In Praise (or Not) of Chantal Akerman

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.