Summer Film Camp 2011

I'm off for an entire week to summer film boot camp. I should probably leave out the boot notion, but it really is a survival of the fittest to sit through every lecture and every movie seven days in a row. The first lecture starts at nine sharp and the last film usually finished around midnight. It is not uncommon to hear someone snore their head off during a movie. After day three your feet start to swell up from all the sitting down. Over the years I've managed to devise some sitting techniques to endure all the movie magic. This year it's in Antwerp. This twice yearly event had been hosted in Bruges in years gone by. So I will have to devise a new sitting strategy because I'm not familiar with the seating arrangements in the theatre.

This will be my 8th Summer Film School I will be attending. I feel like a veteran. And I do feel a bit guilty too. While studying in Brussels (waaaay back in the nineties) I used to attend the Film Museum every night, read the glossy magazines, bought second hand books on cinema, worked on film sets. I ate, slept and breathed cinema.
Over the years, moving to an area where most movie theatres are over 15 kilometers away (and expensive), my movie going experience has dropped to an alarming rate. So far this year (or last year) I haven't even set foot inside a cinema.
So this week is very important to me, to keep connected to my very first love for images.

I will have to face up to the music and decide how to spare my strenght. I will be driving to Antwerp every day, so I will need to be alert and wide awake before venturing onto the roads.
This means I will have to skip a movie to get safely home. When in Bruges I could just skip a movie I'd already seen and have a nap in my hotel room. This will be an entirely different challenge.

David Bordwell will be lecturing on Storytelling strategies in 1940s Hollywood. His morning lectures have been very entertaining and enlightening and no doubt his seven Dark Passages-lectures will be of the same high standard I have heard over the years.
He blogged about the Summer camp for cinephiles in 2007 and in 2009.

This year the umbrella theme is Art & Painting. Lisa Colpaert, Tom Paulus, Wouter Hessels (freshly appointed director of Cinematec) and Steven Jacobs will be lecturing on a wide variety of themes i.a. tableau vivants, art documentaries, interiours and landscapes.

After years of whining I finally get what I asked for: A Greenaway movie! Three cheers for the Vlaamse Dienst voor Filmcultuur!

I don't think I will have time to do any blogging during the coming week. Or even a couple of days after that. Dr Livingstone will be home!