Boris Lehman

There are directors whose faces no one sees because the ceaseless motion of cinema has forced them to disappear deep into the unreachable limbo somewhere out-of-frame. There are others who like to slip themselves into their movies for just a scene, a glimpse, a fleeting reflection in the mirror. And finally, there are those who invade the frame, pacing all over it, eager to imprint their image on the tumultuous ebb and flow of time and space. Boris Lehman belongs to those “filmmakers” (those who “make films”) who manufacture their own memories thanks to and through cinema. His frequent urges to revert back to the innocence of childhood (putting on his bathing cap, he amuses himself by playing the role of his friend’s grandson in A Comme Adrienne) should not be mistaken for some kind of inappropriate naïveté. He is well aware that cinema shapes life, structures the quotidian, turns the ephemeral into the timeless. He knows that the spiritual mechanics of the camera have the ontological aim of producing fiction, and that one should not delude oneself into believing that it is possible to record “what lies in front of one’s eyes”. Artifice creeps in. As do structural devices: Lehman naked, wrapped entirely in strips of film (the Egyptian future of cinema as foreseen by French writer Bazin), eating bits of photos served on a plate or projecting film clips on his naked body as if it were a screen. This last composition evolves into an exuberant happening. Indeed, the projected image goes up in flames thanks to a superimposition technique tricking the viewer into believing that the filmmaker is disintegrating. However, even when surrounded by tall flames, his face remains untouched. Lehman the illusionist stages his own (fake) destruction, convinced that cinema will grant him eternal life and protect him from the worldly deflagration. His work is like a bubble within which affective patterns can live on (picture, symbol, hair, wrinkle) thus preventing absence and lack from taking root. Along European, American and Mexican roads, Lehman has been peddling his belief in the eternal rebirth of images: eternally filmed, eternally shown and eternally encountered.

In the end these images compiled into movies and linked by invisible ties form a sort of heterogenous Filmer’s Digest. One shot leads to the next, like organic pearls strung together, punctuated by chanted leitmotivs, inter-titles, or shots of Lehman wallowing in his foam bath, a rethinking of Diogenes and his barrel. Observed and Observer blend to such an extent that the viewer goes as far as “lehmanizing” himself. Vampirism? Schizophrenia? These mirror tricks, intensified by drastic camera movements (sometimes filming right side-up, sometimes upside-down, with no clues given as to what is intended as the actual subject of the shots: the clapper, the close-up face, or the latent images from a long lost past – in fact, the subject is the coexistence of all three of them) disrupt the order established by the cinematic doxology and aim at creating a peculiar intimacy between Lehman, those observed by his cinema, and those observing his cinema. Therefore, in A Comme Adrienne, heinterviews his cinematographer and his editor, as well as the head of a film library, a film critic, and one of his viewers (could you be next?). They are his surrogate family. Lehman gets closer to them, distances himself from them, films himself with or without them, indoors or outdoors, according to his comings and goings. He offers a brief insight into their daily life before making them the captives of his incessant interrogations as he searches for traces of truth in facial expressions and vocal modulations. Until he finally starts looking for answers within himself. Who is “himself”? What kind of mask for what kind of out-of-sync autobiography? The actor, the Buster Keaton-like character, the “maker of films”, the wandering Jew? The dove or the bear (“dov” in Hebrew)? The witness of a decay that fragments, or the infinity that takes its place?

Between appearance and disappearance, here and there, Lehman plays with time, which he views as both ally and enemy. After having mentioned, in Porto with his friends Saguenail and Corbe, the idea of a mythical time, he amuses himself in the next interview (Mes entretiens filmés, deuxième partie), by tapping the little egg timer used by psychoanalyst Rachel Fajersztajn to cook hard-boiled eggs. Lehman tames time from different angles, constantly renewing his goal from one end to the other of the cinematic construct. Poetry gives way to irony, essays to jokes, but the main idea remains the same: a filmed scene is documentation of the filming process. Space is an image of time, traveling is an image of anamnesis. Having been filmed as a series of private practices, offices, and workshops, all the cities he has visited look alike and fail to lead one to reflect upon actual geographical location. Hence the feeling of motionlessness: the true progression lies in the unraveling of the film, not in its iterations that take us from Moscow to Paris, through Köln, Dunkerque or Porto. In is last works, Lehman exhausts locales, draining them of all spatial dimension: postcards replace traveling shots of cityscapes, recitations replace journeys. Surroundings gradually become irrelevant. The second part of A Comme Adrienne takes us to Iran through a unique use of sounds (singing intonations, sacred music, Persian quotations) and the power of time within them. In sum, motion has become an inner-force focusing only on the passage of figures (whether human or not) through the temporality of the film.

