D’Est
France / Belgium / Portugal,
1993, 110 min
Shown in 1994
CREDITS
- dir
-
Chantal Akerman
- prod
-
Marilyn Watelet, Helena van Dantzig
- scr
-
Chantal Akerman
- cam
-
Raimond Fromont, Bernard Delville
- editor
-
Claire Atherton
- source
-
Lieurac Productions
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Chantal Akerman in person.
OTHER
Chantal Akerman’s films resist categorization. She first came to prominence in 1975 with her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—filming her fiction about a housewife’s part-time prostitution as if it were an essay in visual anthropology. From the East, Akerman’s latest film, might be called a documentary, except it ignores almost every convention of the genre. The East in From the East is less a place—post–Cold War Eastern Europe and Russia—than it is a space. Her camera shows flat landscapes and ribbons of city streets, modulated by the change of seasons, by the succession of day and night. The East is a space of muffled sounds, traversed by the footsteps of passersby, punctuated by clusters of motionless figures, sporadically pierced by music, laughter and strange interjections. It is an epidermal space: the camera slides over appearances (“like a caress,” says Akerman). When the camera enters the home, it reveals only carefully posed stagings of solitary reveries. There is no commentary. Akerman refuses to narrate, to translate or to explain, making this an uncompromising, even demanding, film. In photographing the informal surface of everyday life with meticulous formality, she constructs an uncanny sense of the marvelous in the everyday. The East, no longer monolithically impersonal, is shown as both familiar and completely strange. This is a haunting and, quite literally, extra-ordinary film.
—Francette Pacteau
FACTOID #35
The first film retrospective accompanying a tribute at the Festival was a Tribute to Warner Bros., featuring Jack L. Warner in person, October 26, 1966.
