Rediscovering Nicole Van Goethem, The Only Belgian Director To Ever Win an Oscar

A newsletter full of grace, nuns, plastic penises and caryatids. All animated.

Awards season has wrapped up, and with it the impressive recognition for Flow. This week, we take a look back at another exceptional Award Season for Belgium.

The year was 1987, the weather —allegedly, but in Belgium, it's not such a wild guess— cold and rainy.

But in the heart of Belgian artist and director Nicole Van Goethem (1941-2000), it must have been pretty warm that night.

On March 30, 1987, she received her very own Oscar statue for her short film, Een Griekse tragedie (A Greek Tragedy), the only Oscar ever awarded to a Belgian director to date. A feat even more impressive as the short marked Van Goethem's animated directorial debut.

Like many artists of her generation, Van Goethem started her artistic career as with drawing. A tendency that she already had picked up at a very young age, along with a taste — according to her teachers — for disobedience. From then on, drawing became part of her life. At the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she took evening classes and met her partner Rudi Renson. And in 1971, after a six-year break, she turned to art as a profession.

Nicole Van Goethem in her studio, approx 1987. courtesy of M HKA Library

Animation also came to Van Goethem through the drawing community. In the 1970s, she started working with Belgian cartoonist and animator Picha on Tarzoon, Shame of the Jungle, as both inker, colorist and background artist. The film, which is accessible online, as aged poorly in terms of subject and female depiction (a topic for a later newsletter). Yet it remains a landmark in Belgian animation, and one of the first true adult animated feature films ever to be released in the cinemas.

The Tintin cameo in Shame of the Jungle marks one of the highlight of this raunchy, crude and unequally funny weirdness of a movie.

Through this collaboration, Nicole Van Goethem discovered a medium that suited her very well, along with an artist that has had a huge influence on her animated and illustrative works. Flash forward ten years, and although Van Goethem had to manage rocky financial times and hopping from one animated project to another, she started working on her very own projects.

A Greek Tragedy, on and off-screen

How is it that a Belgian Oscar-winner has not left a much stronger mark in Belgian cinematic history?

It may have to do with the love-hate relationship Van Goethem had with the trophy, and the global attention her first film received. Produced in a small studio in Antwerp, the short tells the story of three caryatids that finally manage to break free of their burden. With funny faces, floppy breasts and arms and long noses, her characters remind us of Picha’s quirky designs, yet with a female gaze that contrasts with the way the latter treats his own female protagonists. And as they finally give up on holding the broken roof above their heads, the three caryatids liberate themselves into a wonderful a inspirational ballet.

Critics may have the tendency to over-analyze films, so the following feminist interpretation might be far-fetched. But as Van Goethem worked with feminist magazine Mimo in Belgium and was involved in creating many posters for Women’s Consultation Committee in Flanders, one can argue that A Greek Tragedy boldly depicts women breaking free as a collective from the burden of handling a broken patriarcal society. A responsibility that was assigned to them against their will, preventing them from experiencing life in full.

Or maybe it’s just a beautiful piece of 2d non-dialogue animation, your call.

In any case, the film appealed to both national and international juries. A slew of prizes, starting with the Grand Prix and the Audience Award at Annecy Intl. Animation Film Festival and ending with the Academy Award, were awarded to the short. But as Nicole Van Goethem was very uncomfortable with this attention, the Oscar wasn’t received as a blessing at the time. According to M HKA Ensembles Library (which is this newsletter’s main source) the director commented: “Oscar or no Oscar – ‘Nicoleke’ is still all alone in the world with her sorrow and will remain destitute and penniless in a lousy, two-bit flat tomorrow, the same as she was yesterday.”

Still, it helped Van Goethem’s career. And commissions were numerous after this project.

Animation-wise, the director had already two other scripts in hand, written in the early 1980s, like A Greek Tragedy. Those became Vol Van Gratie (Full of Grace, 1987) and the posthumous L.A.T, Living Apart Together (2002)

Full of… Grace

Is there anything funnier than animated nuns playing with dildos? In Full of Grace, Van Goethem offers a delightful counterpart to her male contemporaries, providing female-driven fun written, drawn and conducted by a female director. And it’s a delight indeed to follow around this weird duo as they unveil nightly and forbidden pleasures, mistaking plastic penises for candlelights until they discover their true purpose.

Managing her own backgrounds and colors, Nicole Van Goethem delivers again a strong proposition of a film, with impressive lighting and great atmosphere.

Sadly, this second animated short did not receive the same attention as the first one. Even though the film was nominated for the Palme d’Or in Cannes and won the Film Fest Gent’s Joseph Plateau Award for Best Belgian Short Film, Full of Grace was considered offensive by some. Van Goethem went on to work on commissioned films and illustrations, with still her third animation project under the belt.

L.A.T. - Living Apart Together

A film ten years in the making, Living Apart Together was completed two years after Van Goethem’s death, in 2000. Rudi Renson completed the piece, which marked Van Goethem’s first experimentation with voice and 3d animation. The result is a weird, crazy portrait of a blind mole couple, touching on several artistic disciplines commented and accompanied by their overly talkative parrot. Most striking in this film is the 2d-3d mix, providing a surprising camera movement unlike anything I had ever seen in a 1990s short film.

Today, thanks to the work of M HKA teams and the distributors behind KIS KIS Shorts initiative, all three films are available online in full, as you may have noticed.

More information — and an exhibition catalog — are available in Dutch (and partly in English) for free here.

I hope you get the chance to discover all three, and take the time to dive into the artists’ rich and various illustrations.

In the meantime, thank you for reading this new episode, and I wish you a great animated weekend.

Kevin