Jan Bucquoy


Jan Bucquoy is a Belgian anarchist who has worked in various media. He gained fame for his controversial anti-establishment works and media stunts, which caused many court cases, including for lèse-majesté, copyright infingement and defamation. Between 2005 and 2010 he staged five attempts to attack the Belgian Royal Palace in Brussels and conquer it. Internationally he is best known as a film director, with La Vie sexuelle des Belges 1950-1978 and the cult film Camping Cosmos being his most famous movies. A recurring theme in his work is Belgitude.

Career

After his studies in Strassburg and Brussels he started his career as an author of about 50 comics: Jaunes, Le Bal du Rat Mort. With his producer Francis De Smet he made his much acclaimed series of The Sexual Life of the Belgians which includes 10 movies and documentaries about the whereabouts of Belgian people from the period after the war until now: the surrealist Camping Cosmos with Lolo Ferrari and Jan Decleir, and with a parody of Tintin and Snowy and of the play Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht; The Closing down of the Renault Factory at Vilvoorde Belgium as a Belgian version of Roger & Me by Michael Moore; Les Vacances de Noël with Noël Godin and Yolande Moreau etc...
He opened the Underwear Museum in Brussels in 2009; in 2016 it moved to its current location in Lessines, Hainaut.

Influences

His movies are a mixture of French avant-garde cinema in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard, Tout va bien, Italian neo-realism and the humanism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Marriage of Maria Braun ; Bucquoy directed some theatrical plays by Fassbinder during his university studies at Strassburg. Influenced by the Situationist book Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, Bucquoy considers life in the 21st century to be a permanent theatrical performance. 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 psychiatrist Lucien Israël. He was also influenced by the artist Marcel Mariën and the writer Raoul Vaneigem.

Protagonists

His protagonists include celebrities looking for love, having reminiscences of their lost mother. The term "sexual" in his first movie La Vie sexuelle des Belges 1950-1978 means affectionate. His work renders ridiculous the false seriousness of the media and its 'stars' who act as collaborators of this system of massive distraction. This is the reason why he is an accomplice of the entarteur Noël Godin who threw pies at 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 or happening just like his musée du slip. This does not mean that he takes politics seriously: his movie La vie politique des Belges with Benoit Poelvoorde for instance, makes fun of the two minuscule opposing political parties in the race for votes: Tarte, and Vivant with the Belgian millionaire Roland Duchâtelet.

Films