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Interchange – There Is No More Distance: The Films of Chantal Akerman

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A better title for this show might be “Screening Women,” suggested by tonight’s guest, Janet Bergstrom, in an essay on Akerman for Sight and Sound. Or perhaps we might call it “Look what I’ve done with your name” a response by Akerman to her father’s disappointment that she had no children. This comes directly from Akerman during an interview conducted in 2011 while discussing a kind of loss or erasure of the religious and community traditions of her Jewish father and mother. Her mother survived Auschwitz as a young girl, but lost her parents in the Nazi death camp, something she never spoke of with Akerman.

Exile and loss of “home” are major themes in her work to set alongside those of the status of woman in society. As Bergstrom writes:

The films of Chantal Akerman demonstrate a motivating interest in the status of the representation of woman – her desire, her self-image, the image others create of and for her. Akerman’s films have shown different solutions to the question “who speaks?”, and it may well be that any given answers will always be reductive. But were the questions about the representational status of women, so urgently posed during the 70s, ever resolved? I think not, because I still hear them asked by successive generations of students.

We’ll take a look 4 films (while possibly touching on some others): Saute Ma Ville; Jeanne Dielman; From the Other Side; and her last film, No Home Movie. When there are over 40 films on the books with much more other work, I know that’s going to limit us.

5893_janet_bergstrom_thmbGUEST
Janet Bergstrom is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA who has followed Chantal Akerman’s work closely since 1976. She is working on an archivally-based study of F. W. Murnau’s career and a visual essay for the DVD of Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (Edition filmmuseum 2016).

FILMS DISCUSSED
Saute Ma Ville
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
From the Other Side
No Home Movie

RELATED
“Chantal Akerman: Heartfelt” by Janet Bergstrom
The Innovators 1970-1980: Keeping a distance, by Janet Bergstrom
Saute Ma Ville, Akerman’s first film (age 18)
Clip of Akerman and Delphine Seyrig during filming of Jeanne Dielman
5 Lessons Rogue Indie Director Chantal Akerman Can Teach You About Filmmaking

swa-lgbMUSIC
All songs off of Little Girl Blue, from Nina Simone by Sonia Wieder-Atherton
“Little Girl Blue”
“Black Swann”
“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”
“Return Home”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

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