Chantal Akerman
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Watch: Inside the Rooms of No Home Movie, Take 2
Late last week, we published a video essay from Kevin B. Lee, chief video essayist at Fandor, about the spaces in Chantal Akerman’s final documentary, No Home Movie. Lee estimated that about 70% of the film took place within the walls of the filmmaker’s dying mother Natalia’s apartment. To re-orient himself in Natalia’s apartment, Lee reorganized the footage by room. Initially, he edited the video to music, using Schubert’s Impromptu D. 899 Op. 90 No. 3, not coincidentally the same music used in Michael Haneke’s Amour, which also follows an elderly woman’s demise. But after receiving some complaints, including from the distributors of the film, Lee reassessed […]
by Paula Bernstein on Apr 5, 2016 -
Watch: No Home Movie Room by Room
Chantal Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, takes on a deeper resonance following the Belgian filmmaker’s death in October 2015. The film is a documentary tribute to her dying mother, Natalia a.k.a. Nelly and an exploration of their relationship. As with all of Akerman’s work, there’s a deeply autobiographical element to the film — even more so now that we know it was to be her last. In the above video essay from Fandor, Kevin B. Lee has reorganized the film’s footage by each room in the apartment to emphasize how Akerman explores each space to reflect her relationship with her dying mother. Beginning April 1, No Home Movie […]
by Paula Bernstein on Mar 31, 2016 -
Parting Shot: Chantal Akerman
In early October, the film world lost a great, challenging voice when director Chantal Akerman passed away at 65. Forty years earlier the young Belgian had altered the course of film history with her second feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour, 20-minute portrait of a middle-aged, widowed mother and sometime prostitute. Dielman’s daily chores are captured with a fixed camera in near real time, offering both a historical critique of domestic routine — “women’s work” — as well as the representational strategies of mainstream cinema. But Jeanne Dielman was only one of Akerman’s remarkable films. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015 -
Chantal Akerman, 1950-2015
The great director and artist Chantal Akerman has died in Paris. Filmmaker will have more on Akerman in the days ahead, but here are several of her short(er) films, with the hope that you will all take to Hulu/Criterion, Fandor or even a video store to seek out her feature length masterpieces, a description that doensn’t begin to cover the work of one of the 21st century’s most significant artists. Her final feature, No Home Movie plays tomorrow and Thursday at the New York Film Festival. Lastly, a word from J. Hoberman on his quest to cover Jeanne Dielman for The Village Voice — it didn’t arrive […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 6, 2015 -
NYFF ’15: In The Shadow of Women and No Home Movie
Slotting a festival schedule is one of those tasks that falls subject to a number of outside variables, namely, filmmaker and celebrity availability. One would figure that less thought goes into structuring a press and industry schedule, where 10 AM screenings are decidedly void of glamour, and yet the occasional revelatory double feature presents itself, in which two disparate filmmakers appear in dialogue. Case in point: back-to-back screenings of Philippe Garrel’s In the Shadow of Women and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie proved a joint exercise in obstruction, fostering a shifting interplay between objects and protagonists, despite their very different surroundings. Garrel […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 2, 2015 -
Right Then, Right Now: The Locarno Film Festival 2015
Considering last year’s Locarno Film Festival presented what turned out to be some of the best films of 2014 – Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Martín Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired and Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France – artistic director Carlo Chatrian had a lot to live up to in his third year of tenure. Unbelievably, when the program of the festival’s 68th edition was announced, the main competition featured an even more impressive selection of auteurs. Though the extremely high expectations weren’t quite met, it was nevertheless an excellent year, and for every disappointment […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Aug 19, 2015 -
Short Film: Saute ma ville, by Chantal Akerman
In 1968, at the age of 18 and six years before the release of her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made this short film, which announces themes and strategies she continues to this present day. From Amber Frost at Dangerous Minds: Akerman actually dropped out of film school before completing a single term in order to make it, selling stocks and working in an office to fund the twelve and a half minutes that eventually paved the way for her three hour plus opus. As with Jeanne Dielman, intense, oppressive boredom and domestic isolation […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 7, 2014 -
City World Director Brent Chesanek
Among the discoveries at the 2012 edition of CPH:DOX was Brooklyn-based Brent Chesanek’s City World, which is part magic realist children’s adventure tale and part austere landscape documentary. Over precisely framed tableaux shot in his hometown of Orlando, FL — nearly all of them completely absent of people — Chesanek drapes the narration of a young boy mulling the breakup of his family and subsequent move, with his father, to this Southern city. As in another recent film, General Orders No. 9, contemporary landscape photography is presented as historical residue meant to be both meditated on and explicated. Drained of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2013 -
Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: Michael Lew
Get together for drinks with a group of people who work in film, and soon the memories will flow. And they are usually linked to films these people have worked on. Film titles become markers of memory. It was on that film that this electrician met his future wife. On this one a P.A. adopted her dog. The sound guy was going through a divorce on this other one. The films may have faded from our collective memory, but the days on those sets are still ripe for the people who were involved. In reading this letter from Michael Lew, […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 14, 2013 -
MUSIC VIDEO: “HEART OF GLASS,” ELISE
Blondie meets Jeanne Dielman in this cover by Elise. Don’t know who the director is.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2012
