Original subtitles

Drawing is a form of writing with its own dangers and surprises.

At first I see a few features, a few elements.

It's turning a rough mark into a face, taking a little India ink and a pen

and making lines on paper. Lines become shapes,

which gradually arrange themselves into a tree, a woman, a face.

That's the pleasure of improvisation :

Not knowing at the start where exactly you're going.

Drawing is my recreation, my moment of freedom.

When I was seven, I wanted to be a station master.

Even now, I still love trains. I can while away hours in a station.

Yet sometimes I imagine they have no purpose :

stations you can never reach, trains you can never catch.

It's a subject close to my heart, a childhood memory.

There's an air of mystery.

I've painted stations because I like watching trains. Full stop.

Just as I liked the lamps my mother would carry from room to room at night.

When I was a child, skulls and skeletons terrified me.

Later they came to fascinate me, and were key elements in some of my work.

I've drawn skeleton crucifixions and skeletons being entombed.

These scenes from the Passion allowed me to express a certain drama.

Instead of a body, there was a skeleton, screaming, yelling, crying.

Even praying. Expressing all the human emotions.

Drawing helps me to clarify my ideas.

As my vision of a painting is very strict, very structured,

the preparatory drawings are very detailed.

They must enable me to transform an idea

into its plastic form.

In the painting you have the background, the light,

the colour and the substance.

A drawing is an emotion expressed on paper, without an intermediary.

I've always tried to bring the two concepts together.

For me, the painting is the development of an embryonic drawing.

The starting point for this painting is a poetic idea:

a ruined city, Pompeii, which suddenly finds itself inhabited.

But I add elements that have nothing to do with Pompeii,

and which make the painting unsettling.

There are three parts. The blue woman,

the woman in the middle, and the Pompeii women on the right.

Then there are smaller, more distant figures.

All my life, I've been concerned with perspective and the idea of distance.

Unsettling elements, for instance, are the woman with the flowery hat

and doors that you'd expect Brussels houses in the 1880s to have.

I'm playing with the ambiance of the ruined town.

The background of this canvas is a kind of musical grisaille

which controls the rest of the painting.

In a painting, you can't leave anything unfinished, you can't hide anything.

That's why I can't improvise as I do with drawing.

At first, everything seems complicated, although the final solution is simple.

Why can't I start where I end up?

The problem is knowing what an image will be like when reflected in a mirror.

It mustn't lose its equilibrium.

Because if I've worked on a painting for months, I no longer see it.

THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE and

RADIO-TELEVISION BELGIUM present

PAUL DELVAUX

or THE FORBIDDEN WOMEN

a film by HENRI STORCK

based on an original idea by RENE MICHA

music by PHILIPPE ARTHUYS

poem by HENRY BAUCHAU

spoken by MONIQUE DORSEL

text by RENE MICHA

spoken by JEAN SERVAIS

director of photography PAUL DE FRU

assisted by JEAN-PIERRE ETIENNE and PIERRE BELLEMANS

photos by CHARLES and VIRGINIA LEIRENS

editing assistant ALAIN MARC HAL

production director BAUDOUIN MUSSCHE

For Luc Haesaerts and André Souris

The paintings of Paul Delvaux

recall the state of seeing described by Rimbaud.

This is art drawn from first discoveries

from first amazement, from first dread.

The skeletons are animated figures.

They express emotions. They don't represent death.

This is the land of childhood, where truth and poetry are as one.

Where day and night become immaterial.

In Elysian fields, women, unseeing and unhearing,

eyes turned inwards, out of time.

Women dressed in feathers, in flowers, in ribbons, in jewels.

Women, forever forbidden.

A theatre of the world. A blend of all imagination.

A unique memoir.

Women Exiled for a time

Women An unyielding distance

Waiting in welcome All warmth exiled

To bring sleep In obscure light

The sea is nearby

Was childhood brighter?

Was it darker than memory?

Stones of the blind, diamonds

Conspiring beneath the meteors

A breast, bound in ribbon

You traverse the troubled planet

Couple without husbands, grander than harlot queens

Mere prostituted queens

Eulogies to melancholy

Was childhood brighter?

Was it darker than memory?

the end