Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Documentary produced and broadcast in the show "Court Circuit" on Arte.

Three no-budget semi-professional filmmakers finally get their due in this witty but respectful documentary. Director Frederic Sojcher visits three fellow Belgian auteurs whose ambitions outstrip their budgets, or their recognition. Max Naveaux is a projectionist who decided to take a stab at making movies himself, putting together small-scale war films whose realism was heightened by the fact that the Belgian Ministry of Defense gave him permission to use real bullets for one of his movies. Schoolteacher Jacques Hardy has dabbled in creating film noir, costume horror, and comic-book adventures, most starring his friend Christian Vranken, who makes his living as a church caretaker and insists on casting approval for his female co-stars. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a self-styled surrealist whose commitment to obscurity is great enough that he insists on being interviewed while wearing a ski mask.

A cinematographic “cadavre exquis”, whose entrails reveal the odd nature of a (un)certain Belgian cinema. Authors, directors, actors who have proved that imposture could be an act of creation. Convinced that any so-called “new” cinematographic production was in fact a rehash of what had already been made, these pirates of images snuck as forgers, liars, tricksters, usurpers, … Outlaws of the cinema who falsified its form. From the filmed imposture of Man Bites Dog to Jan Bucquoy’s fabulist biopic, everything participates in the dynamiting of institutional language through simulacrum and absurdity. This free journey in the “cine-belgitude” has for vocation to approach these marvellous eccentrics followers of a overexcited and stripping situationism.

L'histoire du cinéma 16 III