In Praise (or Not) of Chantal Akerman

I just found this clip from D'Est, one of my favorite films.

er, D'Est.

i've only seen la captive, which is really good. what besides d'est should go on the netflix queue?

There's not a lot else out. Jeanne Dielman is amazing, an acheivement not just for Ackerman but also Delphine Seyrig. A new print has just started touring. About a year back I saw Ju, Tu, Ill, Elle in rep, and I can assure you that neither myself or any of the other 30 or so people in attendence were prepared for those final scenes ;-)

I saw A Couch In New York (her romcom w/ J. Binoche) on tv along time ago. I recall it being ok.

There's is also a really good film she did for French TV called "Ackerman on Ackerman" wherein she edited a bunch of clips from her films together. It's alot of fun, certainly more fun than you would expect given how dour her work can be.

Farner, Grisso & McCain is selling Jeanne Dielman short; it's one of the four or five greatest achievements for cinema period. I doubt it will ever be released on DVD, Bloo-Ray, or pixie dust hologram. Besides, it really wouldn't work in the home unless you could insure that its 3 hours and 40 minutes could pass uninterrupted which is essential to its damn near scientific effect on you.

Also check out her musical Window Shopping, her musical without songs Night and Day, and her finest film this decade, the heartbreaking De l'autre côté (From The Other Side).

Uh guys, Jeanne D. is out on DVD! Well, in Europe at least. I recently bought this box set.

Maybe not my fave but 'Toute une Nuit' (All Night Long) made a very strong impression on me. Not sure I could be bothered watching it agaon tho

I first heard of her from... dude, I can't remember his name. I interviewed him for some zine. I'm actually pretty sure it was Alan Licht. He mentioned it cause he knew I was from Belgium and so is Chantal. Never did check out her stuff. :-(

there's still time! all her films have now bene released on dvd, at least in Belgium.

I'm no longer a snooty intellectual wannabe. ;-) Srsly though, I should. Where to start?

maybe we shd correct spelling of Akerman so we can find this thread in future?

The fact that there's a new Janus Films print of Jeanne D. going around right now almost definitely means it will be a Criterion DVD sooner or later.

I caught it at Film Forum a few weeks ago, and it's by far the best film I've seen in a long, long time. I was absolutely riveted.

Man what I wouldn't give for the nft to screen a season of her films (instead of boring ol' Kubrick). Search: Dielman (and Manny Farber's essay on it), Captive (all I've seen so far) and try to catch her video art. You get the harsh angles and all that.

btw I read somewhere she said of Jeanne's third client, "It was him or her, and I'm glad it was him."

Farner, Grisso & McCain is selling Jeanne Dielman short; it's one of the four or five greatest achievements for cinema period. I doubt it will ever be released on DVD, Bloo-Ray, or pixie dust hologram. Besides, it really wouldn't work in the home unless you could insure that its 3 hours and 40 minutes could pass uninterrupted which is essential to its damn near scientific effect on you.

I kinda had to sell it short, otherwise I'd get all gushy and shit. I'll just say that it captures a particular state of mind (which I unforutunately knew all too well when I viewed it) (and kind of getting back into at the moment). No film quite says "What's the use?" as well or as knowingly.

I think about the film often. The other day I was having breakfast at a usual haunt. There is this group of old ladies who come in every day, sit at the same table and drink coffee. This particular day someone (for the first time in long time) came in before them and claimed their table. The ladies came in and where quietly miffed at this development. I thought to myself, "This is just like what happend to Jeanne Dielman at the bar!" Not sure what the women did later. Hopefully that didn't respond the same way JD did.

BTW, for those of you who've seen more of her films, which one has a scene set at a party with a bunch of kids dancing to "La Bamba" and then "It's A Man's Man's Man's World"? The clip was featured in "Akerman on Ackerman" and I'd like to someday checkout the film which originally contained that brilliant scene.

love the old lady on line @ post office in JD.

i have asked for a title correction.

thread title, i mean.

that was quick! thanks tehresa!

which one has a scene set at a party with a bunch of kids dancing to "La Bamba" and then "It's A Man's Man's Man's World"?

doesnt ring bell, but maybe it's from that musical she did, "Golden Eighties"?

Don't remember that particular number in that one.

Yeah, I checked on IMDB and the description doesn't match (although that film was also excerpted for "A on A"). From what I could gather from the other clips, the mystery film is about a teenage lesbian who runs away from home. Somewhere along the way she gets to go to a house party. There she gets to dance with a pretty girl to "La Bamba" while everyone else surrounds them in a circle (like a "spotlight dance"). Then "IAMMMW" comes on and the pretty girl's boyfriend comes in and pushes the heroine out of the circle so he can dance. From what I remember, Ackerman does some really effective cross-cutting on the girls, which combined with the song choices, perfectly conveys the excitement of the moment (and the ultimate disappointment as well).

BTW, according to a poster on the criterion forum who saw Criterion's Kim Hendrickson speak the other night, Criterion is planning on releasing Jeanne Dielman later this year.

Watched this last night:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Y9HKWY6JL._SS500_.jpg

Verdict: awesome (and not just because I have a crush of shame on Testud)

Coming in August (the 25th to be exact)

http://www.criterionforum.org/images/484_box_348x490.jpg

News From Home, is the one I'm keen on, predictably.

xpost

Bout time! Arguably the greatest film ever made. And what a great cover!

Terrific news!!

Coming In January

Just got Jeanne Dielman from Netflix the other day; looking forward to watching it this weekend.

get ready for a wiiiiiild ride

Hahaha.

I can't overemphasize: Watch in one sitting. (Maybe one bathroom break.)

i never entered that meatloaf contest :(

booooooooooo

Between the Kurosawa box and this Ackerman series, Criterion will sufficiently keep me indoors even more this winter.

Akerman.

AKERMAN!!!

anyone ever see toute une nuit? seems kind of hard to.

yeah one of my faves but as I said above, I doubt I'd eve manage to watch it again.

I realize I now live literally next door to 23 quai du commerce, Brussels.

schlump, i webmailed you.

well thanks jed but no, i'm not interested in doing that kind of modelling for you.

if you have an further offers?, you could shoot me a mail at corkysdebt at hotmail dot com :D

"news from home" is really good.

new one showing in NYC this week

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-chantal-akermans-almayers-folly

w/director in person iirc

i feel like there are five CA docs that have come out as plain-looking dvds in the past lil while; i always see them positively reviewed & advertised in filmcomment, has anybody seen any?

Three years too late, I know, but that circle dance scene described above is from Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels.

just saw her do Q&A for Almayer's Folly, which was sometimes hypnotic and, partic the last scene, left me a bit cold. She answered one question by saying "'Why' doesn't matter."

Been to the last two screenings of the Chantal Akerman season and going again tonight.

Didn't know this but she is going to be there!

http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/nos-amours-chantal-akerman-9-un-jour-pina-demand%C3%A9-l%E2%80%99homme-%C3%A0-la-valise

Akerman gave a brief intro to the films but in between came back for a Q&A which didn't seem pre-planned (the ICA had to get a microphone ready). She was moved by the applause at the beginning an like to think she wanted to give sometime for people to ask anything. It sorta started as a talk on what Pina Bausch was like and how the doc was made, then went into "well I am not going to be here after my next film is shown as I want to sleep so if you'd like to ask anything then its now or never...you don't have to, sometimes its better not to say anything"

There were three questions but they were basically interrupted (good on the first one which was just a v dry question about where does performance start and end that you could never pin her down to -- too much of an attempt to reveal a method -- its interesting that the question's phrasing may sound as precise as her images but they miss all the colour and sense of humour present that are such a big part of her films...for the most part) as she started giving a riff on a theme about half-way through, because her English is at 70% they were kinda half-replies half-rants that would go to funny places. When she talked about how she needed to do different things after Jeanne Dielman it was all "I could've stopped...but not like Rimbaud where I could've been a drug dealer, or sell slaves" (!)

I loved how she talked about Pina -- Akerman was very honest and open at how the beauty she first saw in her choreography turned to anger as she gradually uncovered the sadistic side, involving sinister manipulation of the people in her company -- its something you see on Wenders' film through interviews but here its shown via a series of rehearsals for scenes flowing through performances on stage (she aimed to edit her film like a piece by Pina, and it certainly gives that feel of attending to contemporary dance). She compared Pina to Celine (who I happen to be reading!) and how the work -- the end result -- is what matters. But those questions are never really resolved?

Three years too late, I know, but that circle dance scene described above is from Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels.

― Cherish, Monday, August 13, 2012 3:41 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Almost two years too late on me, but THANK YOU!

Ha, you're welcome. Slow but steady... There should be a Jeanne Dielman joke in here somewhere. :)

Looks great, on tonight:

https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/nos-amours-chantal-akerman-11-golden-eighties

The musical about the shopping mall? I like it.

