Mostly known for his socially engaged documentaries and his informative biopics of artists like Rubens or Paul Delvaux, Henri Storck (1907-1999) also shot an intriguing share of experimental shorts. These early films laid the foundation for a long and fertile career in the cinema.
Co-founder of the Royal Belgian Film Archive, Storck is largely considered the godfather of Belgian film culture. He came of age in interbellum Ostend, a coastal city brimming with artists, writers and art benefactors (now, as then). Through his bourgeois family, the young Storck became acquainted with many of them. The doors to the salons of Constant Permeke, Léon Spilliaert and James Ensor were always open to him.
During these inspiring meetings and social calls, Storck befriended the French painter Félix Labisse, who resided in Ostend and worked under Ensor. Labisse became the brother Storck never had.
The pair would embark on various journeys together. Like Labisse, Storck was enthralled by surrealist art and literature. He read the manifesto of André Breton, the combatant gatekeeper of Surrealism. His library – part of which is on show here – also contained works by noted French writers such as Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and Max Jacob.
When Storck founded the Club du Cinéma in Ostend in 1928, Labisse became the assistant secretary. The club would show daring work by international filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein, Man Ray, René Clair and Luis Buñuel, often triggering controversy in the seaside town.
Another frequent on-screen guest was Felix the Cat, highly imaginative cartoons. Storck also screened American director Robert Flaherty’s groundbreaking documentaries, which had a huge impact on his own career.
The screenings were attended by the same circle of friends who discussed art in the morning and drank tea in the afternoon. Because of Storck, the vibrant days of European avant-garde cinema were very much alive in Ostend.
Labisse and Storck decided to make a film together, inspired by the aesthetics of surrealism. Labisse wrote a script about a young man who finds a glass eye and is obsessed by this object of seeing and being seen. Eventually, the man wants to distance himself from the eye, but he can’t get rid of it – neither in a shop packed with fake eyes nor in the postal office.
Voor je mooie ogen uses experimental techniques and images of masks and glances to reflect upon the act of looking, thus taking up similar themes in the work of surrealists Buñuel and Salvador Dalí around the same time.
Henri Storck en het surrealisme wants to reassemble the friendships and artistic endeavours of Storck, Ensor and Labisse, an excellent enterprise. Much of the archival snippets are intriguing – a design by Labisse for Storck’s 1931 film Strandidylle (Idyll on the Beach), a picture of Ensor peeking through Storck’s camera, a leaflet showing Storck and Labisse as extras in the 1933 French classic Zéro de conduite – but the material suffers from an overcrowded, stagnant presentation.
The exhibition lacks a coherent story, but regrettably not in the same way early surrealist films were chastised for their so-called absence of meaning. The overall set-up at Ensor House could do well with a dose of disarranged imagination that surrealist art so often feasts upon.
Such a rich cultural history and intriguing body of work as Storck’s deserves a livelier exposé. Wouldn’t it have been a treat to see bits of the documentaries Storck made on his lifelong friend Labisse, or the experimental films by local contemporaries (and friends) such as Charles Dekeukeleire, whose work was also part of the Club du Cinéma programme? The foundations are there, now all we need is a curator.
The legacy of Storck still lives on in other ways, most notably through the Brussels-based Henri Storck Fund and its annual documentary prize, awarded during the film festival Filmer à Tout Prix in November.
Until 7 November
Ensor House
Vlaanderenstraat 27, Ostend
www.muzee.be
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