Franco Basaglia ha 100 anni

PROGRAM #2 – Films made by former patients at the Club Antonin Artaud in Brussels (Belgium)

“The Antonin Artaud Club was founded on January 10, 1962, on the input of former mentally ill people who had gathered after their hospitalization. Among them, Dr. Jacques Bardfer and the artist Jean Racine, a member of the Cobra group. The Club, a rehabilitation centre also for social work, offered its members, in addition to traditional handicrafts and occupational therapy (weaving, carpentry, ceramics), various artistic disciplines. Theatre and cinema were used as therapeutic means to facilitate the exchange of relationships, providing possibilities for sublimation, diversions to hostility and aggression, encouraging identification and self-discovery, and freeing self-expression. At the same time documentaries and fiction, reportage and experimentation, these films are the antipodes of psychiatric, philanthropic or aesthetic formulas. They are examples of spontaneous creations, freed from dross, norms and habits of thought, capable of acting directly on life.”

Boris Lehman

Symphonie (Soliloque)

By Boris Lehman and Romain Schneid. Belgium, 1979. 34′

“Romain Schneid tells the story of his claustrophobia when, at the age of twelve, hiding as a Jew during the German occupation, he could not leave a tiny apartment. He narrates and interprets all the characters of his drama. Invent, deform, imagine another ending. He is at the same time author, narrator and actor (the actors). Has he really lived what he is talking about, or does it all exist only in his head? Testimony or delirium?” (Boris Lehman)

The belly, a supermonde

By René Pacquot, Belgium. 1974. 19′

Visualization of a symbolic universe full of ghosts: a collage film, a dialogue between the mother and the child to be born, the film can be interpreted as a self-analysis by René Paquot, who reveals in dreamlike form his conflicts with maternal, medical and religious authority.

Mon delire, le Saint Michel

By René Pacquot and Boris Lehman. Belgium, 1979. 17′

“With an acute awareness of his condition as a mentally ill person, René Paquot denounces all the powers, and especially the practices of psychiatric hospitals, which he compares with those used in slaughterhouses: subjugation with drugs, straitjackets and annihilation with electroshock. The film should be seen as a cry of revolt.” (Boris Lehman)