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Robbrecht Desmet

Am Egelsberg

Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur et n&b | 26:0 | Belgique | 2014

Am Egelsberg is shot in Krefeld, a town in the Ruhr area in Germany. In the rolling landscape around this former industrial city, Robbrecht & Daem architects realized a striking pavilion, a temporary objet d’architecture based on a design for a golf course clubhouse by Mies van der Rohe, dating from 1930, which was never built. The film plays with the idea that the model leads the gaze towards the landscape but by doing so actually looks back at itself. The huge frames, windows without glass, ‘pull’ the landscape ‘inside’. But our gaze is also thrown back ‘inside’, via the textures and drawings in the wooden plates. These plates remind one of the original marble stone plates that Mies had in mind. The walls become screens as ‘masks’, as André Bazin wrote, ‘whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it’. The spaces in the film, through the device of the model, become extensions of cinematic space, (far) beyond the boundaries of the image. The 360° degree panorama that is at the heart of the film, showing the landscape without the model, unites ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the present. This film tries to be an imaginative, geo-temporal map of the intimate relationship between cinema and architecture.

Robbrecht Desmet (°1985) is a filmmaker. He studied Cinema and Fine Arts at the Sint Lukas College of Art & Design in Brussels. His films are portraits of landscapes, places and spaces that are in one way or another a substantial part of the memory of a specific artwork. His filmmaking is dedicated to a documentation of the life and afterlife of these artworks, their meaning and their history. His work was presented in screenings and exhibitions as Beyond The Picturesque (S.M.A.K. & Artcinema OFFoff), Documented Now! (de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam), Splav Meduze (Centre for Contemporary Art Celje) and filmfestivals like International Filmfestival Hamburg, Festival for Experimental Film in New York, ISELP Festival du Film sur l’Art Brussels and Courtisane Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and BFI London Film Festival. He has participated in residency programs such as Capacete Int. in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo (Br), SIC SoundImageCulture workspace and FLACC workspace for visual artists (Genk, Belgium). He is a lecturer Film Studies at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. Desmet is currently working on a new film under the working title Close Up in collaboration with Brussels based production platform Auguste Orts.