An evening with François Pain: Experiments in film and psychiatric clinics

An evening with François Pain is dedicated to François Pain’s most celebrated works around the hospital. The screening accompanies Pain’s first institutional exhibition in Los Angeles at JOAN. The selection of short films will be followed by a conversation between the filmmaker, coeditor of Semiotext(e) and writer Hedi El Kholti, and guest curator Perwana Nazif.

Film Program

Min Tanaka at La Borde (1986), Japanese butô dancer Min Tanaka performs at La Borde hospital for its residents. The residents reflect on the performance and the collective unconscious on camera. Among the residents speaking, one can spot actor Pierre Clémenti. 

Felix’s couch (1986), An intimate conversation between Félix Guattari and psychiatrist Danielle Sivadon.

François Tosquelles: a politics of madness (1989), François Tosquelles on his early life, exile, and clinical and political practice in conversation with Pain, Danielle Sivadon, and Jean-Claude Polack. 

François Pain (b. 1945) is an experimental video artist known for his work in guerilla media networks and leftist collective organizing. He was a member of FGERI (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study & Research), its celebrated journal Recherches, and its CERFI group (the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Development,which included Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze). Co-founder of the pirate Radio Tomato with Félix Guattari, Pain was an early practitioner of handheld video technologies, and one of the only filmmakers documenting the experimental, militant clinics of institutional psychotherapy. He worked at La Borde clinic from 1965 to 1972.

Institutional psychotherapy began at Saint-Alban hospital in France during World War II. The hospital was a collective resistance effort against the material extermination of the disabled, and an attempt to work through and against social and psychic alienation. Through constant transformation and renegotiation of traditional hierarchies in psychiatric hospitals, doctors, psychoanalysts, patients, and resistance fighters all lived together in a Marxist-Freudian bid to “cure the hospital”. The most recognizable iterations of institutional psychotherapy include Jean Oury’s La Borde and Frantz Fanon’s practices at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital.

Pain’s videos have been released over the years through French TV, and featured in various international film festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, and the Graz Festival in Austria. His work has been exhibited or screened at the São Paulo Biennial, Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, and Jeu de Paume in Paris, among others. He has led several media workshops in psychiatric and rehabilitative institutions. Pain is the co-founder of the Fédération des Radios Libres Non Commerciales (1978), Canal Déchaîné (1991) and Chaosmédia (1994).

Hedi El Kholti is an artist, writer, and the coeditor of Semiotext(e).

Perwana Nazif is a writer and curator. She is the Art Director for the Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at Parapraxis.