D'est
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDJ3JiSwGYg
Chantal Akerman has continued to create new and unexpected films that explore ideas about image, gaze, space, performance, and narration. Her distinctive visual style is influenced by structuralism and minimalism. Akerman is often discussed with in the context of pioneering feminist film-makers; however she does not describe herself as such, stating “I won’t say I am a feminist film-maker, I’m not making women’ films, I am making Chantal Akerman films”. Despite this her feminist status began with her first film "Saute Ma Ville" (1968, roughly translated as "blow up my city") and continued in "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975), in which actress Delphine Seyrig exists in the world as a mother, homemaker and caretaker. The camera movements with in the claustrophobic domestic interiors are often slow and completely stable. The film places much emphasis on Seyrig's deliberate movements, and her ritualistic domestic behaviour exemplifies even the leaving of a lid off a jar as having startling significance.
As an artist, Akerman’s goal is to explore that hidden story, one of female space and action. This goal reflects the aims of the seventies feminist movement, ‘which was struggling not just for equality, but for attention and understanding in a world of double standards and indifference.’ More recent works by Akerman have an almost documentary tone, though she rejects the documentary label. She has explored the Mexican/American border and illegal immigration (in "De l'autre côté" 2002 – "From the other side"); the Israel/Palestine conflict ("Là Bas" 2005 – "Down There") and the American South ("Sud" 1999 – "South"), she stresses that her films remain fictions describing them as still always about her. This personal significance is alluded to in the title of her movie and installation exploring post-Communist Eastern Europe: "D'est: Au bord de la fiction" (1995 – "From the East: Bordering on Fiction").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F9T7IdfiM
At the basis of D'Est is the concern for the daily, ‘for privileging the personal over the national or the political.’[1] The camera's "choice" of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, exposes the subjective nature of any narrative an individual could choose to recall. In D’est, Akerman uses certain shots or frames as echoes of other, past narratives, which seem to reflect the depth of our own expectations as spectators in the cinematic tradition and as consumers of different types of visual media. Though the film ostensively speaks about the fall of the Eastern bloc it disavows the de rigueur voice of the documentary. This is seen particularly in the recording and construction of the films sound.
Instead of the voiceovers and narrative structure which would customarily weave and connect the content, the sound often acts in contrast to the image. Voices are deliberately not chosen by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if "naturally.” Its sound was recorded live and then remixed it in its entirety; Akerman often uses the sound as the dominant element of the sequence even exceeding the image and its duration. The relentless montage of sounds and images gives a ‘sense of obsessive repetition and looping.’[2] The camera movements can be described as lateral, slow and deliberate, not stopping to focus on anything and not making exceptions. She attempts to film people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same indifferent eye. ‘The viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond.’[3]
Akerman's cinema speaks of a perceived loss of the real, born of a discerning look at the raw elements that make up the medium itself. Like the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other new wave directors, Akerman explores a reaction to cinema’s ever increasing tendency to exploit developments in cinematic technology and make possible ‘a seamless cinema, inducing ever more persuasively "realistic" effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction.’ Akerman abandons this need for technical perfection exemplified in the slick "realism" of Hollywood and instead employs a style of editing which allows the editor's work to show. This was particularly poignant in her exhibition "Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est” first shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota in June 1995.
This installation, often described as a branching out for Akerman, re-poses questions about cinematic process and the ‘construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space.’[4] The viewer is taken on a three room journey which deconstructs the filmmaking process. The visitor can work backwards through the film-making process from the final product to the artist's vision of the work, and from the technologically "finished" film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks. First the visitor enters a darkened room where the finished version of D'Est, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in Germany, Poland, and Russia in 1992 and 1993 runs continuously. The second gallery space contains video monitors arranged into eight triptychs simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. The third gallery consists of a single video monitor and two small speakers placed on the floor, from which Akerman’s voice recites passages from the Hebrew Bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. Her installations are essentially aspects of her movies, contingent art works based on her films edited into shorter segments and displayed in a variety of arrangements on monitors. This imagery shares with Godard a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, ‘a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible.’[5] It is this deconstruction of narrative which plays with the visitor’s awareness of their own spectatorship. The narrative is shaped by when, what and how the viewer chooses to see, and there own recollection and interpretation of the imagery.
As an artist, Akerman’s goal is to explore that hidden story, one of female space and action. This goal reflects the aims of the seventies feminist movement, ‘which was struggling not just for equality, but for attention and understanding in a world of double standards and indifference.’ More recent works by Akerman have an almost documentary tone, though she rejects the documentary label. She has explored the Mexican/American border and illegal immigration (in "De l'autre côté" 2002 – "From the other side"); the Israel/Palestine conflict ("Là Bas" 2005 – "Down There") and the American South ("Sud" 1999 – "South"), she stresses that her films remain fictions describing them as still always about her. This personal significance is alluded to in the title of her movie and installation exploring post-Communist Eastern Europe: "D'est: Au bord de la fiction" (1995 – "From the East: Bordering on Fiction").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F9T7IdfiM
At the basis of D'Est is the concern for the daily, ‘for privileging the personal over the national or the political.’[1] The camera's "choice" of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, exposes the subjective nature of any narrative an individual could choose to recall. In D’est, Akerman uses certain shots or frames as echoes of other, past narratives, which seem to reflect the depth of our own expectations as spectators in the cinematic tradition and as consumers of different types of visual media. Though the film ostensively speaks about the fall of the Eastern bloc it disavows the de rigueur voice of the documentary. This is seen particularly in the recording and construction of the films sound.
Instead of the voiceovers and narrative structure which would customarily weave and connect the content, the sound often acts in contrast to the image. Voices are deliberately not chosen by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if "naturally.” Its sound was recorded live and then remixed it in its entirety; Akerman often uses the sound as the dominant element of the sequence even exceeding the image and its duration. The relentless montage of sounds and images gives a ‘sense of obsessive repetition and looping.’[2] The camera movements can be described as lateral, slow and deliberate, not stopping to focus on anything and not making exceptions. She attempts to film people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same indifferent eye. ‘The viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond.’[3]
Akerman's cinema speaks of a perceived loss of the real, born of a discerning look at the raw elements that make up the medium itself. Like the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other new wave directors, Akerman explores a reaction to cinema’s ever increasing tendency to exploit developments in cinematic technology and make possible ‘a seamless cinema, inducing ever more persuasively "realistic" effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction.’ Akerman abandons this need for technical perfection exemplified in the slick "realism" of Hollywood and instead employs a style of editing which allows the editor's work to show. This was particularly poignant in her exhibition "Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est” first shown at Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota in June 1995.
This installation, often described as a branching out for Akerman, re-poses questions about cinematic process and the ‘construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space.’[4] The viewer is taken on a three room journey which deconstructs the filmmaking process. The visitor can work backwards through the film-making process from the final product to the artist's vision of the work, and from the technologically "finished" film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks. First the visitor enters a darkened room where the finished version of D'Est, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in Germany, Poland, and Russia in 1992 and 1993 runs continuously. The second gallery space contains video monitors arranged into eight triptychs simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. The third gallery consists of a single video monitor and two small speakers placed on the floor, from which Akerman’s voice recites passages from the Hebrew Bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. Her installations are essentially aspects of her movies, contingent art works based on her films edited into shorter segments and displayed in a variety of arrangements on monitors. This imagery shares with Godard a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, ‘a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible.’[5] It is this deconstruction of narrative which plays with the visitor’s awareness of their own spectatorship. The narrative is shaped by when, what and how the viewer chooses to see, and there own recollection and interpretation of the imagery.
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