Jeanne Dielmann is playing Friday in 35mm and I want to go but if I couldn't even sit through Celine & Julie Go Boating w/o getting extremely bored I feel like this is going to be TORTUROUS. Any tips of things to focus on or contemplate while watching this film that will make it tolerable? Should I sit in the back of the theater where no one sits and like idk work on stuff during the slow bits?

whatever you do, don't take a bathroom break 15 mins before the end.

compare the multiple times she performs her kitchen tasks and goes to the post office.

also this kicks the shit out of Celine & Julie.

idk work on stuff during the slow bits?

NO NO NO, the slow bits are i dunno, 98% of the film, and also the point.

I knew the ending of the film before I saw it and personally it helped me to focus on the deviations to her routine and where it leads.

i know nothing about the film or its ending apart from it's about a woman and she does mundane household things and maybe also is a prostitute, idk, i want to know AS LITTLE about it as possible

i never take bathroom breaks during movies so

No need to compare Akerman to Celine & Julie, they are going for a diff thing althogether.

Even if you know the ending (and I did) the execution is still amazing thing to sit through. Have fun!

well i mean i compared them bcz they are v long and v slowly paced. The other two Akerman films I've seen (Toute un Nuit and Rendesvous d'Anna) were kind of... boring... but I watched them on TVs so they weren't v immersive.

I feel like smoking a bowl beforehand would either be THE BEST or THE WORST idea, possibly the latter bcz when I tried to watch a Bela Tarr film stoned I wanted to claw my fucking eyes out.

as you might guess i vote no there.

it's not boring.

I watched the Eclipse prints of Je tu il elle and Les Rendez-vous d'Anna two weeks: lovely.

I'd never seen the latter (liked a lot) and the former not since 16 mm in college.

Je tu il elle

This was given a few screenings about a week ago in a few cinemas over here. Didn't go - glad to have seen it, although I never quite liked it that much myself. The season at the ICA goes on and on, a few interesting films to come. Even though she made her best film in the mid-70s Akerman has clearly made one great film after another.

this movie got me really amped up about housekeeping

also it was not boring at all. the photography is really addictive

it's at the level of low activity that becomes hypnotic and engrossing

I don't know why Morbs get so crabby. If there was one movie made for which viewers can perform purely functional habits besides Warhol's entire filmography it's Jeanne Dielmann.

I vote no on functional habits since it would ruin the spell

Inhaling Pledge fumes from the newly clean coffee table >> popcorn

china & morbs otm; it really isn't boring, stevie. you get kind of hypnotically involved. celine & julie's a broad thing & this is a very specific, narrower & richer thing.

really don't think you need prep but i really adore reading christine smallwood talk about watching it-

People used to fret about the “masses” using the movies as “escapism.” It is actually supremely difficult to escape into a movie. The impulse to send texts during a movie, or the power of the smallest square of light to distract everyone in a six-seat vicinity, is proof of this. Besides: escape from what? Into what? When I watch movies, I have a running internal monologue of thoughts like, “What would I do if I had to clean all day?” or “Do I look that good when I smoke?” The human brain does not turn off so easily. The drive to identify with narrative, to insert oneself into the story, the basic desire to be in that story, is boundless. That’s not escapism, that’s participation. And even if you can stop identifying, you’re still thinking—if not of something else, then at least of something also. As Chris Fujiwara has written, in a piece called “The Force of the Useless,” “it’s impossible to concentrate entirely on a film or on one’s self.”

The whole point of going to the movies in the first place is to experience this slide. It’s to have the freedom to be thinking in tandem with the film—really, to be thinking at all. At home, it is nearly impossible not to interrupt viewing—to pause, to get a drink of water, go to the bathroom, to check email, yes, to send a text. In the theater you are captive, or you should be, and so your mind ranges more freely, because it traverses the same course, bouncing against those images, again and again, back and forth, until it arrives at last at someplace new.

I've been saying that for years *drinks water*

In the theatre if you pull your phone to text I can tell you to fkn stop it.

no no no i mean at this theater the back 15 rows are always empty and I turn the brightness all the way down so there is no possible way that anyone could see it.

WATCH THE FILM as the Mekons insisted u goddamn Sotosyn. In the dark. Eyes front.

but I'm a millenial with ADD and I get bored so easily

how can you expect me to spend 90+ minutes engaging with only ONE SCREEN???

don't make me quote the druggist in West Side Story about "you kids"

Do it, it'll be funny.

The first time I saw JD (which was the only time I saw it projected, albeit from a digital source) the copy didn't have subtitles, which added to the claustrophobia. That, and these two people sitting in the back of the theatre who were chatting in French for about 75% of the runtime. It was easy to think of them as Jeanne's noisy neighbors.

too bad they didn't show up before the last client

this is a great movie but i don't get why you would watch it in a cinema if you're already determined on not paying attention

Well, if that wasn't the best car chase scene this side of French Connection...

That was infinity more pleasant to watch than I imagined. I longed so much to know this person, what made her laugh, what her favorite food was, what she's thinking... It was really bleak and painful.

shit, RIP

http://next.liberation.fr/culture-next/2015/10/06/mort-de-la-cineaste-chantal-akerman_1398190

:(

Wow. I finally caught up with her last year after the release of those exemplary Criterion releases.

:-(

She was coming to London to give a masterclass and there was also an exhibition coming up.

http://www.anosamours.co.uk/

New film out soon too.

Can anyone read French, how did she pass away?

This is at the end of a near two-year retrospective of pretty much all of her work at (mostly) the ICA (one film a month).

Can't believe this.

Can someone post further confirmation when they see it?

One of her protégées/disciples/what have you is at NYFF right now.

:(

rest in peace.

The link above just says more details forthcoming.

Good intentions here: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/mayor/zac-goldsmith-knock-down-ugly-estates-to-build-better-homes-for-londoners-a3083756.html

aargh wrong thread sorry.

According to Le Monde it was a suicide. Such sad news.

oh no

Oh no :((((((

xp

So sad.

Her first movie, made at age 18:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx2RNzl-p3Q

sinking in :(

her mom, with whom C.A. was terribly close, died last year; C.A.'s newest film was compiled from interviews she conducted with her mother.

this is all very very sad.

if you haven't seen "toute une nuit," you should. it might be my favorite of hers, a long series of nocturnal romantic encounters. it has a nouveau roman feel to it, with the encounters playing out--in an ordered fashion--variations on the theme of coupling and uncoupling.

very sad indeed.

the film screens next two nights at NYFF

https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2015/films/no-home-movie/

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/no-home-movie

NY Times not reporting on the cause yet, surely it wouldn't be mis-reported

Just struggling with this. Numb.

Glenn Kenny's piece speaks of "differing accounts" of cause in Brit and French media.

wtf.

Maybe it depends on fine point of French grammar that is misunderstood in the UK.

Sorry, not trying to be amusing, it was confusing to me when I looked at the French reports.

seems suicide mentioned in all the french language articles

vaguely recall having read how young she was when jeanne dielman was made, nonetheless thought she would have been quite a bit older than 65

RIP

Fernando Croce:

Once at a film class I heard two dudes enthusing about PTA being only 27 when he made BOOGIE NIGHTS. I couldn't resist chiming in: "Akerman, 25, JEANNE DIELMAN."

I had completely forgotten that i saw her do that Almayer's Folly Q&A three years ago, which shows that ILX will be helpful as i dodder on.

so this is sad and awful. I want to know the cause of death because this indeterminacy is ugly, but maybe that's a delayed way of putting away the fact that death is always going to be indeterminate by its nature because someone becomes finally unreachable. what a great, great artist. her films force us to see the everyday and when we find that torturous that disavowal is really interesting. devastating art making. as others have pointed out, funny and beautiful too. and the attention to the SOUND of everyday life in her work (like those train noises in Les Rendez Vous d'Anna) was always so strong. RIP.

What's the musical about the the shopping mall, Golden Eighties? I recommend that one.

I had completely forgotten that i saw her do that Almayer's Folly Q&A three years ago, which shows that ILX will be helpful as i dodder on.

the french press is quite clear it was suicide -- "s'est donné la mort" :(

claire denis has a testimony to akerman at the libération page. strange to remember that denis is (was) older than akerman. but their careers had dissimilar trajectories... denis was 40 before she finish her first feature. akerman was, famously, a major filmmaker by (at the latest) her early 20s.

Yes, they all word it exactly the same way, little room for doubt.

