- In his most narrative film, A Strange Love Affair (1984), De Kuyper explores the themes of melodrama in the context of the characters' selection of lovers, and drives it in with an unconventional ending. The black-and-white photography is by the legendary Henri Alekan, cinematographer on Beauty and the Beast (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1946).
- Towards the end of the 2000s, he started organizing concerts en images, events in which he combines silent films, some segments shot by himself for the occasions, with live classical music, and sometimes singing and acting.
- Is a Flemish-Belgian and Dutch writer, semiologist, art critic, and experimental film director.
- Eric De Kuyper was born and spent his early childhood in Brussels and then, as he put it, his teenage years of choices swayed by "faith, sexuality, and the future" in Antwerp.
- Casta Diva was his non-traditional directorial debut (finished 1982, released 1983)and earned him the Grand Prix at the Hyères International Festival of Young Cinema, Different Cinema. Its original Italian title refers to the aria "Oh, pure/chaste goddess..." (i.e., the moon) from Norma. The black-and-white 106'-long feature without a dialogue starts with a stationary camera showing attractive men grooming in front of a mirror while the soundtrack of operatic arias and fragments of other songs challenges the viewer to perceive the two levels as seductive and intoxicating parallels, speculative contrasts, or mold-breaking transgressions. The film establishes a relation with its cinematic objects, male bodies, that is both sensual and distant, somewhat reminiscent of Flesh (dir. Paul Morrissey; 1968) produced by Andy Warhol.
- His academic writing encompasses reviews, essays, articles, and books on semiotics, film, dance, theater, and opera.
- De Kuyper's films reveal an engineered penchant for melodrama, love songs, and silent films of Alfred Machin and Yevgeni Bauer. The central theme of his filmmaking is homosexuality. Most of his work is highly experimental underground shown mainly at film festivals.[.
- His non-traditional films reveal an engineered penchant for melodrama, love songs, and silent movies; their central topic is homosexuality.
- According to him, his family mostly spoke Dutch while they "thought in French and felt the more subtle emotions" in that language.
- De Kuyper has described himself as belonging to the dying breed of inhabitants of Brussels who are fully bilingual in Dutch (Flemish) and French.
- De Kuyper's first novel (Aan zee: taferelen uit de kinderjaren; By the Sea: Scenes from a Childhood) consists of a series of insightful snapshots of a small boy's life in post-World War II Brussels and family summer vacation at Ostend. Together, they conjure up a nostalgic vignette of times gone by, along with a timeless sense of childhood when one feels everything revolves around him. A reviewer said of its effective acuteness that no one who has read it can look at the Belgian beach without thinking of De Kuyper. The lyrical By the Sea turned out to be the first volume in de Kuyper's successful series of 3rd-person fictionalized memoirs.
- After graduating from Notre Dame Jesuit High School, he returned to the city of his birth to study in the Department of Audiovisual and Dramatic Arts and Techniques (Rits), Erasmus University College Brussels, and took courses in philosophy and mass communication at the Free University of Brussels. While in college, he began to work as a producer at the Flemish Radio and Television Network.
- Fictionalized autobiographical novels, written in the 3rd-person, account for most of his creative work.
- In 1974 he registered for graduate study at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris where he worked in semiotics and from which he received a PhD for his thesis "Pour une Sémiotique Spectaculaire" under the direction of A. J. Greimas in 1979.Before he became a full-time writer in 1992, he was professor of film theory at the Catholic University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands (1978-1988), and then Deputy Director of the Dutch Film Museum (1988-1992). He was on the editorial board of and contributed to the Dutch academic film journal Versus.
- After a decade-long hiatus from film, de Kuyper collaborated with Chantal Akerman on the screenplays for her La captive (The Captive; 2000) and Demain on déménage (Tomorrow We Move; 2004) and she later cast him in a supporting role in her Die Blutgräfin.
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