12.11.24, 20:30, Rondom Mooie Ogen (kortfilms)

In 1929, Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck made Voor je mooie ogen, a film in which a man finds a glass eye. The visceral fascination with the (bodiless, mutilated, blinded or distorted) eye recalls not only the famous opening shot from Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) but the iconography of Surrealism as a whole. From the paintings and photographs of René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí and Man Ray to the writings of Georges Bataille, for these artists the eye, a slippery organ on the outside of our bodies, marked the boundary between an outer and inner world. In this sense, the eye represents an interesting motif for exploring the surreal in the real — precisely the ambition of many surrealist photographers and filmmakers.

Using Storcks For Your Beautiful Eyes as a starting point, this programme brings together several films in which eyes figure prominently and which also explore various optical modalities. Among others, Visite à Félix Labisse (1947, 8‘) by Alain Resnais, On Eye Rape (1962, 10’) by Takahiko Iimura, Man Rays Emak Bakia (1926, 16') and other eye gems pass in review.

This film will be introduced by art history lecturer Steven Jacobs.