Tuesday, May 2, 2017
The Cinema Of Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics
I had this opportunity to watch some of extraordinary films by Chantal Akerman at Block Museum, Northwestern University
In the light of our
current political moment, Chantal Akerman’s films feel more urgent than ever;
but perhaps none more so than From the Other Side, a minimalist and evocative
exploration of the U.S.-Mexican border and the lives of those who live and work
there. Akerman again brings her talent for landscape cinematography to the
mountains and deserts of Arizona, painting a terrain that stands between work
and poverty for Mexican immigrants hoping to find a way across. Coupled with
this are interviews with many of the stakeholders: immigrants themselves, law
enforcement, U.S. locals who live along the border, and immigration rights
advocates. Part landscape study, portraiture, structural formalism,
documentary, journalism, and essay, From the Other Side is ultimately,
as Dave Kehr wrote in the New York Times, a “spare, painterly and
scrupulously unsentimental look. Both eerily beautiful and filled with a quiet
compassion."
Chantal Akerman died in
October 2015 at the age of sixty-five, leaving behind a body of work that spans
five decades and stands as one of the most significant contributions to modern
cinema. Positioned in between fiction and documentary, Akerman’s films give
visibility to those people and places that our culture overlooks or relegates
to the margins because of gender, race, or age; or simply because they have
found themselves on the wrong side of history. From Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai
du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—widely regarded as the most important feminist
film of the seventies—to No Home Movie, Akerman’s films offer us scenes
of unique beauty and formal discipline, indeed a new, sensuous way of thinking
about the complexity of ordinary experience. Labor, love, travel, migration—no
aspect of life is immune to the workings of power and yet resistance can arise
unexpected from the smallest details, whether we find ourselves in a lower
middle class kitchen (Jeanne Dielman), on the streets of the former
Eastern Bloc (From the East), or at the US-Mexico border (From the Other
Side). This series will culminate in a one-day symposium, The Cinema of
Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics, organized by the Northwestern
Image Lab and the Department of French and Italian. The symposium will bring
together renowned scholars from the fields of film and media studies, art
history, and political theory, and is scheduled to take place on Friday, April
28, 2017.
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