Interviewer: “[S]o many of your films have to do with travel and moving from place to place—” Chantal Äkerman: “You mean nomadisme. Well, I’m Jewish. That’s all. So I’m in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.” Traditionally, documentaries “document” external realities. In 2006, […]
Tag Archives: Chantal Äkerman
On June 7, 1998, in Jasper, Texas, three white men offered a ride to a black man, James Byrd, Jr., in a pickup truck. White supremacists, they seized their quarry and tied him by his ankles with a logging chain to the back of the truck. For three miles they dragged Byrd, swerving from side […]
Dr. Henry Harriston maintains a posh practice as a psychoanalyst in his spacious Manhattan apartment, but, lately, his heart hasn’t been in it. His “clients” have beseiged his confidence with their life-problems and neuroses, and his morose apartment-mate, Edgar the Dog, has taken to sleeping most of the time as though he, too, were a […]
The occasion of Belgian-born Chantal Äkerman’s “I, You, He, She,” made when Äkerman was in her mid-twenties, is a romantic breakup that has left Julie, played by Äkerman herself, in a state of emotional chaos. However, Äkerman’s voiceover locates the images sometime in the past; in the present, Äkerman/Julie’s voice is calm, low-keyed and deliberate, […]
Shoes quickly go every which way across part of the floor at a Parisian mall called The Golden Fleece; but the viewer’s heart jumps when one pair of legs half-leaps. A reference point is the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), but there the two pairs of cross-cut shoes belong to men, […]
Dennis Grunes 