Scenes of Ostend (1929): cast, story & where to watch

Released in 1929, Scenes of Ostend is a notable film directed by Henri Storck.

What it’s about. One of the early films. It is structured in visual chapters: the port, anchors, the wind, the spray, the dunes, the North Sea … a series of images that have nothing to do with anecdote or explanation. Each shot is at the very heart of the definition of the word involved. It could be said that this is the first film of conceptual experimentation. Shot after shot (the montage is quite rapid), Storck offers a glimpse of a fragment, an aspect that orders its multiple constitutive elements. They invoke their cinematographic equivalents, light, framing, the scale of the shots, movement, rhythm. The water, the sand, the waves are an integral part of a cinematic language. This is what Germaine Dulac and her friends would have called pure cinema. A poetic and kinetic shock, without fiction or sound, which relieves film from its narrative obligation and restores it to the world of sensations that it alone is able to carry.

How it landed. With an audience score of 7.0/10, Scenes of Ostend has been warmly received by audiences.

Where to watch. Streaming options change often. See the full, country-by-country breakdown on our where to watch Scenes of Ostend page.