Harry Kümel

A young sailor finds himself trapped in the labyrinthine mansion of his occultist uncle, along with a number of eccentric and mysterious relatives who all seem to be harboring a dark secret.Read More »

Description
‘De komst van Joachim Stiller’ (= Dutch for ‘the coming of Joachim Stiller’) is a novel by the Flemish author Hubert Lampo from 1961.

‘Magical realism’ is this novel’s keyword, a style of writing Lampo excelled in. It deals with the intrusion of the unexplainable into common, everyday’s life. Setting up an atmosphere of tension and uneasiness as a consequence.
In 1976 Flemish producer Harry Kümel transferred ‘De komst van Joachim Stiller’ into a TV-series. Making them an instant hit in the low countries back then. A few decades later the Royal Belgian Film Institute incorporated Kümel’s work in a DVD-series about great Belgian films: it is the very DVD this site is about.Read More »

Mr. Desgrands, a wealthy bourgeois, often changes his maid. The new one, Suzon, is very appetizing. And not shy at all. On the other side of the wall, through a cleverly dug hole, Jean the nephew doesn’t miss a moment of the show.Read More »

Old landlord, Gustave is after beautiful maid Celestine while he is very afraid of his dominant wife Jeanne. But Celestine wants baker’s teenage son.Read More »

Written by Antoine Gallien
inspired by the writings of Jean de La Fontaine and Niccolo MachiavelliRead More »

Old weaver’young and dissatisfied wife behaves badly to her husband’s cousin, Marietta and has an affair with worker, Luke. Marietta makes a plan for revenge.Read More »

Harry Kümel’s last major film to-date, a masterpiece of vividly operatic style and fluid camerawork. Despite being based on a 19th century classic Dutch novel, the film is less a traditional costumer (as apparently the critics took it to be) than a flamboyant fantasy on Kümel’s running theme of a vicious cycle of repeated wrong decisions and bad choices that engulf the lead character and eventually destroy her. The film displays the usual influences of von Sternberg, Resnais, Bergman, the Belgian symbolists, but creates a uniquely Kümelian feel and texture of a different reality at one remove from ours.Read More »

Quote:
This film has been more talked about than seen since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, when it was shown in a hastily shortened English-language version which distributors subsequently hacked down even further. Now the Belgium Cinémathèque Royale have worked with Kümel (best known for the lesbian vampire classic Daughters of Darkness) to produce a definitive ‘director’s cut’, Dutch-language version that runs for almost two hours – longer than has ever been seen before, and giving its labyrinthine story far greater clarity and depth.Read More »

Monsieur Hawarden, accompanied by his beautiful maid Victorine, arrives to stay at a remote farmhouse in the Ardennes. The household retainers gossip about the newcomers and develop rivalries over Victorine which end in her death. Hawarden leaves for Spa and resumes ‘his’ true identity, that of Meriora Gillibrand, daughter of Viennese aristocrats, has a brief affair with an officer, and returns – as Hawarden again – to the French farm… Filmed with a cool, stylish elegance and an eye for period detail, this deliberately slow-paced film unfolds in the manner of a mystery story.Read More »