Although often mentioned as one of the key figures of Belgian experimental cinema of the 1920s and although he became one of the leading members of the Union belge des cinéastes amateurs in the early 1930s, little is known of Lucien Backman apart from the fact that he worked as a cameraman. In 1929, he made Midi, which is considered to be a lost film shot in Brussels in the style of Ruttmann. It deals with urban life as the clock strikes noon. According to press reviews, the film shows floods of office clerks leaving through doors, fully-packed trams, construction sites coming to a standstill, restaurants filling with clients, and road workers having their lunch or taking a nap, in an ironical montage orchestrating all the details typical of a city at noon—a description that brings to mind several similar sequences in other city symphonies.
In Midi, Backmann used reverse motion effects evoking Vertov. In 1930, Backman released La Vie à l’envers (Life Upside Down), consisting entirely of reverse-motion shots, contributing to Backman’s association with Surrealism by several critics. The screening history of Midi is also remarkable. As Jeffrey Geiger noted, Backman’s city symphony was part of a film program sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art that took place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC in March 1936. The program also included Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Paul Rotha’s The Face of Britain (1935), Len Lye’s A Color Box (1935), an unidentified Russian short, and an excerpt of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Davay, Paul, Cinéma de Belgique (Gembloux: Duculot, 1973), 162.
Geiger, Jeffrey, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 111.
Giménez, Estrella de la Torre, “Les Essais cinématographiques de René Magritte,” Mélusine XXIV (theme issue on “Le Cinéma des Surréalistes” edited by Henri Béhar) (2004): 125.
Thys, Marianne et al., Belgian Cinema/Le Cinéma belge/De Belgische film (Ghent: Ludion, 1999), 162.
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