Particularly Now, in Spring (1996)

Directed by: Bavo Defurne | 8 minutes | short film | Actors: Olaf Nollen, Bart, Ignace, Sven, Tom, Adriaan, Johan, Werner De Smedt, Alexander, Mark, Stefaan, Alain Van Goethem, Oswin, Geert

During his student years at the Film Academy, Bavo Defurne made the film ‘Particulary Now, in Spring’, in which he tried to cast his own feelings into a film form. Shortly before, in the early 1990s, he had left his rowing buddies in Ostend to pursue his dream of becoming an artist in Brussels. Unfortunately for Bavo, his teachers at the Film Academy didn’t like his film at all and out of shame the Flemish filmmaker hid ‘Particularly Now’. It wasn’t until three years later, after the British Film Institute rediscovered the film in San Francisco, that Defurne got the credit it deserved. In ‘Particularly Now’, a young athlete talks about his last years as a teenager: to pursue his dream, he must leave the safe haven of his youth and spread his wings. He has an exciting future ahead of him. Meanwhile, Defurne shows images of seventeen-year-old boys on the sports field, in the swimming pool and in the locker room. The narrator expresses his dream of a career as an actor, just like his great hero Johnny Weismuller. At the same time, he hopes that his group of friends will always stay together.

What more binds the boys, besides their sport, does not come to the surface. A plot is missing in this eight-minute film. But because it only sees the bodies of young men, it suggests that there is an unconscious but blistering desire in the group (especially if at a certain point it is said: ‘We don’t talk about it’). Seen in that light, the main character’s desire to become an ‘actor’ may have a very different meaning. The narrator also likes to dream: ‘Do you see how glorious life can be when you have dreams?’, he says literally. The boy is a naive romantic who longs for the warmth and security of his youth. The black-and-white images that Defurne and cameraman Vincent Bal treat us to are very similar to the films made in the 1930s. The fixation on the human body makes it easy to make comparisons with the oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl (‘Triumph of the Will’, 1935), but Defurne invariably indicates in interviews that he does not see her as an example. The lack of a concrete plot makes it difficult to get emotionally involved with these guys, but ‘Particularly Now, in Spring’ is certainly admirably shot.