DANGER OF DEATH

DANGER OF DEATH

Daredevils in the water. Hesitation on the shore. In a refreshing poetry film.

Poetry film by Paul Bogaert
Production year: 2024
Language: English. Translation by Astrid Alben with the support of Flanders Literature.
Aspect ratio: 16:9 (1.77:1)
Colour: colour
Sound: stereo
Duration: 3 min 03 s (including titles)

In other languages
  • Original version in Dutch: LEVENSGEVAAR
  • French version: DANGER DE MORT (traduction par Daniel Cunin avec le soutien de Literatuur Vlaanderen)
  • German version: LEBENSGEFAHR (übersetzt von Stefan Wieczorek mit Unterstützung von Literatuur Vlaanderen)
Screenings of ‘DANGER OF DEATH’ | ‘LEVENSGEVAAR’
DANGER OF DEATH – PAUL BOGAERT

“Danger of Death reflects on various aspects of life and cinema with lightness. For those who make cinema, it raises the question of whether cinema itself is an escape from life’s occasionally dangerous yet thrilling intensity.
A semi-transparent boundary (a rigid net installed by local authorities to prevent people from surfing or swimming in a small, deemed-dangerous river) separates filmmaker Paul Bogaert and his camera from his subjects—those who defy the legal prohibition to venture into the stream’s waters.
If the filmmaker ventured in, for example with a GoPro to film himself braving the waters, would it still be cinema? Or would it become television? We don’t have a clear answer to these questions.
The strength of this short film, made with an almost childlike spontaneity, also lies in the fact that we often don’t see the protagonists or catch only glimpses of them—almost as if they could only gain visibility through significant effort, or sometimes, it seems, through sheer chance. This has always been a characteristic of auteur cinema compared to television: leaving essential narrative elements off-screen but still present.
The author perhaps suggests something paradoxical: that in order to perform a poetic act, subtly humorous in its own way, he had to avoid crossing that boundary. Crossing it, he would have been swept into the current of intense life or, to use Heraclitus’ phrase, the “panta rei” (everything flows) of time—the panta rei that today is represented by constantly active, ever-flowing, and flatly real television schedules. By staying outside, he displayed “the courage of his fragility” and self-irony, which is the indomitable fragility of cinema, art, and poetry.”

Federico Iris Osmo Tinelli 
15.12.2024