Here is page you are referring to, I think: http://next.liberation.fr/culture-next/2015/10/06/chantal-akerman-faisait-des-films-avec-sa-chair-sa-peau-sa-vie_1398256

the NYT article has been filled out with more information:

Friends said that Ms. Akerman had been in a dark emotional state after the death of her mother last year, and that she had had breakdowns. She had recently been hospitalized for depression, returning home to Paris 10 days ago, her sister said.

also reporting that cause is "unknown"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/arts/chantal-akerman-belgian-filmmaker-dies-65.html

this might be of some broad relevance

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/15/trauma-second-generation-holocaust-survivors

Right, just came to post that times link(xpost)

or this, rather

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/descendants-of-holocaust-survivors-have-altered-stress-hormones/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/MINDchart.jpg

RIP

Guess I'm not surprised that my uni library's copies of the Criterion set remain unchecked out (I was the last). Good night to re-watch News From Home.

there was a weird month in chicago, about a decade ago, when jeanne dielman was playing on different days, at three different venues, and i went each time. i think one of those was a weekday evening and i dozed off for a while, but i'm not sure akerman would mind.

as i mentioned elsewhere on ILXOR, i follow(ed) her on facebook and she seemed to a great extent like any slightly cantankerous aging baby boomer, posting about various social-media memes, complaining about the sorry state of american (and french) politics, sharing youtubes of rock music, etc.

I need to get on a lot more, only features i remember seeing besides JD are News From Home and Almayer's Folly.

I wrote in my brief blog obit that, contra Morbs, her work, because it presents work so rigorously, is best consumed while polishing tables and scrubbing floors.

Or, in the case of D'est, drifting in and out of sleep.

yeah there's nothing like 'watching' a film when your eyes aren't on the screen

that had better be the last time you make that philistinish boast. also fuck housework now and forever

i'd rather watch Delphine Seyrig do it

akerman did have some installation pieces, often reconfigured from her later films.

i'm not sure that her earlier films would really benefit from a kind of passive attention or fluctuating attention. they're pretty rigorously designed to have a /cumulative/ effect.

Morbs' apartment:

http://www.trashitman.com/img/Hoarders-Apartment-Cleanout-NY.JPG

my preferred aesthetic: "early Unabomber"

or perhaps "crazy cat lady in advanced stages of arthritis"?

she was at French Institute here last week? re this doc, now on Icarus disc

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/over-there-chantal-akerman-presents-from-the-other-side-at-fiaf/

(mentioned by KJB six years upthread)

ok despite the date header of today, fc piece is from 2012

dumbfounded - rip Chantal

RIP

A bit gutted at the moment...most impactful celeb/famous person death for me in some time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=8pSNOEYSIlg

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-chantal-akerman

so The Captive, yes? Haven't seen it.

Nor I. Curious

It's been awhile, but I'd say yeah re:Captive.

Philippe Garrel ("bon voyage Chantal") and Dennis Lim both paid tribute before PG's film at NYFF tonight. About a quarter of the audience gasped; they hadn't heard. (Linc Ctr age demographic at work?)

There's a 1080p version of News From Home on YouTube...

Wonder what the Filmmaker in Residence will say about it tomorrow during her free talk?

who?

I wrote in my brief blog obit that, contra Morbs, her work, because it presents work so rigorously, is best consumed while polishing tables and scrubbing floors.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the context of a marginal (in the grand scheme of things most obits are going to focus on JD, which leaves another 30 years of film-making) figure who has just killed herself calling for a lack of attention and disguising as an oh so clever joke is tasteless.

Also don't think we should be speculating on reasons for the suicide.

vaguely recall having read how young she was when jeanne dielman was made, nonetheless thought she would have been quite a bit older than 65

RIP

― noɪˈɣiːələx (nakhchivan), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Akerman talked about how people were expecting someone a lot older to have made JD, and how some assumed that a man made it.

In the context of a marginal (in the grand scheme of things most obits are going to focus on JD, which leaves another 30 years of film-making) figure who has just killed herself calling for a lack of attention and disguising as an oh so clever joke is tasteless.

I don't see what one thing has to do with another, especially if you haven't read the post and the post is about the work, not the creator.

You clearly don't, that's what I said.

who?

Imagine writing an insouciant, brief take on one of the best filmmakers of the last half century, what apostasy.

“Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother,” Ms. Akerman said with the deep, lilting tones familiar from the voice-overs and monologues that define many of her films. “And there is ‘no home’ anymore, because she isn’t there, and when I came the last time, the home was empty.”

One of her last Interviews

Watching the twilight scenes in News from Home juxtaposed against those letters in voice-over while it poured outside my apartment last night was a fraught experience.

From Brody's piece

From Brody's piece:

And that’s what in fact happened—but first I saw the film with astonished delight, and then witnessed the Q. & A, which was unlike any that I’ve ever seen, before or since. The audience was composed mainly of young people, of the age of college students or recent graduates, and, after the screening, they were eager to engage Akerman in discussion about the film. A young woman sitting behind me raised her hand; Akerman called on her, and the viewer asked a fairly complex question filled with academic language. Akerman responded sharply, “Is that how you talk to your friends?” The woman stayed silent; Akerman persisted, asking whether the question represented the way that the young woman talks in real life and wondering why that’s the way she chose to talk to Akerman.

Reminds me of the Q&A I was in, as there was someone who did seem to ask Akerman a question using academic terms she never bothered to learn, and then she went off on a rant instead.

One of the few Q&As with a film maker I attended, and one of the few needed.

that was cheering. i've had friends ask non-academics questions full of academic jargon, and i've always been both embarrassed for them and a bit ashamed of academia.

I put that bit on my Facebook page yesterday. An acquaintance privately asked if I sided with Brody, lol

even better: http://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2015/daily/on-chantal-akerman/

brody strikes me as a poseur most of the time but that tribute (?) to akerman was admirably heartfelt and straightforward.

The last screening from the year-long Akerman fest is later this month: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/nos-amours-chantal-akerman-25-la-folie-almayer

Will be a tough night.

I mentioned this a few years ago when it happened, a story similar to the Akerman one: Frederick Wiseman's withering brevity and coldness when someone asked him a lengthy question couched in academic language at a TIFF Q&A.

i admit to sometimes having the same question that akerman did, i.e. "do you talk to your friends that way?"

i don't encourage a flattening of discourse. obviously you write an essay or book in a different way that you would speak aloud in a casual social context. and an academic book is going to read differently from a popular book, and so forth. but sometimes academic jargon is so deliberately obtuse and circumlocutious and show-offy that i can't help but picture the full-of-himself author trying to talk to, i dunno, his grandma that way. i appreciate that akerman and wiseman aren't afraid to give these folks the occasional reality check.

and the abstruse prose often masks an ability to write a simple declarative sentence.

yes. and/or it's just a weird sort of careerism--if you talk in riddles, people think you're a genius, and that can be good for business.

just to pick one example, here's a particularly opaque description of a research/book project from someone's faculty web page:

I am currently at work on two book projects. The first, A Theory of Regret: The Thought of Bureaucracy pursues the unexpected, and in most cases unwelcome, relation that pertains between theories of thinking in continental philosophy and bureaucratic logics, insofar as both are typically defined in terms of withdrawal. If the bureaucrat is the one who disappears behind an appearance, which is shown to us simply as a distraction, then what are we to make of the fact that most claims for thinking also privilege the moment in which we ourselves fall away from appearances? If in thought we fall away from appearance while remaining an appearance for others, expressly so that we might reflect on what is before us with respect to something that has already passed or that might be done next, what will it mean for us to carry on describing the bureaucrat as stupid, when his/her actions mimic the very logic of thinking? For one, we will have to admit the bureaucrat is not, strictly speaking, stupid, if “stupid” implies an inability to withdraw from appearance. A Theory of Regret is an attempt to reckon with the consequences of that very problem, so that we might find modes of resistance that do more than merely produce in us a state of melancholic fixation on the thing that should have been but has nevertheless gone missing. Instead, it will be shown that regret, which helps us to distinguish between non-voluntary and involuntary states (pace Aristotle), enables us to think the future as something more than a mere perfecting of what once seemed good but did not quite work the first time.

was this written with any audience in mind? it's really impossible to imagine anyone who could follow all of the allusions, nod at all the assumptions (there are an awful not of very iffy "If..."s), and come out with a real grasp of whatever this professor thinks he is up to.

sorry for thread derail.

If in thought we fall away from appearance while remaining an appearance for others, expressly so that we might reflect on what is before us with respect to something that has already passed or that might be done next, what will it mean for us to carry on describing the bureaucrat as stupid, when his/her actions mimic the very logic of thinking?

brb gonna pour a scotch

I'm the first person to make fun of such language, but I remember feeling bad for the guy at the Wiseman film. He'd undoubtedly spent some time formulating his question to get it just right, wanted Wiseman to think of him as a kindred spirit, and he got a two- or three-word answer. Akerman's response was even more deflating.

I go through a bit of that when I send a question to the baseball writer Bill James, who similarly has no patience for acronyms, jargon, etc. I fuss over the questions endlessly, making sure there's nothing he can jump on. I've pretty lucky, although once he sort of cut me down.

wiseman is just kind of a cantankerous dude in general, which you'd know if you ever read an interview with him. a lot of the times his answers to (even pretty good) questions are along the lines of, "i have no idea what you're talking about. i don't think about it that way. next question."

