Sept. 19, 2024
Two films on Love and Intimacy by Chantal Akerman
Toute une Nuit (1982) + La Chambre (1972)
Introduced by Lucia Aspesi
Cinema Rouge et Noir
18:30
Ten years apart, these two films approach intimacy through a resolutely cinematic lens. La Chambre, 12 mins, long offers a formal study of a room, through repeated 360 pans that finally settle on a woman in bed; the filmaker herself as she listlessly devours an apple. Toute une Nuit (90 mins) offers a series of intense fragments to do with quivering, loving and sexual tension. Over the course of a hot stomy summer night, men, women, children, caught up in their desire and ready for anything, allow themselves be carried away, to the point of vertigo, by the excess of their feelings.
Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels on 6 June 1950. At the age of 15, she discovers Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou by chance, which inspired her to take up filmmaking. Entering the Brussels film school (INSAS) in 1967, she left straight away, rejecting the rigid framework of the school. The following year she made her first short film, Saute ma ville, first expression of a free and radical cinema. Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s, where she discovered the experimental cinema of Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow, which had a profound influence on the films she made there (La Chambre, Hotel Monterey). On her return to Belgium, she directed Je, tu, il, elle and then raised the necessary funds to produce Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. This film about the daily life of a housewife, an essential piece of feminist cinema and presented at the Cannes Fortnight in 1975, brought her international recognition and remains a major cinematic experiment in the history of cinema, studied and admired for decades. Akerman ‘s full filmography numbers fourty odd films and has been widely acclaimed throughout the world. Akerman is considered one of the most important and influential European directors of her generation, thanks to her visionary treatment of images, time and space, and the multiple reflections that run through her films: on identity, belonging, memory, feminism, gender and sexuality.
Lucia Aspesi is a curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, with a particular interest in the status of film and moving image in the field of contemporary art. She co-curated Trisha Baga' s solo show at Hangar Bicocca in 2020 and in 2017, she presented the first solo show in Italy by Ben Rivers at La Triennale di Milano. In 2019 she co-curated the major retrospective on Marinella Pirelli at Museo del Novecento, Milan (2019).
With thanks to Celine Brouwez and the Fondation Chantal Akerman
These films are in french only, however they are largely silent.
Tickets €4, free for students.