D'Est (Akerman, 1993): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm
This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital restoration also screens on February 20th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Chantal Akerman’s haunting 1993 masterpiece documents without commentary
or dialogue her several-months-long trip from east Germany to Moscow—a
tough and formally rigorous inventory of what the former Soviet bloc
looks and feels like today. Akerman’s penchant for finding Edward Hopper
wherever she goes has never been more obvious; this travelogue
seemingly offers vistas any alert tourist could find yet delivers a
series of images and sounds that are impossible to shake later: the
countless tracking shots, the sense of people forever waiting, the rare
plaint of an offscreen violin over an otherwise densely ambient sound
track, static glimpses of roadside sites and domestic interiors, the
periphery of an outdoor rock concert, a heavy Moscow snowfall, a crowded
terminal where weary people and baggage are huddled together like so
many dropped handkerchiefs. The only other film I know that imparts such
a vivid sense of being somewhere is the Egyptian section of
Straub-Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late. Everyone goes to movies in
search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman’s sorrowful,
intractable film are the shots themselves—the everyday recorded by a
powerful artist with an acute eye and ear.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is an extract.
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