Focus on the Belgian film maker Boris Lehman, whom we are happy to welcome regularly at the Antre-Peaux.
Film directing: Philippe Zunino.
Production: Bandits-Mages – 2011
Everybody will tell you: Boris Lehman is a first-person film maker. He is part of this mythical and nice family of which are also part the brothers or cousins Brakhage, Mekas, Morder, De Bernardi, Noren, Hernandez, Kawanaka, Guttenplan, Hanoun, Courant or Akerman, and which brings closer cinema, intimate literature, and self-portrait. He did everything to deserve this relationship: He has often been his own screenwriter, his own camera operator, his own film editor. He investigated himself, he did self-ethnology. He was the main actor of many of his movies, beaming lover in Couple, Regards, Positions, sweetly narcissistic investigator in Babel, using the mise en abyme (and self-mockery) in Homme portant (The carrying man), his heavier movie. Most of his movies are self-portraits, I would even say self-embalmings, thinking of this film where he is seen as “Homme de terre” (Earth man) or this other (Masque) where he has his death mask made. Yes, but Boris also welcomes others, lets them enter his movies, makes room for them close to him, in front of him, next to him. He is the author of Album 1, super 8 film of one hour, in which he films his friends and have them film him. And he just directed « Mes entretiens filmés » (My Filmed Interviews) where he asks that his critic friends talk about his film making. In short, he practices narcissism with others and his self-celebrations have a hell of a casting. After a screening of these « Entretiens filmés » at the French Cinémathèque (film library), Jean Rouch said he was struck by the way the people in it were “ridiculous and ugly”. When I saw the movie, I never stopped thinking the opposite: “Astonishing how so-and-so and so-and-so are good, they were never that good”. Boris pretends to interrogate the persons he is speaking to about himself, but it is a way to have them talk about themselves. His narcissism frees their own, makes them more confident and freer. It is no doubt the Christopher Columbus or the Sisters Tatin syndrome: you never do what you think you do, and sometimes you even do the opposite. Boris Lehman believes he is making films in the first person, but actually he may have done the best second-person cinema of the past thirty years.
Dominique Noguez
We are currently working on the photo archives of Boris Lehman.