A 2-minute time machine that never happened.
In 2000, which was ‘Ensor Year’, the installation artist Guillaume Bijl made a short fictitious found-footage film entitled ‘James Ensor in Oostende ca. 1920’, which shows the painter at this resort with his friends. We see them having a drink, strolling in the arcades of the Thermae Palace and sitting on the beach. Bijl’s meticulous choice of locations, belle époque dress (including bathing costumes) and his cinematographically perfect imitation of the rather jerky black & white images, as well as the patina and the perfectly imitated scratches on the film emulsion, all resulted in a perfect replica: an apparently forgotten roll of film from the days of silent film. Bijl himself classifies this faultless slice of life, one of his rare excursions into film and video, under ‘cultural tourism’, one of the elements of his work in which he popularizes cultural history subjects and reduces them to clichés for the general public.
Production
Every scratch and patina handcrafted to deceive.
Costume
Bathing costumes so wrong they feel exactly right.
Director
Guillaume Bijl
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Bijl typically works in large-scale installation 'situations'—this rare film miniature compresses his entire practice into 120 seconds of temporal fraud.
Ensor Year 2000 saw Belgium celebrating its masked visionary; Bijl responded not with tribute but with a ghost wearing his face at the seaside.
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