Pensees Et Visions D 39-une Tete Coupee -1991- Ok.ru ((install)) Jun 2026

The film runs approximately 38 minutes. It was screened only twice in 1991: once at the Avignon Film Festival (where it was booed) and once at a midnight showing in a converted slaughterhouse in Lyon. It never received a commercial VHS or DVD release.

The directors do not simply catalog Wiertz's paintings. Instead, they create a disorienting experience that mirrors the artist's own madness. Narrated by the director himself, the film abandons the traditional, didactic rhythm of an art documentary. The official summary states that Smolders "has basically taken a standard documentary and chopped it up," interweaving quotes from the long-dead artist, historical facts, and, most shockingly, scenes of real-life violence and staged surrealist performances. Inside the museum that houses Wiertz's gigantic paintings, Smolders stages a "tour" for a group of nattily dressed dwarves, whose small stature against the massive, nightmarish canvases "accentuate the painter's mad visions and ego that bleed from the more disturbing works dealing with suicide, infanticide, piles of baby bodies, and monsters opening up their innards."

The film takes its title from Wiertz's fascination with what a severed head might "think" or "see" in the moments following a guillotine execution.

Unlike traditional narratives where death implies the end of the story, here death is the condition of the story. The narrator acts as the "Absolute Witness." Gracq writes with a detachment that suggests the head, once severed, is freed from the messy, biological urgencies of the body (hunger, lust, fear). The narrative voice is calm, observational, and strangely euphoric. This detachment creates a stark contrast with the violence of the event. The head becomes a camera that has been disconnected from its tripod, continuing to film as it rolls away. pensees et visions d 39-une tete coupee -1991- ok.ru

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The "cut head" represents the modern French citizen—disconnected from their own actions (the body). The body works a bureaucratic job; the head dreams of poetry. Caro was responding to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the subsequent death of ideological conviction. If your head is cut off, are you still responsible for what your body does?

: Rather than a standard biography, Smolders "chops up" the documentary format, intercutting original footage of the painter's works with staged scenes of nudity, sex, and extreme violence. The film runs approximately 38 minutes

Disjointed and dream-like, simulating the scattered, firing neurons of a dying brain.

Will you be disturbed? Probably. Will you understand the "thoughts" if you don't speak French? Unlikely. But you will have participated in the true spirit of the avant-garde: finding art where it was left to rot.

The documentary functions as a surrealist portrait rather than a conventional biography. It blends historical art analysis with nightmarish cinematic vignettes: The directors do not simply catalog Wiertz's paintings

The title splits the experience into two categories: "Pensées" (Thoughts) and "Visions" (Sights).

: The narrative follows a painter—played by Christian Courtois—who lectures a group of onlookers on the presence of the Devil in the works of masters like Goya and Rembrandt.