Guest: Boris Lehman – Club Antonin Artaud
’26
Club Antonin Artaud, 6 Rue du Grand Hospice, 1000 Bruxelles © Boris Lehman, Ne pas stagner
In honor of the 40th anniversary of Museum Dr. Guislain, we welcome the Belgian filmmaker Boris Lehman to present a two-part program on the Club Antonin Artaud.
In 1962, in the boisterous context of the anti-psychiatry movements, the Club Antonin Artaud was founded in Brussels by former mental patients and some of their therapists. In this avant-garde space, conceived as a center for social and cultural rehabilitation, Boris Lehman created a filmmaking group in 1965, the first of its kind. Over the course of nearly twenty years, about one hundred films were made, both individually and collectively: documentaries, fiction films and experimental works. These are not therapeutic films, but rather art brut experiences.
- 17:00 Part I (85′)
- Dinner
- 20:00 Part II (54′)
- Each of the two complementary programs will be personally introduced by Boris Lehman and followed by a discussion with Stefaan Vervoort.
Dr. Stefaan Vervoort (Ghent University) is currently preparing a research project on art, psychiatry and experimental psychotherapy in post-war Belgium, focusing on the Club Antonin Artaud.
Born in 1944, Boris Lehman has been an exceptional presence in Belgian film culture for well over fifty years. In his autobiographical oeuvre, he has turned his life into a film, as the films have become his life. With minimal means, he makes films about his own obsessions and the things close to him, always bearing his unmistakable signature. He made almost five hundred films, which he always presents to his audience in person. This screening marks his first appearance in Ghent in seven years.
Boris Lehman
Ne pas stagner
In the form of a reportage film, Don’t Stagnate reflects a lived experience of the Club Antonin Artaud’s theatre group. Through the playful and instinctive creation of an untitled piece, the actors express the desire “not to remain stuck, to be able to leave and stand on their own.” Their collective improvisations are born not from artistic intention or the urge for a public performance, but out of necessity. The actors are also the authors, playing their own roles. Having lost their guide, a group of amateur mountaineers eventually find shelter in an inn. Through the radio, they learn that a war has broken out. Whether to stay or to move on becomes the question.
Ne pas stagner © Boris Lehman
Boris Lehman & René Paquot
Villofolie
Shot with direct sound, Villofolie presents six people giving a monologue in a destroyed and dehumanized city: Brussels. The film dissects itself to reflect on mental illness and the inability to communicate. The group of people share feelings of abnormality, anxiety and loneliness.
Villofolie © Boris Lehman
Boris Lehman & René Paquot
Mon délire, le Saint Michel
With an acute awareness of his condition as a mental patient, René Paquot denounces all powers, especially the practices of psychiatric hospitals, which he compares with those used in slaughterhouses: submissions by drugs, straitjackets and exterminations by electroshock. You have to see this film as a cry of revolt.
Mon délire, le Saint Michel © Boris Lehman
Boris Lehman & René Paquot
Le ventre, un supermonde
The visualization of a symbolic universe, filled with raw phantasms inside a house that presents itself as both asylum and hell, womb and brain, visited by a pregnant queen. As a collage film and a dialogue between a mother and her unborn child, Le Ventre, un supermonde can be understood as a personal psychoanalysis of the filmmaker, who dreamily delivers his conflicts with maternal, medical and religious authority.
Le ventre, un supermonde © Boris Lehman
Boris Lehman © Nina de Vroome, 2021