophy and rude text as words and ideas worthy of anyone, Smolders alternates his actors, with several men portraying (presumably) the incarcerated De Sade.

Mental anguish is all that's present in the film Seuls / Alone (1989). Shot like a grungy medical documentary, Smolders and co-director Thierry Knauff intercut shots of several children at a Belgium psychiatric clinic. The kids are shown with forlorn expressions, twicthing their eyes, sometimes smiling, shaking, jumping, rocking their heads side to side, or smacking their heads with horrific glee against walls. It's a minimalist work that captures the intense monotony of lost and disturbed young minds, and maintains a gritty intensity.

A cinematographic “cadavre exquis”, whose entrails reveal the odd nature of a (un)certain Belgian cinema. Authors, directors, actors who have proved that imposture could be an act of creation. Convinced that any so-called “new” cinematographic production was in fact a rehash of what had already been made, these pirates of images snuck as forgers, liars, tricksters, usurpers, … Outlaws of the cinema who falsified its form. From the filmed imposture of Man Bites Dog to Jan Bucquoy’s fabulist biopic, everything participates in the dynamiting of institutional language through simulacrum and absurdity. This free journey in the “cine-belgitude” has for vocation to approach these marvellous eccentrics followers of a overexcited and stripping situationism.

Modest meditation on youth, life and mortality made up almost entirely from professionally made family films. What is more heart-rending than seeing pictures of people who have died? The aim of Mort à Vignole is to transcend the pain of a certain family and to come to terms with sensitive memories and family bonds.

A small, empty boudoir slowly becomes populated by a series of young women, their still and open expressions gradually engulfing the screen, as a nun narrates an account of religious rapture. Belgian filmmaker Olivier Smolders continues a brilliant exploration of religious ecstasy, figured in and epitomized by the erotic, death-defying gaze of the camera lens, in this sublime black-and-white treatment set to excerpts from the theological writings of Saint Teresa of Avila.

No description available.

On February 7, 1944, the day of the opening of a major exhibition of his work, the Hungarian photographer Oskar Benedek disappeared. More than sixty years later, an investigation reveals his strange fate.

The camera slowly pans through a room as Smolders offers various observations and memories.

On vacation in the countryside, a filmmaker thinks about the mourning of his parents. As their faces, and most especially their gaze, fades away, he starts meditating on masks as passages to the afterlife.

A man accepts a concierge job, which comes with a small apartment, in an old building and, locked inside his lodgings, undertakes a strange job of grieving. He discovers that behind the walls, a system of secret corridors allows tenants to be observed. But is it really the tenants that he is spying on?

The title (NOVENA in English) refers to the nine days of prayers undertaken in Roman Catholicism as an act of devotion or penitence with the aim of obtaining a state of grace. In Olivier Smolders' brooding, impressively refined short film, realized in black and white with liturgical choral music punctuating its obsessive narrative, a writer retreats into the seclusion and tumultuous memories of his old college. There he assumes a vow of silence mocked by his nearly ceaseless internal monologue and the violent, morbid preoccupations of his mind as he attempts to reconcile the competing forces of the ascetic and the voluptuary. - Robert Avila

L’art d’aimer / The Art of Loving (1985), another colour short, is probably the weakest of the ten films, mostly because it’s a blurry monologue (read by Smolders) from the perspective of a man confused about past events from his youth, and the fate of his mother. Smolder’s voice is deadly monotone, and the short drones on towards a climax set in an old age home, and a room filled with men and women suffering from diverse ailments, or seniors trapped in some darkened mental gloom. - kqek.com

Reflections in a surrealist tone about the art of cinema.

The film's author recounts his memories of a rebellious childhood friend.

Collector of cursed musicians, unreasonable assassins, or suicidal hermits, a patient in a psychiatric institution has a historical gallery of characters that haunt him.