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/chantal-akerman-guiding-light

Her films will be running for free on Hulu through the 21st:

http://www.hulu.com/search?q=chantal+akerman

is it just for the US? Watched all those but I'll certainly re-watch one or two of these.

Yes it is :-(

obit from Romney: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/08/chantal-akerman

I dunno, academic and theoretical language is a context based practice- people who are fluent in it speak it, those who aren't don't, and the awkwardness described is like someone just speaking French to you when you speak English- they are presuming fluency for all present in a way that can just seem gauche or irrelevant. But If I know you speak French and I speak French then is it really so rude to just ask in French? It is if you're not in a Francophone context. And so then the question is: is public space so generic that theory jargon is banned? wouldn't a Chantal Akerman Q+A be a pretty plausible space in which to wheel out certain terms that make certain kinds of conversations move faster given who tends to like her work? Without hearing the text of the question it's hard to go further.

Re: that book project above, I don't think the problem there is jargon (not saying you said it was) but that there's a failure to make the core analogy stick: bureaucrats "withdraw" (okay, maybe) and so do philosophers (yes, to a degree) but the concept of "regret" is not a moving part, and that book proposal does not succeed in showing how or why. Since that's a key term for the project, it sounds shaky and tendentious. Which is bad at the level of the thinking, not the terminology.

wouldn't a Chantal Akerman Q+A be a pretty plausible space in which to wheel out certain terms that make certain kinds of conversations move faster given who tends to like her work?

Its plausible if two people who are familiar with that kind of language are talking in those terms about her films, and if other ppl want to watch that its not like you can complain too much that this is taking place.

Akerman is pretty clear she had no familiarity in particular ways her work was talked about - so plenty to say about that gap, and how her work attracts that kind of language when the person who spent all the making it was so uninterested in it.

Yup

Learned my lesson on this when I tried to chat briefly with Bob Rafelson about his version of The Postman Always Rings Twice and he scowled at me when I used the words film noir. Decided to keep that stuff to a minimum so that years later at a Claire Denis Q&A I just told her I liked the traffic sounds in her soundtracks and she laughed and said it was the result of budgetary constraints and shooting on location.

Re: that book project above, I don't think the problem there is jargon (not saying you said it was) but that there's a failure to make the core analogy stick: bureaucrats "withdraw" (okay, maybe) and so do philosophers (yes, to a degree) but the concept of "regret" is not a moving part, and that book proposal does not succeed in showing how or why. Since that's a key term for the project, it sounds shaky and tendentious. Which is bad at the level of the thinking, not the terminology.

right, but the opacity of the ideas (and the glib assumption that we will go along with some of the more dubious assertions) is characteristic of academese, i think.

also, it's not just about terminology (the words being used) but usage... familiar words are being used in non-standard ways in that paragraph without much attempt to clarify what they might mean.

obviously there are different kinds of academese, but i guess by posting that graf i meant to demonstrate how it can be somehow both grandiose and opaque (not to mention verbose) and how that combination could really repel someone.

Decided to keep that stuff to a minimum so that years later at a Claire Denis Q&A I just told her I liked the traffic sounds in her soundtracks and she laughed and said it was the result of budgetary constraints and shooting on location.

ironically (?) claire denis is probably one of those filmmakers who would feel a bit more at home with the jargon of academic film studies, since she's worked with jacques ranciere, has taught alongside zizek, etc. etc. at the european graduate school. (i still imagine she prefers to talk about her work in more concrete terms, but i don't think she's as allergic to academese as akerman. even though akerman has had her academic connections, e.g. teaching production at harvard.)

So you are saying that next time I see her, I should bring up objet petit a and the Big Other?

ironically (?) claire denis is probably one of those filmmakers who would feel a bit more at home with the jargon of academic film studies,

Cronenberg and Assayas too.

Missed my chance with Assayas.

I think Clint Eastwood would be very welcoming too.

My cousin told me once about a show he was at where Eastwood was in the audience to see his son's band perform. One of my cousins friend went up to him and went on about what a big fan he was. Eastwood stood stock still against the back wall, gritted his teeth and said "the pleasure's all mine."

whereupon he quietly pulled out a .45

A 78 rather. "Relaxin' At Camarillo."

Learned my lesson on this when I tried to chat briefly with Bob Rafelson about his version of The Postman Always Rings Twice and he scowled at me when I used the words film noir.

That sounds pretty uncomfortable, but in your defense, film noir is hardly academic jargon at this point! It's a widely recognized genre, and the term is used by both academics/cinephiles and lay-people.

I mean obviously one can have a debate about the usefulness of the term or whether it's over-applied, but I wouldn't call it academese.

And The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 version) is one of the quintessential film noirs!

At least he didn't punch me out, like he told us he did to one of the producers of Brubaker!

But yeah, it is a common enough term. This was in Spain, maybe he thought he was safe from American fanboys such as he may have perceived me to be.

Anyway I basically agree with your previous string of posts about the uses of academic language. I would formulate my own version in my own words but no doubt as this is an ILX film thread we might have to argue, if only due to the narcissism of small differences.

That sounds pretty uncomfortable, but in your defense, film noir is hardly academic jargon at this point! It's a widely recognized genre, and the term is used by both academics/cinephiles and lay-people.

that's true, but to someone's rafelson's age (he was born in the mid-1930s IIRC) "film noir" might sound a little hoity-toity, since it really isn't until the 1970s that the concept became mainstream in english-language criticism (thanks in large part to paul schrader!).

but bob rafelson just kinda seems like a jerk

He is definitely a little bit of a grump. Not holding it against him though.

"if i told you bob rafelson was a grump, would you hold it against him?"

Get into Raybert, cowboy.

there's an outdoor screening of 'les rendez-vous d'anna' near my place tomorrow night. is it good? i couldn't really handle 'jeanne dielman' but seems like stuff happens in this one

not much more stuff. it's a great movie but if you didn't like jeanne dielman, you probably won't liek it.

Agree, although most of her films don't run very much on this notion of stuff happening apart from Golden Eighties, say.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/chantal-akerman-primer?utm_content=buffercddf3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitterbfi&utm_campaign=buffer

Great overview. Seen about 2/3rds of her films and mad @ all the ones I wasn't able to catch.

a/v essay on Almayer's Folly

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/video-essay-before-and-elsewhere-chantal-akerman-s-almayer-s-folly

dielman is on tcm tmorrow am iirc

La Captive was marvelous, the best Proust adaptation I've seen.

Thanks. The lack of appraisal of the later work was missing from the obits. The problem is until the ICA two-year retrospective (in London) you couldn't really get much beyond La Captive. Ultimately no excuses, the retro showed she went to so many places over 30+ years.

So we were probably at the same screening of Almayer's Folly last week. Wouldn't say it was evident that it was Cambodia and not Malaysia. Apart from that some good stuff, really felt it was a - not departure - but inspiring how Akerman seemed to be fully conversant with Hou (coming from the BFI season last month) and especially Tsai's work - evident from the last shot in the film and also w/the lack of 'corridor shots' (like the one instance of an alleyway shot was notable) - again that could be the environment, but she could've confined the plot to a chamber-like setting. Compare that with her other literary adaptation. xxp

The John Cale ref is inspired, might need to pull that alb out.

No Home Movie has US distro: http://us4.campaign-archive1.com/?u=b4b814acfe115ea55c6413e83&id=ab8a6e2759&e=b191b4e79b

watched Ju, Tu, Ill, Elle (Eclipse DVD) last night. Won me over eventually, tho i think US commercial prospects wd've been aided by title change to Half-Naked Gal Eats from a Bag of Sugar.

...And Then Eats...Something Else

oh yeah, love JTIE, the way she looks soooo hungrily at the trucker dude, and his monologue/handjob face, so good. That first long shot of the freeway overpasses is so jarring after the claustrophobia of the early shots when she's in catatonic depressive sugar ritual mode.

So I guess Babette Mangoite is at UCSD- has anybody on here ever talked to her about this period of CA's work?

I bet she has some cool stories.

JTIE is my favorite -- the best movie I've seen about being single and horny.

https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201601&id=56695

^ this is great

Tomorrow We Move (2004) screening at Lincoln Center tonight. "Accessible! Comedy!" wrote Sam Adams. Apparently there was a DVD in '05, but i can't get hold of it.

https://www.filmlinc.org/films/tomorrow-we-move/

http://citypaper.net/articles/2005-08-04/screen.shtml

btw, pretty good interview with Akerman by Sam Adams in 2010:

...when I started to shoot Jeanne Dielman, at the beginning, I was not aware of what was going to be the film. Everything was written in the script already, but still. After three or four days, when I saw the first dailies, I realized and I said, “My God, the film is going to be three hours and 20 or 40 minutes long, and it’s going to be developing little by little.” For example, when after she sleeps with the guy for the second time, and you feel something happens, even though the length of the shots is more or less the same as before, certainly there is an acceleration inside the viewer, just because, “Oh, she forgot to put the money there, and then suddenly she doesn’t know what to do.” It’s like the end of her life. She doesn’t leave any room for anxiety. It’s like the workaholic, they do the same. When they stop, they die, because then they have to face something inside of them that they don’t want to face. When she has that, that’s the anxiety.

