Titre : Sunday and other tests
Auteur : Olivier Smolders
Edit: Yellow Now
Collection : Film side
Publication date: January 15, 2025
Genre of the book: Movie theater
This small book in rectangular format by Olivier Smolders retraces the life of Edmond Bernhard, in very broad terms. Smolders was a student of Bernhard at INSAS (higher school of performing arts and broadcasting and communication techniques of FWB). It is by wishing to rescue his former teacher from the oblivion in which he finds himself that Smolders wanted to review and analyze all his films, five short films in all, while exploring his particular way of teaching and living his life .
Sunday and other tests is therefore a book of homage to an eccentric personality, if the word is not too overused. A poet above all, he only wanted to design films in his own way, without submitting files or storyboards to receive financing. He did not want to concede anything to the producers, which also prevented him from making feature films or more. According to him, the film was designed during editing. So how can you sell a feature film that is only created after it has been filmed?
We feel a lot of esteem from Smolders for Bernhard who had a particular way of approaching pedagogy, without ever expressing his feelings in relation to his students’ films. He also often expressed himself, at least in writing, with a vocabulary of his own, composed of long, very complicated sentences, readily admitting contradiction. His educational writings are thus in his image, sometimes difficult to grasp because they are anchored in a non-real universe that Bernhard himself created. In this, Smolders describes him as the exact opposite of another professor at INSAS, André Delvaux, representative of a certain Belgian educational and cinematographic classicism.
Edmond Bernhard will have composed five short, commissioned films, which Olivier Smolders describes and analyzes in his book. These are films that are interested in rites, in dead museum institutions where guides lead sheep (people) to admire immobile works. Common points of comparison circulate, according to the authors’ policy, Smolders detects a well-crafted work, red threads, also composed of dream films.
Sunday and other tests is a book for cinema lovers or INSAS students. If the part interested in the man could attract a larger audience, the part which is interested in the analysis of films is off-putting for all the people who don’t care about analyzing cinema in depth. And even there, you have to want to let yourself be immersed in the words and sentences of an author seeking to analyze an artist who cultivates a certain authoristic and avant-garde posture.
The book becomes more moving when it seeks the man behind the artist or his works. Seeing Smolders try to fill certain holes, knowing that he contacted “former men and women” of INSAS to write, it is a beautiful posthumous gift for this man, Edmond Bernhard, who was his mentor and the one who was responsible for being his end-of-study work supervisor. Besides, that’s also what made me decide to read this book by my former teacher, Olivier Smolders, who gave me a film course and introduced me to some very beautiful works, including those of Alain Cavalier, and I remember that he himself cultivated a certain aura as an artist, creator of his own universe and path of life.
