Biography

In his most narrative film, A Strange Love Affair (1984), De Kuyper explores the themes of melodrama in the context of the characters' selection of lovers, and drives it in with an unconventional ending. The black-and-white photography is by the legendary Henri Alekan, cinematographer on Beauty and the Beast (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1946).

Towards the end of the 2000s, he started organizing concerts en images, events in which he combines silent films, some segments shot by himself for the occasions, with live classical music, and sometimes singing and acting.

Is a Flemish-Belgian and Dutch writer, semiologist, art critic, and experimental film director.

Eric De Kuyper was born and spent his early childhood in Brussels and then, as he put it, his teenage years of choices swayed by "faith, sexuality, and the future" in Antwerp.

Casta Diva was his non-traditional directorial debut (finished 1982, released 1983)and earned him the Grand Prix at the Hyères International Festival of Young Cinema, Different Cinema. Its original Italian title refers to the aria "Oh, pure/chaste goddess..." (i.e., the moon) from Norma. The black-and-white 106'-long feature without a dialogue starts with a stationary camera showing attractive men grooming in front of a mirror while the soundtrack of operatic arias and fragments of other songs challenges the viewer to perceive the two levels as seductive and intoxicating parallels, speculative contrasts, or mold-breaking transgressions. The film establishes a relation with its cinematic objects, male bodies, that is both sensual and distant, somewhat reminiscent of Flesh (dir. Paul Morrissey; 1968) produced by Andy Warhol.