I think I am speaking about people. Jeanne Dielman is not special. I can do that with a man, going to work and doing the same thing and being happy because he has the key and he opens the door and then his papers are there and his secretary. Imagine, and then something has changed and he can’t stand it. Because change is dangerous. Change is fear, change is opening the jail. That’s why it is so difficult for yourself to change deeply.

http://www.avclub.com/article/chantal-akerman-37600

I remember liking Tomorrow We Move, particularly the sustained "Pile-On" energy in the set pieces.

FSLC had Stuart Klawans introduce Tomorrow We Move, he made the mistake of descibing it as a "screwball comedy," leading the rather large audience to expect a Hawks-Lombard romp. Very little laughter except the hilariously elided birth scene. Group of 60somethings in front of me complained afterward that it was "silly" and "there were no consequences to anything" (not nec debits in either case, even if debatably true). I was charmed by Testud and Clement but in addition to my now-standard sleepiness issues, didn't chuckle more than 3-4 times.

I wrote this about Chantal's suicide and how it might (or might not) change how we watch her films, focusing on "News From Home":

http://openhumanitiespress.org/feedback/film/rememberingakerman/

One of the things that has been missed in a lot of the discourse surrounding her work is a talk of any sense of emotion(s). Her work was so good but formal (so its good to read this), and when the subject matter was written about it was larger stuff like feminism or politics.

She was bipolar - which I didn't know about. But knowledge of that while she was alive wouldn't mean very much, beyond some vague sense that she could put so much work out there - never mind that the work was so good.

Her death has been unexpectedly hard to process. It felt like a hammer blow on the day and I seldom feel anything about the death of people I don't know - even if what they do is important to me. As the weeks pass I try to read all the recollections or any pieces written about her. Whereas for almost anybody else I'd be 'bored' by now (Bowie). The manner of it might have played a part in it but idk I read a lot of works by people who have killed themselves.

Saw No Home Movie today. I think a pretty key thing is that the title might be a pun. It's both 'No Home-Movie' (that's debatable) but moreso it's a 'No-Home Movie'. The scenes of Akerman on the road is so incredibly dull and lonely that it's pretty powerful every time she gets to talk to her mom again.

i saw Golden Eighties last night in 35mm and was quite taken with it... a '50s Technicolor pastiche that manages to incorporate her mother's Holocaust experience.

Was Delphine Seyrig ever not All-World in anything? Heartbreaking.

Not that I know of, although never saw Pull my Daisy

i love golden eighties. morbs, have you seen toute une nuit?

nope

c'est bon mais pourquoi ?

Is All-World the same as All-Time? I hope so, Delphine Seyrig is the best. I could just watch her peel potatoes for 3 hours.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3986-remembering-chantal-akerman-a-dry-and-moving-intensity

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2016/03/place-and-displacement-akerman-and-documentary/

wow, that was first rat

*rate

Looks like a vital box set (I missed screening of all four docs and this really complements all the Godard essay films I've been watching)

any recommendations for these TV things?

http://www.bam.org/film/2016/the-man-with-the-suitcase

missed those

enjoyed the formalism and jokes of Toute Une Nuit last night

Obviously ~not the same~ as actually seeing it in the theater, but "The Man with the Suitcase" is available on youtube; it's lowkey slapstick and unsettlingly precise in the ways it invokes the difficulties of sharing a space.

think this weekend i'm gonna try to catch the pina bausch doc and 'd'est'

toute une nuit is really wonderful. it drove my students batty, though.

What are the jokes of Toute une Nuit?

My birthday's in six months, so someone buy me the box already.

You should have asked your EMP friends.

they're journalists, therefore poor

well nixx, how about the woman who leaves her husband and goes to a hotel and then...

@labuzamovies
D'EST (Akerman, 93) As someone who has waited for many buses, I feel this.

National Gallery of Art in W. DC is showing some Ackerman for free in June

I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (Lambert film about Ackerman)

News from Home

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

No Home Movie

Saw No Home Movie today. I think a pretty key thing is that the title might be a pun. It's both 'No Home-Movie' (that's debatable) but moreso it's a 'No-Home Movie'. The scenes of Akerman on the road is so incredibly dull and lonely that it's pretty powerful every time she gets to talk to her mom again.

― Frederik B, Monday, February 1, 2016 1:40 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This played here yesterday, and FB mostly OTM, although I thought the road scenes worked well for what they are on the big screen.

i want someone to mash up the last scene of tout une nuit w/ lionel richie's "all night long" and post it to youtube

er, toute une nuit

Lots of Chantal on Mubi right now.

Watched South and No Home Movies. Both worth it.

not Mubi in the UK, which have put up 80% US movies in the last month

activated a Mubi account just for Akerman.

I did too; I haven't watched the other documentaries yet, but the hushed intensity of South is remarkable, especially the terrible concluding moving shot along the road in Jasper where James Byrd was killed.

yeah sud is excellent, huh. retro rly just hammered home how across the grid she was

Loved how No Home Movie incorporated her recent gallery work into a diary of her relationship with her mother (whereas East seemed to like a film converted to a gallery piece with a similar subject).

So mad that she is gone.

Great piece on the sounds in Akerman's last film, written by Frances Morgan:

The first things

The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is the sound of wind blowing through a tree and across a valley. The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is wind distorting the sound of wind. The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is wind distorting the sound picked up by the microphone. The first thing you hear is the microphone, which is part of a camera. The first thing you hear is the camera.

The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is the impact of wind on a hand-held camera. But is it on the camera, or in, or both: “it may also be possible for wind to leak through holes cut for switches and generate noise inside the body too,” an instructional PDF downloaded from the Microphone Data website warns the recordist. The first thing you hear is the hand holding the camera. The first thing you hear is the body.

The Microphone Data info sheet says, “Air is a much more turbulent and knotty fluid than we usually imagine it to be.”

In these exterior sequences of the film, the air is tied in knots: intransigent clumps made up of a low ragged thudding sound that is round but doesn’t bounce. A knotted fluid, an impossible hybrid element, an impossibility, an impasse. Through or behind or above this sound, the rattle of the tree’s few papery leaves can be heard.

(“Attach strips of paper to the air vents. At night it sounds like the rustling of leaves,” Dr Snaut advises Kelvin in Solaris. In the controlled atmosphere of the space station the paper strips flapping in the artificial breeze are an aural reminder of Earth; close enough to the real thing to help you sleep.)

Manhola Dargis, reviewing No Home Movie, describes the opening sequence. She notes that it is long enough that the viewer has to take in all the features of what looks like a featureless space: the distant road, the blank sky, a telephone wire. “Mostly, though, there is this resolute, trembling tree perched on what looks like an abyss. How, you wonder, does it survive?”

“On my mother’s side, few had survived,” says Chantal Akerman in the trailer for I Don’t Belong Here: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman. No Home Movie was Akerman’s last film. It was premiered just a month before her death in October 2015. It is a film about her mother, Natalia, who was born in Poland and escaped to Belgium at the start of the Second World War. She was deported back to Poland and sent to Auschwitz, where both her parents died. After the war she returned to Brussels, where Chantal Akerman was born in 1950. Natalia died shortly after No Home Movie was finished, in April 2014. Survival is a central fact of No Home Movie. What is the character of this survival? It is hard to read, hard to hear. It has to be. It has its own complex system of knots and turbulence, interference and static. Sometimes I think it takes sonic form in these blocks of noise that any device would struggle to record clearly, not just the handheld cameras and Blackberries that Akerman uses throughout the film.

To reduce the possibility of wind sounds, the Microphone Data info sheet says, you can place a fine mesh between the mic and the sound source you wish to record. There are many professional and DIY ways in which you can do this but on YouTube my searches for ‘reduce wind noise’ frequently bring up hacks for GoPro users who want to show how fast they are going without obscuring the sound of the engine of whatever it is they are going fast on. Put half a washing-up sponge in the GoPro casing so when you record yourself on your motorbike it sounds so much better. Put a sock on the sponge. Now you can even hear me talking. I like the GoPro tutorial makers. They are not audiophiles. They are more excited about speed and being outside and how half a sponge can take the slap of the air on the camera down to a rumble.

