Henri d' Ursel

Biography

The count Henri d'Ursel was a singular charactor: born in Brussels 1900, he lived in Paris during the 20s, a regular at the homes of the surrealists and avant-garde film-makers, and shot 'The Pearl' under the pseudonym of Henri d'Arche "in the flush of inexperience", as he put it. Returning to Belgium, eternally nostalgic for silent cinema ("the only films whose horizon was the dream"), in 1937 he founded the Prix de l'Image, the precursor of the experimental film festivals; then, in the aftermath of the war, the Séminaire des Arts, which for 22 years was to remain the most prestigious of Belgian ciné-clubs. A flower in his buttonhole, utterly deadpan, he showed the great classics, with his inadvertent clumsiness creating widespread enthusiasm, especially when he regularly vented his spleen about the silent era. A friend of Henri Storck and Charles Dekeukeleire, the count was also vice-president of the Royal Film Archive for 25 years and died in 1974. As with the other Belgian surrealist film-makers (Ernst Moerman, Pierre Charbonnier and Marcel Mariën), d'Ursel shot only one film, which was based on a screenplay by the poet Georges Hugnet.