In 1955, three young cinema enthusiasts shot a film noir in the streets of Antwerp. They have almost no money, no real industry behind them, no film school, not even the impression of belonging to a cinema country. Director Rik Kuypers is still an amateur. Roland Verhavert and Ivo Michiels are film critics before being filmmakers. They watch American, Italian or French post-war films and admire Italian neorealism, American thrillers, and the films of Ingmar Bergman. In Flemish Belgium, at the time, there was almost nothing resembling a real cinematic culture.“We were in the desert”Roland Verhavert would later summarize. However, they were going to give birth to modern Flemish cinema.
The seagulls die at the port,black and white film, follows a man on the run wandering Antwerp after committing a murder. He crosses deserted docks, foggy streets, wastelands, cold modern buildings. The film resembles a mix between American film noir and post-war European realism. The city of Antwerp is no longer just a setting: it becomes a ghost character. The expressionist shadows cut out the faces as in German films of the 1920s, while the camera follows the street in an almost documentary way inherited from Italian neorealism.Â
Before the New Wave, The seagulls die at the portAlready films bodies lost in the city, male solitude, dead-end trajectories and characters who wander more than they act. Critic Luc Joris will later speak of a film which “introduces aesthetics into Flemish cinema”.Â
Furthermore, the film still bears the scars of the Second World War. Behind its criminal intrigue, it mainly tells of a tired Europe, populated by silent survivors. This post-war melancholy fascinated even Sergei Parajanov, Soviet director, who would later refer to the film as“one of the most beautiful†he’s ever seen†.
Seventy years later,Seagulls die at the port returns to where almost everything began: at the Cannes Film Festival.Â