I’ve called these ‘exterior’ sequences, the parts of No Home Movie that show the outside. This is mainly to distinguish them from the majority of the film, which shows the inside of Natalia Akerman’s flat in Brussels; you see some other interiors, of hotel rooms that Chantal is staying in, but not in any detail. The hotel rooms are spaces that contain another interior, that of the laptop and Skype window in which Chantal and her mother talk to one another, in which we see Natalia’s flat again, but now on another screen in a room far away from it. In the so-called exterior sequences the relationship between inside and outside is also layered and mediated. Much of the outside is seen from an inside, shot from a moving car through a window. If this is not obvious from the speed of the camera, it’s also clear from the sounds it picks up of tires on ground, engine, wind, and an insistent small plasticky tapping that suggests something knocking against the window or door when the car hits uneven patches of road. A mistake-sound among mistake-sounds. From the window dune-like hills blur and bump past. Some concrete buildings and a section of long black plastic pipe curving up and over a hill like a snake so long its head and tail can’t be seen.

I read afterwards that Akerman shot this footage in Israel. I wondered why I had not thought about this while watching the film, but instead had placed these moon-like landscapes somewhere simply ‘unknown’. No, I didn’t wonder, I don’t wonder, because it is obvious, and not just because I have seen only a fraction of Akerman’s huge body of work and have not read enough about her life. It is easy and seductive to think about The Desert as a metaphor rather than a real space, and to abstract a bleak and awe-inspiring terrain into something literally unearthly, by comparing it to a satellite or even another planet. It’s easy to empty a space of people and history in order to fetishize its emptiness. It’s so easy and so seductive that I find myself trying to do this even when I am forcefully deterred from doing so by all the sonic reminders of the presence of the filmmaker – the recordist – and her own refusal of or inability to be subsumed into this landscape.

There is nothing peaceful about these empty spaces. There is nothing empty about them. Is there ever an empty space, and if there was, could it ever be recorded? It is never empty of the recordist and their recording device. One of the cliches about travelling is that you can’t escape yourself, however far you go to get away from problems or heartbreak or whatever. That ‘you’ will always be there, waiting for yourself in whichever wilderness you get to. I can never work out whether it means you should stay at home until you feel better, or just not expect too much from the wilderness, but it is clear the warning is made with the assumption that the person is travelling by choice and that they have a home to return to, and Akerman’s furious, blunted travelogues are disturbing most of all because no such assumption underlies them. There is a home – the mother’s house – and a choice – to make this film, to travel to make it – but such concepts are shaken and bruised, buffeted, knocked around in the passenger seat, blown sideways.

(In an article called ‘Femme Vérité’, Michelle Orange writes, “Throughout her work, Akerman enacts a formal reckoning with an inexorable problem having to do with time, space, and distance—which is to say a problem of home.”)

In the space of the cinema where I watch No Home Movie the extraneous artefacts of time-based recording technology are magnified, visually and sonically, and they call attention to other kinds of extraneity – other things that get in the way of communication or recording or representation, or that are supposed to be invisible or inaudible. But when Akerman forefronts these artefacts, especially those that sound, I think she goes beyond the aims of cinema vérité, at least as I understand them. Those artefacts – the distortion, glitch, interference, light bleed and so on – are not left in to make the film more truthful exactly. They are part of a wider consideration of how intimacy is both transmitted and frustrated by technology. How technology not only enables but creates intimacy.

No Home Movie includes a number of Skype conversations between Chantal and Natalia in which technical and operational glitches happen and long goodbyes leave uneven edges. The Skype call, with its drop-outs and time-lags and weird overdriven bursts of noise, equates neatly with the characterization of digital media as atomizing and alienating, the implication being that these unnatural communications, mediated through screens that flatten affect, are not only inferior but detrimental to ‘real’ relationships. In these fluid, often passionate conversations between mother and daughter, Akerman shows that connection can be made not despite but because of or even through glitch, and that the screen is a fine mesh that in fact clarifies, sharpens rather than obscures emotion.

(On the afternoon I watch the film, between working and caring for my mother, who was born just a decade after Natalia, the cinema screen creates another mesh between me and my thoughts, making audible that which I find hard to hear. Later that day I tell my mother about some aspects of the film (Natalia’s flat) and not others (Chantal’s suicide). Afterwards it occurs to me that it has created another mesh, one through which we can talk about some of our fears and avoid others.)

The more formal discussions that Akerman films at Natalia’s kitchen table flow less easily. This is because they are about the past, a past which Natalia will speak of only sparingly. The interference here isn’t something hitting the mic or the wifi cutting out but it feels akin to that. Something too loud, or too absent, or an absence too loud to be voiced, has broken the conversation. Sometimes the wind brings sound with it; mostly, though, it blocks it. Akerman stays with the block, films the block, sounds out the block.

Here is one. “I don’t want everyone to hear the things I want to say to you”, says Natalia during one of the Skypes. As if the viewer – the everyone – will hear not just the things that are said but the things that are not said but desired to be said. As if the things that are said aren’t exactly the things she wants to say.

Chantal, in I Don’t Belong Anywhere, on her mother’s story. “I thought for a while I was speaking on her behalf, and then sometimes I’d think I was speaking against her.”

(Distortion mingles and confuses signal and noise, intention and action, sound and air, machine and body.)

“The draught across the cold stone floor of a quiet church may produce more serious ‘wind noise’ than the gentle breeze outside.” Microphone Data, again.

Air is unpredictable. In Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrey Arsenevich the narrator talks about the presence of the elements in Tarkovsky’s films, in particular how fire and water are brought together at key moments. On the one hand, Marker draws your attention to the heavy symbolism and significance of the elements: they appear not just because they are photogenic – they are there “as a last resort, the answer to a prayer”. On the other, he seems to imply, they challenge the idea of such significance, appearing to manifest beyond cause and effect. And it’s here where he talks about wind and air:

“As [Tarkovsky’s] oeuvre advances, it throws off the ballast of pretext and excuses. Even the director steps free of his own pretext. The whirlwind of grass at the outset of Mirror serves to avoid a cliché, that of a man looking back at the woman he had just met. Something unusual had to happen. In Stalker it’s the fiction of the Zone that makes the grass move. There’s nothing to be explained: it’s autonomous.”

In fact these are not two opposing interpretations, but different ways of saying the same thing. A prayer, a last resort, something unusual, nothing to be explained: in this view, there is life and meaning in every image or action, even in phenomena that can’t be explained. (Marker does not mention the fake wind in the fake trees of Solaris.) In Marker’s loving portrait of an animistic cinema, these elemental last resorts precede redemption.

In No Home Movie the last resort is the wind on the mic. The last resort is the muffled, curtailed roar of the cheap mic shaking in its casing. The last resort is the hand holding the camera. The last resort is the body. It has to stop somewhere.

(In Akerman’s 1980 film, Tell Me, in which she interviews a group of elderly Jewish women, like her mother survivors of the Holocaust, one of her subjects interrupts the story she is telling. “I have so much to tell you, we could stay eight days and not finish all of it.”)


Within sound by Frances Morgan

Finally watching that now. Will read afterwards.

Also, found this paper about Athina Tsangari which contains a discussion of the Akerman influence:
http://filmiconjournal.com/journal/article/2014/2/4

Which uses the interesting word "planimetric," which Bordwell describes here, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/01/16/shot-consciousness/, although he doesn't mention Akerman.

her criterion eclipse boxset is finally back in stock at their store & amazon (cheaper on criterion)

No Home Movie is on the Film4 site for a week (think its UK only):

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/no-home-movie

the final shot in News from Home

Yeah.

Floored me. I can’t wait to watch the rest of her Eclipse set, and to see Jeanne Dielman for the first time in a theater in March (!!)

"When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films." The great Chantal Akerman, seen here in her debut feature, JE TU IL ELLE (1975) #IWD2018 pic.twitter.com/GZDqPbHoJJ

— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) March 8, 2018

Belgian Google doodle:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/05/14/10/4C36B80100000578-0-The_Belgian_filmmaker_Chantal_Akerman_has_been_celebrated_in_the-a-17_1526291349865.jpg

💔

Oh wow didn’t realize that was for her

Got this collection of 4 documentaries, which are the best? I'm keen on checking out Down There first since it seems like a continuation of News from Home.

ftr the films are:

From the East
From the Other Side
South
Down There

From the East was solid.

thanks Alfred, I loved it. Remarkable film.

lol:

@labuzamovies
D'EST (Akerman, 93) As someone who has waited for many buses, I feel this.

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Monday, April 18, 2016 10:35 AM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol Jeanne Dielman's son looks exactly like Michael Cera

Now funnily enough Matmos dedicated a piece to her tonight at their show.

