MEEUWEN STERVEN IN DE HAVEN (SEAGULLS DIE IN THE HARBOUR) © Eyeworks
Meeuwen sterven in de haven (Seagulls Die in the Harbour): the birth of Flemish cinema
Presented at Cannes in 1956, Meeuwen sterven in de haven (Seagulls die in the harbour) remains one of the founding films of Belgian cinema. This dark, expressionist feature film by Rik Kuypers, Ivo Michiels and Roland Verhavert devised a new way of filming Flanders: urban, modern, and haunted by the post-war period.
In 1955, three young film enthusiasts directed a film noir in the streets of Antwerp. They had virtually no money, no real industry support, had not gone to film school, and did not even seem to belong to a nation of film. The director, Rik Kuypers, was still an amateur, and Roland Verhavert and Ivo Michiels were film critics before becoming filmmakers. They watched post-war American, Italian and French films and loved Italian neorealism, American thrillers and Ingmar Bergman films. In Flemish Belgium at the time, there was hardly anything like a real film culture.“It was like a desert,” Roland Verhavert summed up later on. Nevertheless, they would be responsible for the birth of modern Flemish cinema.
Meeuwen sterven in de haven (Seagulls die in the harbour) is a black-and-white film that follows a man in Antwerp who is on the run after committing a murder. He travels through abandoned docks, foggy streets, wastelands, and modern and cold buildings. The film is like a blend of American film noir and European post-war realism. The city of Antwerp is no longer just a backdrop: it becomes a ghost character. Expressionist shadows cut across faces like in the German films of the 1920s, while the camera takes to the streets in a quasi-documentary style inherited from Italian neorealism.
Before the French New Wave, Meeuwen sterven in de haven (Seagulls die in the harbour) was already filming bodies lost in the city, male solitude, dead end trajectories, and characters who wandered more than doing something. Luc Joris’ review would later talk about a film that “introduced esthetics into Flemish cinema.”
The film also bears the scars of the Second World War. Behind its criminal intrigue, it is particularly about the story of a weary Europe inhabited by silent survivors. This post-war melancholy fascinates even Soviet director Sergei Parajanov, who would later refer to the film as “one of the most beautiful films that he has ever seen.”
Seventy years later, Meeuwen sterven in de haven (Seagulls die in the harbour) returns to where it virtually all started: at the Festival de Cannes.
