A Nos Amours Chantal Akerman La-bas (Down-There)
Wed 28 May 2014
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Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town), 1968.
La-bas (Down-there), 2006.
We are delighted to welcome Professor of French Literature and Film at Edinburgh University, Marion Schmid, to introduce this screening.
Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town)
Dir: Chantal Akerman. Cast: Chantal Akerman.
Belgium 1968, b&w, 13m.
Akerman’s first experimental film documents a young woman going about her daily domestic routine in strange ways, whilst shutting herself in her apartment. Often cited as a precursor to her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman.
La-bas (Down-there)
Dir: Chantal Akerman. Cast: Chantal Akerman
Belgium/France 2006, 80m.
Despite initial reluctance to film, during a trip to teach in Tel Aviv Akerman found a frame in the apartment she was staying in that she could not resist. The work was to unfold as an exploration and reflection on her own ambivalent relationship with a city and by extension her own Jewish history. Bill Arning states that she, “builds an internal inventory of responses to the spectral lives she indirectly witnesses.” La-bas blurs the boundaries presence and absence, interior and exterior in a style that ‘inverts’ her usual methodical roving camera eye.
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Chantal Akerman is a filmmaker whose wide-ranging film and video practices explore themes of identity, sexuality, quotidian reality and exile, and works against conventional filmmaking in order to discover new worlds. As J. Hoberman has said: "Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation."
A series of screened shorts and features programmed by Sacha Airlie in conjunction with the A Nos Amours retrospective of the complete film works of Chantal Akerman at the ICA in London. Please see www.anosamours.co.uk for further information.
This project has been kindly supported by The University of Glasgow's Creative Practice Fund and is extremely grateful to Lore Gablier and Paradise films.
A Nos Amours is supported by the British Film Institute, Wallonie-Bruxelles International and Film Hub London (managed by Film London)