Depicting Lehman as someone obsessed with the past would be erroneous. His life and works are totally devoid of nostalgia, even when facing his parents’ grave or when asserting, “There are places I will remember all my life”. His mise-en-scene handles themes head-on, preventing hazy and hesitant memories from surfacing and adding an unwanted dreamlike dimension to the narrative. Ever methodical, he experiences the world as an encyclopedia writer would, more interested in reproducing and organizing what is real than in feeling the vibes of the ghosts surrounding us (in a place or a photo). Hence his interest in mechanics and engineers: optometrists, photographers, repairmen...Yet his head-on and pragmatic way of handling things leads Lehman to a vital transcendental energy. To an after-life devoid of any religious dimension (even though Robert Kramer and Stephen Dowskin compare the filmmaker to a rabbi in Mes entretiens filmés, deuxième partie). On the contrary, this after-life takes the viewer beyond thought (a filmed philosophical reflection), beyond affection (an absolute love, delineated only by otherness). His films are watching the world, taking root in the belief that reality will confer upon those observing it, sensing it, an energy enabling them to face their own mortality. Strange as it may seem, Lehman’s works oscillate between an extremely vivid rationalism and an ardent animism without any sort of guide. His visitors are wholly involved in the immanence of the discussion, the main pre-requisite to reconciliation with the universe, which remains, in essence, an emblematic figure of chaos. Indeed, the filmmaker (the maker of films) recognizes that he always addresses themes linked with happiness and never with unhappiness. “Nothing but the light-hearted happiness of the carefree amateur”. No Nazis, no hospitals, no Cuba, no Moscow, no Israel. Sticking to a very restricted field of action (Brussels, deserted train station platforms, glimpses of tree trunks, intimate places within a few big cities) allows him to experience all sorts of adventures, with no need to resort to a satellite dish or stunt men. “I work with actors whose names I have in my address book,” he explains, showing us his scribbled notes. Like conversation, writing is a way for the godless ethnographer to lend a kind of stability to time and moving pictures. Lehman gradually reaches a point were he produces nothing but static shots, yet these static shots are as moving as can be. Here is rooted his taste for everyday rituals, those each of us create unobtrusively within the closed intimacy of our homes. We are not dealing with symbolic body movements.ont Merely with the vernacular nuts-and-bolts of things. Thus we see Adrienne setting the table or draining the rice, Ulrich Gregor in front of his computer screen, Claudia von Aleman standing in front of a large photo of her daughter. Everyday life as depicted by Lehman is pervaded by a feeling of immoderation.

Behind the fragmented jigsaw puzzle of his life lurks a gigantic figure: that of a “Babelian” oeuvre encompassing all the layers of human existence. This œuvre is both his reason (we could say a “reasoned film” as we would say a “reasoned catalogue”) and his insanity. In a frenzied speech - the amount of irony of which would be impossible to rate - Lehman states that “Nobody listens to or hears him, though he is saying important things.” His delusion of persecution leads him to perceive his camera as a “straightjacket.” Ultimately, is he a hero fighting for his freedom or a burlesque character playing with words?

There is no question that he plays with images by repeating them, inserting echoes and strange coincidences into his visual narratives. A color shot of a naked woman in a bathtub is followed by a black-and-white photo of a naked woman in a brook (Histoire de ma vie racontée par mes photographies). The picture moves, carried away by a miraculous gust of wind: this is one of the techniques used by Lehman to give life to objects that would seem inanimate to a neophyte, but which are, to him, a “second skin,” a framework with a pulse that can go wild and turn into storm. In the field of motion pictures, the wind is capricious and correspondences are lifted up, soar, and surge like menacing waves. In Babel (his 1991 river-film) there is something reminiscent of the Atlantide: a kingdom that is underground (inner), immersed (already passed but reconstructed on the screen), vast (terrain for multiple and interconnected encounters), majestic and decayed (rich and poor).

Utterly self-sufficient, Lehman has developed his own cinematic system, like a lonesome cowboy. Indeed, if you wish to see his work you just need to give the “maker of films” a call or to snatch him on the streets of Brussels (every inhabitant will confirm that he is the guy you always meet by chance) to set up a private screening in your home without any high-tech device. Just rent a video-projector and Lehman will show up to meet you and introduce you to his works. These private screenings are pervaded with both the atmosphere of a Rivettian conspiracy and a feeling of precariousness. Ripped violently from the void, his films are thrilled to have found the light, to have persevered along a steep, rough, and almost hostile path, fighting against mainstream, consumer-oriented multiplex films. Each shot lasts a long time, hesitating to come to an end, knowing it might be the last (the threat, uttered by Lehman himself, not to make films anymore looms over his entire work). The viewer embraces this state of emergency that finally makes it possible to restore a present and a presence; the craftsman has managed to shield his cinema from the gilded temptations of the Romanesque. And, in a very humble way, Lehman invites us to witness this victory. This is an improvised and nomadic victory without annexed territories or trophies. But it has revived the frantic desire to practice metaphysics through image and sound, within an obstacle course of unexpected challenges and utopias (the Ideal Film as a Radiant City). Thus, the assessment turns into a labor of love, an archeological dig looking for clues, having sped up time, in search of ordinary and extraordinary instances which jerk the filmmaker back and forth between his scientific urge to archive and his desire for strong, tangible embodiments and visual metaphors, going as far as considering making love to a roll of film! Through cinema, Lehman has saved that which others have saved only by resorting to mysticism: the Whole of a passionate tangent where the digressions of others become the fictional elements of your own reconciliation with reality.