L’imitation du cinéma

While there is hardly any real narration, we do acquire the suggestion of a story about a young man, slightly marginal, who is told off by a priest when he is caught with an erotic booklet. In its place he is given a copy of the Imitatio Christi, that he takes very literally and this results in extremist and fairly fetishist scenes. While he waits for the life-sized cross that is being constructed for him, he visits a prostitute with a talent for philology and philosophy. He uses the cross in a vain attempt to commit suicide. Then he resorts to turning on the gas.
After the première, a Catholic campaign published an indictment in a dozen Belgian newspapers against this ‘sacrilegious parody of Christianity, mixed with an obscenity that beggars belief’. Marcel Mariën and several companions had raised the budget to make the film by falsifying a contest at the newspaper where they worked. (Mariën had earlier circulated fake banknotes with the painter Magritte.)
Mariën himself considered his film to be a failure and left to China in 1963 the work they have two years as a translator and till he had had his fill of Maoism. Back in Belgium, he concentrated on publications, collages, objects and above all on photography. Yet L’imitation du cinéma is still regarded by connoisseurs as one of the best surrealist films of all time.