Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
Three short documentaries by the two masters of the Low Countries. Storck's portrait of Ostend is also an investigation of cinematographic parameters. Ivens' camera meticulously inspects a new bridge in Rotterdam. Plus their joint masterpiece about the miserable living conditions of miners in the Borinage, victims of capitalism.
Henri Storck (Ostend 1907 - Brussels 1999) lived through the whole history of cinema, passing from silent to sound, and from experimental to commercial films. He is recognised as a pioneer of Belgian cinema and a key figure in documentary. An eyewitness of his times, he made socially engaged films, but also poetic and experimental short films, films on art and a fiction feature. His body of work consists of 70 films, including a series of accounts on his native city of Ostend of which he was the chronicler and which remained, for him, the Queen of beaches.
