Tuesday, April 13, 2010

An Encounter with Chantal's Vision


Eclipse has done it again giving the world introduction to another filmmaker who deserves recognition. I should probably already have been acquainted with Chantal Akerman, a Belgian has developed quite a body of work in the last forty years or so, but somehow her work has eluded me.


Chantal Akerman in the Seventies contains five films on three CDs. I have so far seen the first one that features three films from her time in New York in the early seventies. Le Chambre consists of a thirteen minute tracking shot of an apartment and Ackerman on her bed. It is the kind of experimental film that many film students have created over the decades, but there is enough assurance and surprise in it, that it is not simply superfluous exercise. Hotel Monterey is an hour's worth of silent images that explore a run down Manhattan Hotel ala Chelsea. The quality of the images in Monterey and their continuity structure (we go from the lower floors to the roof) maintain interest for the viewer, particularly one who is going to engage with such a work.
News from Home is the longest and most intriguing of the films on the first disc. Letters and the two shorter films benefit exceptionally from the camera work of Babette Mangolte. The last time I saw such lovely saturation in colors in urban photography was the work that Robby Muller did for Wim Wenders in films like Paris, Texas and The American Friend. Mangolte's images of New York, particularly at dawn and twilight are stunning, but mostly in a quiet way.



Letters is filled with long takes. There are several low angle shots of alley ways and abandoned streets. The camera is also placed in the subway systems and street corners where we see the comings and goings of city inhabitants. This is not Koyaanisqatsi. There is no Philip Glass music, only natural sounds and occasionally Akerman reading letters from her mother. The letters draw the viewer in with pieces of information about her family and insights into their relationship with her. There is something universal and haunting about a mother's words coping with the geographical distance and adult passage of her daughter that is universal. And something about these personal words that contrast well with the images of the city and its various rhythms.

Additionally, Akerman in News has serviced posterity with an amazing time capsule of how urban seventies looked and felt. There is one particularly long tracking shot traveling that was like time travel for me.

But most profoundly, there is the film's final shot taken on a foggy day apparently from a New York ferrry. As is the case throughout News, this take is long and interupted but the last decade gives the shot an added poignancy that the filmmaker could not have predicted or intended because there are two large structures on the left side of the island that are not with us anymore.

My queue will soon see the inclusion of the other Akerman Eclipse films and I am intrigued to see how this artist's experimental film aesthetic was incorporated into her fiction films. I am sure that it this was executed in all kinds of intriguing and beguiling ways. Afterall the type of films on the first disc explore time and structure close to the DNA of cinema. And Akerman's bios often mention that she decided that filmmaking would be her fate after she saw Godard's Pierrot le fou at fifteen years old.

posted by well-executed buffet at 11:28 PM
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