! small world

Les Rendezvous d'Anna has a Janus page now, looks like there's a new restoration. would love to see this one in theaters http://www.janusfilms.com/films/1323

My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman, translated from French by Daniella Shreir. Silver Press, June 2019. Country of origin: Belgium

great news!

has this been shared before? really nice piece on the final shot in News From Home: http://reverseshot.org/features/2105/news_from_home

http://reverseshot.org/images/uploads/news2.jpg

Thanks!

on this week’s episode of triple d we’ve taken a road trip to scenic brussels where we visit a mother whose home cooking is the real deal. seriously, wait till you see this meatloaf. some come on & roll on out with me, guy fieri, on another diners, drive-ins & dives pic.twitter.com/uI0OZOK4Lq

— Nick Usen (@nickusen) January 27, 2019

oh my GOD

Je Tu Il Elle seems like one of the great first feature films by any director that I’ve seen, but is more difficult than most. It’s completely free-form and mysterious in a way that even Jeanne Dielman isn’t. Akerman wants to show you the external manifestation of something that is happening internally with the main character, but also avoids any kind of interpretation.

you have to bring a lot o your own experience and feelings into the events here to come up with any personal sense of what the film is about, it requires a big feat of projection

seemed like three distinct parts: the isolation in the room at the beginning, the experience with the truck driver, and the relationship with the other woman at the end

I see that one as Chantal quite not relaxing into her mode just yet. Only lasted a while before she masters everything.

loved News From Home

all those subway scenes and shots of wide 70s cars on 10th Avenue and cross streets looking out on the Hudson River

wasn’t sure what to make of Hotel Monterey, although I did like that the camera started moving halfway.through

I wish she got sound for that one. Anything.

the silence of that film made it feel very experimental but it was also hypnotic.

Unless my scan of the thread lied, it appears I never linked the memorial piece my genius friend Kate wrote for Cinema Scope shortly after Akerman's passing.

http://cinema-scope.com/columns/deaths-of-cinema/

really great, thanks

Hotel Monterey has no story, it’s just a black and white film document of a residential hotel in NY in 1973, featuring mostly elderly people, with no sound, starting in the lobby and moving in to the elevator and up to individual rooms (open doors, closed doors) to the roof and its views

also lots of shots of fluorescent-lit corridors.

I once synced Hotel Monterey with Eno’s Discreet Music and it was just about perfect.

I loved Les rendez-vous d'Anna

so many of the shots in it had the subject in the middle of the frame, with the sides of the frame mirroring each other. it felt like it really matched the anonymity and dissatisfaction of the narrative

have been watching her films over again and there haven't been any that seem like a throwaway

Finally found this screenshot of Chantal akerman on Facebook pic.twitter.com/8uyDF7rsT3

— alexander iadarola (@aliadarola) October 9, 2019

I loved Les rendez-vous d'Anna

Full retro happening in Toronto and I started with this. Bolstered by someone I briefly dated with the same name being in attendance. Great movie.

it was very enigmatic

Hoberman had a good review

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/movies/les-rendez-vous-danna-chantal-akerman.html

I love the repeated visual of revolving flashing lights from outside that are reflected in the room in Jeanne Dielmann and still wonder what it is supposed to mean, It didn’t seem like it could be from a nearby neon sign, more like it was police lights, maybe a foreshadowing of the ending

not really revolving so much as swinging back and forth

I think I also loved this because I have a deep emotional attachment to long aimless train rides

I was just thinking about this movie yesterday, it's been a while and I haven't thought about it much.
Was it a new DCP? a friend of mine in NYC saw it last year & I'm pretty sure it wasn't a print. I always forget it's in her Eclipse set.

has anyone seen Window Shopping / Golden Eighties? looks potentially awesome but I can't find it anywhere

it was a new "restored" DCP apparently

also have tix for:
Les Annees 80s
La Captive
and a double feature of Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles and Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman

I've only seen La Captive and the self portrait. I haven't read the Proust book, but I couldn't get into it. Very formal, but not like her other films, like dud Chabrol. I was bored by it, though not as much as Almayer's Folly.

CA/CA is cool, it's a clip show w/o much manipulation iirc. it's not like Beaches of Agnes (unfortunately)

spurred on by tonight's viewing, I just also picked up tix for Golden Eighties, No Home Movies and Demain on Demenage. (I had vouchers to use up by year's end.)

I love the repeated visual of revolving flashing lights from outside that are reflected in the room in Jeanne Dielmann and still wonder what it is supposed to mean, It didn’t seem like it could be from a nearby neon sign

i looked into this last year but i forget if i found anything solid. since prostitution is legal in brussels i was wondering whether you were supposed to infer something about her work from her address - because of the name of the street i gathered that her building was in a commercial district (at least, no less of one than you see her walking through in the middle of the city) and figured the lights were neon signs.

"Golden Eighties" is kinda fun but ultimately inessential.
I got it on a twofer with "Toute une Nuit ("All Night Long"). First CA movie I saw. Fascinated me as a 17 yo but not sure whether I could sit through it these days.
"Rendez Vous d'Anna" is my favorite of hers. Rewatched it recently after 20 years or so and although I had forgotten most of the "story", i was amazed how the vibe had stayed with me all these years.

You're one Nuit, Anna, Golden Eighties is phenomenonal range of possibility.

Toute une Nuit

Can’t speak to whether it is “essential” or not but Golden Eighties is really charming, has a great cast and is there anything else like it in her filmography? Pascal Bonitzer contributed to the screenplay.

I feel like Tomorrow We Move is always absent from retros and the conversation about CA - it's essentially a screwball comedy, with Sylvie Testud as a chain smoking CA stand-in and Aurore Clement as her mom. I know there's that rom com she did with Juliette Binoche and William Hurt, afaik her only move in English. but Tomorrow We Move is really bittersweet and melancholy in a different way than any of her other movies.

I'll be seeing that one as well.

I am in the middle of a deep love affair with the facebook exchange flappy bird posted upthread.

🐐

I am pitching an Akerman pod to my Lodgers co host.

Yes!

...which is already turning into a meta project about the difficulty of completist cinephilia even before she approves it!

Chantal Akerman getting a Criterion Channel spotlight in June, including her hard-to-come-by musical GOLDEN EIGHTIES, which I’ve only seen sans subs pic.twitter.com/3TproQHd6Z

— Scott Nye (@railoftomorrow) May 20, 2020

That one rules.

ok guess ill do the free trial then

man, the Criterion Channel added some stuff I'd never seen (Golden Eighties).

do they have Les Annees 80 also? kind of an interesting companion

Temptation to subscribe...rising...

I will def be doing an Akerman series in the screening room if I keep it up a while.

And a slew of Dunye films I haven't seen.

i saw Golden Eighties last night in 35mm and was quite taken with it... a '50s Technicolor pastiche that manages to incorporate her mother's Holocaust experience.

Was Delphine Seyrig ever not All-World in anything? Heartbreaking.

― we can be heroes just for about 3.6 seconds (Dr Morbius), Thursday, February 25, 2016

Good to know, Simon, thanks. That means I can wait.

i saw Golden Eighties last night in 35mm and was quite taken with it... a '50s Technicolor pastiche that manages to incorporate her mother's Holocaust experience.

I MUST SEE THIS IMMEDIATELY 😭

Dunno how Seyrig keeps her cool, projects empathy, yet stays mysterious at the same time.

sort of a less 'royal' Jeanne Moreau

Was just thinking of her as well.

That means I can wait.

I think if I did Rendez vous D'Anna / d'Est (maybe?) / Golden Eighties / No Home Movie as the selections, that should be sufficiently head-spinning.

she's certainly antic in Blow Up My Town, esp for a Topic Omega film

haha she's hilarious in that short

yeah Simon that triple feature sounds great

Le Chambre is way too fucking large

goddamnn 1971 NY living spaces

I found Golden Eighties a strange marvel. Its use of the demotic in musicals reminds me of what Woody Allen tried to do in 1996

Would have been her seventieth birthday today.

fuck

Taken from a Slate piece posted two weeks ago--glad I didn't come across it until after tonight's Mrs. America finale. The final shot: Phyllis Schlafly on the right, after not getting the Reagan cabinet appointment she was expecting (not sure how historically accurate that is).

http://compote.slate.com/images/6bf9c811-0fc4-4a8d-92f0-a0c15bd71c27.jpeg?width=780&height=520&rect=780x520&offset=0x0

that's pretty funny

Jeanne Dielman is the fourth ever number 1 in the best movie poll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Dielman,_23_quai_du_Commerce,_1080_Bruxelles

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time

oh there's another discussion. sorry

Akerman has long been a blind spot for me, perennially on the "I'll get to her" list, partly because she seemed like kind of a heavy lift. Before today, I'd only seen the short La Chambre and, for whatever reason, Golden Eighties — which I liked a lot but also knew was not exactly representative. Anyway, I decided to start the new year by finally watching Jeanne Dielman, no doubt one of many thousands goaded into it by the Sight & Sound ranking. And yeah, obviously great. As a newbie I won't belabor the thread with thoughts about it, except to say that it made me wish we had a Jeanne Dielman for every decade and every country or culture — a detailed inquisition of domestic routine and ritual.

So I guess News From Home is next, huh?

Not necessarily, it's too closely bound-up. I'd go for D'Est.

