André Delvaux

Biography: life and films

André Delvaux is a highly regarded Belgian cineaste who is now considered the founder of Belgian national cinema. He was born in Heverlee, Belgium, on 21st March 1926 and began pursuing a career in academia as a professor in language and literature before turning to filmmaking. In the mid-1950s, he began his directing career with a series of documentary shorts for Belgian television on such subjects as Jean Rouch and Federico Fellini. In 1962, Delvaux co-founded the Belgian film and theatre school INSAS (Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion) with Raymond Ravar and Paul Anrieu. With his first cinema feature L'Homme au crâne rasé (1966), he came to play an important part in the development of modern Belgian cinema.

Most of Delvaux's films are adaptations of literary works by such distinguished writers as Julien Gracq (Rendez-vous à Bray, winner of the Prix Louis-Delluc in 1971), Suzanne Lilar (Benvenuta) and Marguerite Yourcenar (L'Oeuvre au noir). These films have a distinctive dreamlike quality that often seamlessly merges reality and fantasy. The most accomplished example of this is Un soir, un train, an early example of what we now term magic realism. A committed film auteur, Delvaux has also directed a number of documentaries for cinema and television, including Cinéma, bonjour (1958), De tolken (1968) and To Woody Allen from Europe with Love (1980). André Delvaux died from a heart attack whilst attending an arts festival in Valencia, Spain, on 4th October 2002, aged 76.

Filmography