The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short

Brimming with 1960s anti-bourgeois spirit, this is the absurd tale of an ordinary schoolteacher (Senne Rouffaer) who develops an obsession with his pupil (Beata Tyszkiewicz). During the heyday of European art cinema, this feature-length debut of one of Belgium’s most important directors, André Delvaux, was placed alongside the achievements of modernists such as Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni, but later found itself on the margins of cinema history. The film never received a cinema premiere in communist Poland, which appears to be a significant loss: after all, this was one of Tyszkiewicz’s most outstanding performances, two years before her iconic turn as the haughty Izabela Łęcka in Wojciech J. Has’s The Doll). Delvaux met Tyszkiewicz while making a documentary on Polish cinema and considered her to personify the ideal of an inaccessible, sublimely seductive beauty. Although The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short – photographed by Ghislain Cloquet, a collaborator of Robert Bresson – can be described as a “Flemish Lolita”, Tyszkiewicz was 28 years old at the time of its premiere. On screen, she exudes aristocratic power, steals every scene, and drives the titular protagonist to the brink of oblivion.

Sebastian Smoliński

André Delvaux (1926–2002) was a Belgian director. He started his career by making documentaries about film for television. In 1962 he co-founded the Belgian film school INSAS and three years later directed his debut feature The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, adapted from a novel by Johan Daisne. Many of his subsequent films were also literary adaptations. Delvaux developed in his films a specific brand of magical realism and is considered the founder of Belgian national cinema.

New 2K restoration from the original negative material preserved by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique.

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