From July 18th until July 22nd Roffa Mon Amour and CINEA organize Summer Film School Rotterdam: an intensive 5-day program of lectures by renowned film experts and unique film screenings of recently digitalized films from various European film archives. The program is organized in collaboration with CINEA. Summer Film School has been held in Belgium since 1981 and has ever since been highly appreciated by both cinema professionals and cinephiles.

In the first edition of Summer Film School Rotterdam we dive into the work of auteur provocateur director Brian De Palma and the artistic, literary cinema of Alain Resnais.

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Brian De Palma: Vision, Obsession and set-up

Brian De Palma (born 1940) is one of the most inventive film directors that America has produced. Formed in the counter-cultural scene of the 1960s, he has never abandoned his interest in formal, modernist innovation, nor his ultimately pessimistic view of society and politics. This series will take you through the major phases and tendencies of his career so far, from anarchic comedy and complex plotting through to Hitchcockian ‘pure cinema’ and social satire. The ultimate goal of the course is to elaborate the extremely complex and thrilling ‘machine of sound and vision’ that De Palma creates with the elements of film.

Cinema Experts
Cristina Álvarez López
Cristina Álvarez López is a film critic and video maker based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain). Her work has appeared in MUBI Notebook, LOLA, and De Filmkrant, and in books on Chantal Akerman, Bong Joon-ho, Philippe Garrel, and Paul Schrader. More info.
Adrian Martin
Adrian Martin is an art critic based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain). He is the author of eight books, including the forthcoming essay collection Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press). His ongoing archive website of film reviews, covering 40 years of writing, is at filmcritic.com.au.

Lectures and Screenings on Brian De Palma

• July 18 — De Palma’s Beginnings: Art, Music and the Counter-Culture
  Phantom of the Paradise (1974, 92’, DCP)

• July 19 — The Hitchcockian Model and its Variations
  Obsession (1976, 98’, DCP)

• July 20 — Vision and Sound: The Complex Machine
  Carrie (1976, 98’, DCP)

• July 21 — Story, Identity and Point-of-View
  Body Double (1984, 114’, DCP)

• July 22 — The Langian Model: Narrative and Society as Trap
  The Black Dahlia (2006, 121’, 35mm)

Alain Resnais: The Size of Love Itself

Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014), alongside his early collaborators Chris Marker (29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) and Agnès Varda (30 May 1928 – ), comprised the Left Bank Group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In keeping with Resnais’ early commitment to cine-philosophical examinations of actual horrific events, injustices and, moreover, their aftermaths of affliction, this lecture series touches on the poetic elegance of Resnais’ works that singularly express experiences of memory, time and affect. Through explorations of how Resnais’ Cinema of Time at once evokes the ephemeral and material, intimate and universal, present and past-future, this course will consider some of Resnais’ most famed mid-career works alongside his earlier short films, with and without Marker. With regard to Resnais’ cinema in general, philosopher Gilles Deleuze observes that ‘[t]he sheets of past come down and the layers of reality go up, in mutual embraces which are flashes of life: what Resnais calls ‘feeling’ or ‘love’, as mental function.’ Across the five lectures of this series, Nadine Boljkovac and Patricia Pisters will explore how time and affect are, as Deleuze suggests, ‘the principal characters of [this] brain-world.’ And so, as deeply moved by and indebted to his images, this course attempts at its heart to honour the lingering beauty of Resnais’ cinema.

Cinema experts
Patricia Pisters
Patricia Pisters is professor of Media Studies (with a specialization in film studies) at the University of Amsterdam. Her research and teaching focuses on film-philosophy, in conjunction with neuroscience. She also writes and lectures regularly about classic film authors and about Dutch film culture.
Nadine Boljkovac
Nadine Boljkovac (PhD, Cambridge/MA, York Canada/Honours BA, Toronto) is Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. She wrote a monograph examining affect and ethics via Chris Marker and Alain Resnais: Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2013).

Lectures and Screenings on Alain Resnais

• July 18 — Resnais’ Time-Machine
  According to Gilles Deleuze Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime is one of the very few films that shows us how we live in time. In her lecture Patricia Pisters will dive into the temporal universe of Resnais’s films, and show how this experimental science fiction film brings us in a time machine of the past.
  Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, 94’, 35mm)

• July 19 — Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963, 117’, DCP)

• July 20 — Cut and Continuum: Resnais’ jumps, layers and tracking shots through time
  Providence (1977, 110’, DCP)

• July 21 — A Secret Called Happiness
  Shorts:
  Les statues meurent aussi (1953, 30’, 35mm)
  Nuit et brouillard (1956, 32’, DCP)
  Toute la memoire du monde (1957, 21’)

• July 22 — From Depths and Ashes
  Hiroshima mon amour (1959, 90’, DCP)