sarma

In the Reservoir section we give an artist the opportunity to tell us about his ‘reservoir’: the library, video collection, archives or experiences on which he draws when creating. The plays by the Mechelen group Abattoir Fermé evoke a quite coherent world of horror. Stef Lernous, author and director, tells us what fuels this world. Having failed to complete a course in graphics, then selling mobile phones, he ended up in Kontich (Antwerp), first in a studio where classical ballet was taught and then in amateur theatre.

I really liked the ballet, quite apart from the fact that I was the only boy there. That may still have an effect on me today in the sense that I choreograph rather than direct, and in my attention to image and movement and above all to the body. But the real source to which you can trace the work I do now involves horror films, and the fantastic films I watched on television on Sunday afternoons as a child: the adventures of Sinbad, those very primitive stop motion animation films. Naively deficient, but so entertaining. I always associate that period with entertainment. My father was mad about those things too: Greek myths told in the Hollywood style, the Clash of the Titans, Medusa, the nightmarish iconography of Greek mythology, Cerberus, Pegasus, Jason and the Argonauts, the voyages of Odysseus. That entertainment, their cheapness and their epic nature; my father and I could really get into that, whereas my mother’s attitude was something like ‘Come on, you can’t believe in all that!’ We didn’t yet have video at that time, but for the weekend you could rent a video-player with three films which I, as a thirteen-year-old, was allowed to choose: always those poor quality horror films about creatures that turn again the humans, wasps that turn dangerous, creatures that mutate and so on. When I was in the fifth year of secondary school I watched three films a day: I needed my dose. At a certain moment you think you have seen the whole of horror and science fiction and you move on to art house films: the sleazy set films by John Waters and Andy Warhol. I call it ‘celluloid ugliness’, with actors who really can’t act, but put everything they’ve got into doing obscene things, in ugly colours and sets: a highly individual world, but one that is somehow rooted in the spirit of the age. That’s something we are still looking for: the way to reflect the Zeitgeist in the things we make. Even now film remains the most important source of inspiration: Pasolini’s Salo, disaster films like Independence Day and certainly Roy Anderson’s Songs from the Second Floor. But Japanese films too, like Nomura Yoshitaro’s Kichiku (The Demon), in which a father wants to push his child off a cliff but then doesn’t. And the child knows what is going to happen. The man then falls to his knees in tears and takes hold of the seven-year-old’s feet. This adult man on his knees in front of this child: it’s so beautiful. You don’t even need the film: that one scene tells the whole story.

One of the teachers at my primary school, Mr Coppens, had a great classroom with tortoises in an aquarium, and stuffed animals. There was a copy of Lucifer in the classroom bookcase. I knew that name: it was the devil from the horror films. I insisted on being allowed to read that story by Vondel. As an eleven-year-old you don’t understand a word of it, until you come to a verse you do understand: three sentences about the devil. That was sensational! So I went on and on at my parents until they bought me the complete works of Shakespeare. I was reading Shakespeare and Bordewijk at the age of twelve. I didn’t understand a word of it but I learnt by heart the bits that sounded good: Othello, Macbeth, with all that blood. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was the first book I ever bought with my own money. I now have more than 100 different editions of it. We performed O’Neill’s Desire under the Elms with Abattoir Fermé. That father, that youngest son: tragedy, incest. And then there are the inspiring characters like Salomé and Lulu. I saw Charles Lamont’s 1945 film Salomé Where She Danced, and wanted to know more about this character. I had bought a very bad Bible from Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, with horrible drawings in it. But when you look a little further it takes you to Oscar Wilde: fluently written, a little ripe and bombastic, but real theatre that is frivolous but grips you. After that I saw that odd film version, Ken Russell’s Salomé’s Last Dance: I’m mad about his kitschy films. And the character also leads you into the world of painting. Salomé has been painted so many times: both as a slender young girl and as a fat old cow.

A lump of meat

When it comes to painting, Hieronymus Bosch is the obvious source of inspiration, but above all it’s Francis Bacon, not only because of his work but also the person he was and the way he worked. He took a photo, tore it up, stuck it back together again, or took the lid off a pot of paint and used it to make a circle on his canvas. The fact that he had to surround himself with things before he was able to paint. And that link with meditation and how he was able to ‘open’ it up, like David Lynch or Burroughs. I used to be repelled by esoteric matters and everything that inclined that way. But now it seems to me to be a means of catching one’s breath in this busy world. Bacon was able to throw a lump of meat on a plate, like a sort of dissection, very theatrical too. And then start painting it. He had a world of his own but also kept one foot outside it. I’m crazy about Pre-Raphaelite paintings too, including the stories they use from Roman mythology, such as Heliogabalus.

And then of course there are the women: I am a great fan of women. Take Louis Paul Boon’s Mieke Maaike, for example, one of the few books that makes even me blush. Or Nabokov’s Lolita: funny, naughty and extremely well written. It is fantastic what you can do with words and with literature. With old legends too, like the Golem of Prague. I was fourteen when I read Jean Ray’s Malpertuis and was completely entranced by the fiction of someone confessing something. And Von Daniken’s Was God an Astronaut?: that opened up another way of seeing. At the time I thought ‘Yes, it’s true. The pyramids could not have been built by human hands; they must have been helped by aliens.’ The horror I look for is not that of real SF, about robots, but is always about people, about that lump of meat you throw on a plate. Apocalypse Now, that was real horror.

I also often draw on horror films, and documentaries, when it comes to the use of sound – but of course it’s sampled. Perhaps it’s all about portraits, characters that attract us, like Lulu or Salomé, Frankenstein or King Kong. The thing we at Abattoir Fermé actually have in common is wonder. Joost, Nick, Tine, Chiel and myself... we are so naive, we so like to be amazed. We think that we can also amaze other people with this sort of story and portrait.