Famous in the world of documentary, experimental, and ‘third’ cinema, Belgian director Boris Lehman (b. 1944) is the author of over 500 films, ranging from a few minute short diaries to twenty hour long film cycles. During his visit at Yale, he will talk about his work and personal relationship with Chantal Akerman (the two grew up in the same community, went to the same film school, and Lehman collaborated on ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ [1975]). The talk will be followed by a screening of Lehman’s remarkable ‘Magnum Begynasium Bruxellense’ (1978), at once a documentary and poetic evocation of a vanishing neighborhood in Brussels, and its inhabitants. This film illustrates Lehman’s lifelong concern with archiving the past, and processes of mourning, which have nonetheless yielded idiosyncratically powerful and life-affirming works.”
“We find in Lehman (as in Akerman) a cosmogonic dimension. The lush (black and white) photography threatens the film of being overly aestheticized, but this is almost systematically countered by Lehman’s device, which is more devious than it seems: there is, in ‘Magnum Begynasium Brusselense’, beyond the undercurrent fiction that we intuit is ready to emerge, and beyond pure cartography, thanks to the absence of any voice-over or other such safeguard, we feel as though on a launch pad, an effect that is created every time there is reconstitution in film.”