fog lies heavy on ugly residential bunkers. A young woman takes the mail from the mailbox, humming to himself, running into her apartment. In the kitchen, she reads the letters to boil noodles. Your cheerful buzz is increasingly aggressive. They glued the door off, begins to manic to mop the floor, lubricates the shoeshine legs coincide with a. Then she turns on the gas stove.
The young woman, the first daily activities absurdity and then prepare their suicide in “Saute ma ville” (1968), played by the then 18-year-old director Chantal Akerman. A year earlier, the Belgian film school yet leave before the end of the first semester. Akerman, who had already broken with 15 the school was convinced that she could not learn anything there. In the following months, she worked in various offices and saved the jobs the money together, she needed for her first short film.
Even in “Saute ma ville” and the history of its formation, the later career of Chantal Akerman is created, these “border crosser between cinema and visual arts, between documentation and Experiment” (“FAZ”), which remained unknown to the general public in art circles for this was the more respected but. “You can only really make an impact, if you understand the film as fracture – a break with the traditional forms, resolution and abolition of these forms,” said the filmmaker about their work
Daily. gestures of a woman
rebellious, fresh, keen to experiment already shows Akerman in “Saute ma ville”, when they can alienates the tone and run asynchronously and confronts the audience with frenetic cutting sequences. That formal gimmicks were not pose with her, she proved in 1975 with their key work, the nearly three-hour drama “Jeanne Dielman”. Cinematic completely different in nature from “Saute ma ville”, the feature film but reflects themes and motifs, which already employed Akerman in her debut.
In “Jean Dielmann” she films almost in real time, like a widow in Belgium haunts her empty existence. The daily duties govern their lives: peeling potatoes, shopping, housecleaning. And because the money is not enough, now and then prostitution. Just businesslike unwound, like the other activities. The rituals of everyday life do not make more sense to the Compulsive of them occurs significantly through the almost motionless camera and extremely long shots out.
“I do not make women’s films, I’m Chantal Akerman films” said the director about their work, but also: “I think, ‘Jeanne Dielman’ is a feminist film because I give here a little space, which is otherwise hardly ever shown:. the daily gestures of a woman” Chantal Akerman was undoubtedly a feminist filmmaker, her camera took a female look she described as the opposite of voyeurism.
For art film is the romantic comedy
But their film-historical significance goes far beyond that. Chantal Akerman made not only female positions visible, she understood film ever as a radical medium as an art in the service of social change. The daughter of an Auschwitz survivor wanted to do with their work structures visible and break; Structures that are still largely dominated patriarchal. The influence of the experimental filmmaker Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas, who she met in the early seventies during a two-year stay in New York, can be felt in all her work. And Jean-Luc Godard once called it a “resistance fighter against the cinema of favors”.
In Germany, so most of its more than 40 works remained unknown, feature films as “I, you, he, she” (1974) and “Nuit et jour – The Night, the Day” (1991), documentaries such as “Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy” (1988). She is best known in this country very late and with a much conformers film: “A Couch in New York” (1996) with Juliette Binoche and William Hurt was almost something like a charming romantic comedy, but nevertheless tells of profound gender images. Their emerged since the turn of the millennium movies were accessible, but not flat, so the Proust adaptation “The Prisoner” (2000), the dramatic comedy “Tomorrow we draw around” (2003) and her last feature film, the Joseph Conrad adaptation “La folie Almayer” (2011).On the canvas alone Chantal Ackerman wanted to anyway not be reduced. She wrote screenplays, worked for television and was with video installations in museums and art festivals. Even with these works they wanted to make structures identified. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” wrote on the occasion of the 2002 Kassel Documenta 11 presented installation “From the Other Side” on the border between the US and Mexico through its video art: “Enlighten on acute social problems, reflect quite effortlessly dominant perspectives and break then on. ” An attitude that runs like in red thread through her work.
On Monday, the great artist and enlightener Chantal Akerman has died at age 65 in Paris.
No comments:
Post a Comment