Jan Bucquoy (1945 - )
Related: Belgium arts - director
Biography
Jan Bucquoy is a Belgian anarchist and author-filmmaker born in Harelbeke 1945, November 16.
After his studies in Straatsburg (theatre) and Brussels (Insas) he started his career as an author of comics (Jaunes, Le Bal du Rat Mort (1986)). With his producer Francis De Smet he made his much acclaimed series of The Sexual Life of the Belgians which includes 10 movies about the whereabouts of Belgian people from the period after the war until now: the surrealist Camping Cosmos (1996) with Lolo Ferrari in a parody (detournement) of the play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder by Bertolt Brecht; The Closing down of the Renault Factory at Vilvoorde Belgium (1998) as a Belgian version of Roger & Me (1989) by Michael Moore; Les Vacances de Noël (2005) etc... His movies are a mixture of French avant-garde cinéma in the fashion of Jean-Luc Godard and the humanism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
His protagonists include some celebrities and they are looking for love, having reminiscences of their lost mother. The term sexual in his first movie La vie sexuelle des Belges 1950-78 means: affectionate. Influenced by the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, he considers living in this 21th century as a permanent theatrical performance. He is making ridiculous the false seriousness of the media and its stars who act as collaboraters of this system of massive distraction. This is the reason why he is a major accomplice of the entarteur Noël Godin of major figures of business as Bill Gates, culture: Bernard-Henri Lévy and politics: Nicolas Sarkozy and that he celebrates his yearly coup d'état of Belgium as an art performance just like his musée du slip. This does not mean that he takes politics for a life-matter; his movie La vie politique des Belges (2002) with Benoit Poelvoorde for instances, makes fun of the two minuscule opposing political parties in the race for votes: Tarte, and Vivant with the Belgian millionaire Roland Duchâtelet.
His films contain many references to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and one of his movies has even taken a title by one of the books of the pupils of Lacan: La jouissance des hystériques by the psychiater Lucien Israël. He was influenced by the artist Marcel Mariën and the writer Raoul Vaneigem. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Bucquoy [Aug 2006]
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