Les rendez-vous d'Anna is another great entry point

I think they're all on Criterion, maybe I'll just binge Akerman all January.

I tried to spread them out over a period of time, as Morbs advised with Hong Sangsoo

Hotel Monterey is very hypnotic and is one of my favorite films of hers, but it is silent. Maybe you could provide your own soundtrack, but I don't think most soundtracks could possibly represent this film. The images portraying the strangeness of the hotel foreshadow The Shining. The camera doesn't start moving around until the end

x-post

I paired Hotel Monterey with Eno’s Discreet Music some years ago and it worked supremely well.

Try The Captive, tips.

I would not recommend trying The Captive at this early stage

He's watched Jeanne Dielman. Might as well.

OK, I would not recommend trying The Captive at any stage

Lol I think it was my first by her. It was good but I don't think I read the source material.

Watch Hotel Monterey silent at least once before you play any music over it.

Respect.

https://cinephilecity.com/2015/09/10/theatrical-experiences-akerman/

otm

“If Michael knew … if he knew how his art was being treated … I think he will die! If he saw this, he would die here.”

When TIFF and the Art Gallery of Ontario had a big Michael Snow retrospective, they screened all of his films but for some reason they only showed 'Rameau's Nephew' by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen one reel at a time, once a week. I met him in the gallery and asked why, and he seemed puzzled by their choice but not too annoyed. Fortunately they screened the whole film at once several months later.
I hadn't realized until now that Akerman appeared in the film!

Respect.

https://cinephilecity.com/2015/09/10/theatrical-experiences-akerman/

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 6 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

- So I watched Dielman last night. It was at the BFI screen one. For those who don't know the BFI has four screening theatres. One is the biggest screen, proper size. Two and three and mid-size and the last one is more like a gallery screen size. This anecodete I posted here back in Jan makes sense in the way that Dielman blown up to size is utterly magnificent. Savour the colour, the detail, for one thing.

- But if this film is about a woman losing her sense of self the shots of her walking around her apartment to buy groceries become an entirely different experience here because of the blown up size. There is a wonderful scene (every single one is great -- where to even start with this?? Just in terms of photographic composition its perfect: get a twitter bot to post screens of it and it would be as good as The Garden of Earthly Delights bot: the detail, colour, energy...everything so alive and vibrant) where she walks to get the metro and she is out of view, with lots of people packed into the space, for once. It took a good few seconds to find her when she almost barely gets into the compartment (her body, her means of income is utterly absent here). Its a minor detail, but in the architecture of the film this is something that looking back comes up again and again. In another scene, she is walking down the street, two boys of about 10 are walking by; they walk ahead just behind her, then just overtake her to go ahead, then they pull back, then forward, at which point Dielman walks across the street to avoid them, getting out of shot and lost again among the crowd.

- And when I first saw this at the old BFI (NFT as it was called then; a grandpa Simpson detail now), this was on an old shagged out print. I didn't know that much about feminism (nor do I know that much now). I probably watched Marienbad, and certainly Celine and Julie - what lingered was probably the length of some of the scenes. Seyrig's face in the toil of working the home, the drudgery of life and of course, that ending. I had seen Akerman's adaptation of the The Prisoner and liked it. Then the ICA and other small cinemas put up some screenings of her other incredible films over a year (all probably detailed here in this thread). I saw her speak at one of these, she was as combative with some of the questions as in the anecdote of that Snow film. So I devoured the other stuff she made. I forgot Dielman, though it was in the background as I read Manny Farber's amazing essay on it. I saw an exhibiton of her video work; and I loved her last film. Then the news of her suicide was just awful and something I think about every now and then...I really miss her in a way I don't miss other artists when they pass on (maybe its because I saw her speak and take no bullshit)...so I just stopped engaging with her work though I lauged at the memes on twitter of Dielman, in clean screens of the pristine cleaned up DVD version. Then of course the S&S poll, which while its silly it has meant the opportunity to go to a full sold-out screening...

- ...to laugh with the crowd at the funny scenes, and there are about four: The two dialogues with her son before bedtime, the reading of the letter from her aunt in a speeded up fashion (to show a lack of any erudition, or is it to not think about the content of her letter?), and the scene with the neighbour's baby (crying whenever Dielman picked him up, maybe the baby senses something...it certainly adds up no?)

- which takes place in the last day (of 2 1/2 days). So what I didn't get a sense of in my first watch was of the narrative pull, culminating in the last day. This last day is one of the most devastating watches in all of cinema. Things that passed over in 1 1/2 days now come to a head here: The letter from the aunt = will she marry again? The 1st dialogue = she met her husband just after the war (Akerman's real life mother was Jewish and a survivor of the Holcaust, so this detail takes on a life of its own; this film is about that generation who were scarred; and whatever happened in the 60s passed them by, Dielman wears that old woman scarf that was a 'fashion' at the time, and certainly fiddles with it in other scenes, she is old now...) sex was a minor detail in her life; he is now dead, so could she get used to another man? Sex (before its rendered in its most purely transactional form in the final act) is the annoying noise in the constant background, affording her the the means to feed her son, buy wool for knitting, pay for a seat at the coffee shop, the gas bill for her cooker and electricity bills so the light comes on and off (her constantly fiddling with the switches is such a beautiful detail), to rent the place she lives in to go up and down that lift (she does this on the last day but she doesn't go out, and she doesn't check the post -- another point in her breakdown -- the film is choked with micro detail). Sex work is work. And the 2nd dialogue where the son spouts feministy type stuff about 'penetration' (will he grow up to become one of her afternoon clients? The 2nd client seemed to look like her son about 20 years into the future). It was funny the first time I heard this monologue from him then, we all laughed along then and now...

- This film has a brutal logic to it. One of the first, noticeable points where something starts feeling off is in Dielman's relationship with food, where in the 2nd day she overcooks the potatoes. I bring in more things to this screening as I get older and closer to my own end, so I think of the argument over couscous in Fear Eats the Soul, or the ball in The Leopard, where the beautiful looking food is lined and it just tastes disgusting and rotten. Here its potatoes or the coffee tastes off, or she can't get the same seat in her daily trip to the coffee shop because its someone else in there (an older woman but different, she is reading attently; Dielman picks up a newspaper once (earlier in the film) and folds it without looking at it) or she can't find the right button for her son's (whom she adores) coat (another funny/sorta tragic point where she is searching for this phantom button, where she then spouts off something about how maybe she could find it in America, because the US is five years ahead of Europe, so she does absorb something from somewhere). Pre-final act: the photograph of Dielman in her wedding goes from fuzzy to a bit more clear. Gasps from the audience (isn't it nice to hear it again?) after its done. Packed with matter: 3.5 hours go by.

- And the last shot. Post final act. No close-up. A photograph with movement, showing a beautiful face, a face that acts and moves: the head tilts down, the neck stretches long, the head comes up, back up. Its silent film. Its framed with the discipline of Resnais, Ozu and Frampton and Snow. But in the end: trust the face. Great cinema as it was designed to be.

Akerman made this when she was 24. When Dielman turned up as no 1 in the S&S poll (a silly exercise as all polls are but I will never have my tastes reflected to me like this again so let me enjoy it), people said Welles made Kane at the same age. But beyond that its just remarkable how she made so many more films of different shapes and sizes, like there is just no comparison in terms of achievement over time. The problem might be that Dielman seems like a film that needs to be be seen blown-up, and I'm not sure if this is going to be viable for much longer. Everything we make runs its course, and maybe that's an end for cinema.

^^Booming Post.

Excellent Sunday fare.

yes!

Wow. Thank you, that was a wonderful post to read!

Thanks, just trying to put stuff down.

I've been thinking of the different fates of sex worker/oppression-y films in the S&S top 100.

- Dielman as no1
- Wanda making it to the top 100 (not explicitly about a sex worker, but there is something here of a working class woman having v limited options to survive)
- In the Realm of the Senses: not being in the top 250 is a big miss. It isn't about sex work as such but it details a working class woman and her ways of survival. Oshima is a male director, and there is sex in this that is more pleasing to the gaze, but I don't feel he is judging her. There is a world here. I should re-watch, it's one of my favourite films.
- I also love Belle du Jour but it's not a favourite Bunuel. There is other Bunuel in the top 250 but not El, which really would fall in quite well alongside some of these films.

Also a film called Taxi Driver that deals with some of that fairly brutally.

I love Taxi Driver but I'm not so sure it belongs. Feels like that serve as more of an element in the psychodrama that's going on around Bickle.

Blind Spot (Von Alemann, 1981)

This film was on MUBI a few days ago. It's much less interesting as a narrative of a feminist researcher but there were so many great shots worthy of Ackerman. The corridors, the narrow streets, the spacious rooms, the corners, the restaurant. I recommend it as a follow-up

Blu Box:

https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/7045-chantal-akerman-masterpieces-19681978