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Event
Chantal Akermans Sud (South)
Sunday, June 26, 2016, 7:30pm
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Chantal Akermans Sud (South)
Part of
CHANTAL AKERMAN: CONTRE LOUBLI/AGAINST OBLIVION
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
Completed in 1999, Chantal Akermans Sud (South) is a searing examination of the hate crime killing of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Tracing the terrain of Jasper, Sud intertwines the citys landscape, interviews and footage of Byrds funeral.
Describing the project Akerman wrote: How do the trees and the whole natural environment evoke so intensely death, blood and the weight of history? How does the present call up the past? And how does this past, with a mere gesture or a simple regard, haunt and torment you as you wander along an empty cotton field or a dusty country road?
A difficult, important film, Sud poses Akermans questions without fully answering them, seemingly acknowledging the inability of landscape or interviews to fully explain the genesis of such profound violence. Introduced by Courtney Stephens.
"Conjures the ghosts of the hate crimes and lynchings that have plagued that part of the U.S. for decades. [SOUTH] makes its sorrowful points succinctly." Variety
Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation." J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets
or at the door.
Special Thanks: Sylviane Akerman, Claire Atherton, Mathieu Fournet, Amélie Garin-Davet, Séverine Madinier, Nicola Mazzanti, Adam Roberts, Véronique Siklosi, Marilyn Watelet
CHANTAL AKERMAN: CONTRE L'OUBLI/AGAINST OBLIVIVION was curated by Bérénice Reynaud (REDCAT), Alison Kozberg and Adam Hyman (Los Angeles Filmforum), William Morris (Cinefamily), Martha Kirszenbaum (Fahrenheit) and Courtney Stephens (VEGGIECLOUD & Human Resources).
See below for more details of CHANTAL AKERMAN: CONTRE LOUBLI/AGAINST OBLIVION
Screening:
Sud
Chantal Akerman, 1999, color, sound, 70 minutes.
CHANTAL AKERMAN
When Chantal Akerman (June 6, 1950-October 5, 2015) died last October, she left behind a prolific and singular oeuvre. A truly independent filmmaker, she used to write or co-write all her screenplays, and her films outline an autobiography of sorts. She worked in a variety of formats, exploring both documentary, fiction and the personal essay form in most than 60 works: 18 features, countless shorts and featurettes, and a dozen multiple-screen installations that were often variations of her single-channel films always mixing high art with popular culture, minimalist rigor with physical exuberance. Through this multiplicity of formats, though, a unique tone, the specific quality of the gaze, an inimitable mastery of the mise en scène constituted a style that can be immediately spotted.
Akerman fell in love with cinema when she saw Godards Pierrot le fou as a teenager. At 18 she started to make films, with the irreverent Saute Ma Ville (1968), and it is at 25, with Jeanne Dielman (1975), that she became a household name, de facto defining an era, influencing filmmakers as different as Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and Nina Menkes. Unlike them, though, she frequently appeared in her own films, racing, meditating, writing, sleeping, stumbling into things, singing even a female Charlie Chaplin, as she used to say.
Her presence was the index of a new way of performing femininity, as well as queerness and the anguish felt by the children of Holocaust survivors. Hers was an unclassifiable body willfully exploding the boundaries of sex, race, ethnicity, genre, language, and geography or, at the border of the image, at the border between documentary and fiction (to allude to the title of one of her installations), as an inimitable voice, talking and singing, the thinly melodious voice of a child, later made husky by the smoke of a thousand cigarettes.
As such, through the audacity and formal rigor of her cinematic language, she struck a cord with generations of spectators. Her untimely death became an Internet event. Thousands of people, most of them very young, were clamoring how much her work had resonated through them, how much they were missing her.
CHANTAL AKERMAN: CONTRE LOUBLI/AGAINST OBLIVION
This screening series gathered the representatives of several venues across town (REDCAT, Los Angeles Filmforum, Cinefamily, Fahrenheit, Veggie Cloud, Human Resources) that are dedicated to render a proper homage to this major film director, by securing newly-created DCPs, restored prints (when available) and well-preserved digital files to exhibit Akermans images and sounds in their pristine beauty, and to present a survey of her work as exhaustive as possible considering the current state and availability of some films. A companion exhibition is concurrently organized at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
These programs are organized in collaboration with Paradise Films and Cinémathèque royale de Belgique and presented with the support of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Institut Français and with the support of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Belgium
Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels, capital of Belgium whose gray winters, cloudy skies and hazy light were once captured by Flemish painting. Her parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. They did not care about cinema, and cared even less about passing that painful part of Jewish history to their children. Yet this nothing they refused to talk about became the core of Akermans inspiration.
Many of her films are about a girl/a woman whose desires, passions, longings, and obsession with an unspoken past are too big to be contained in Brussels alone. Women run away, cut classes, hitch-hike, sleeplessly walk the streets at night, love two people at the same time, strive to marry the wrong person, stalk female ex-lovers, commit murders, travel throughout Europe, go to America, to Eastern Europe, to Asia, illegally cross borders in situations that go from the banal to the surreal.
A seductive emotional violence bursts at the seams. Language often drifts, a love letter turns into an obsessive diary or a schmaltzy song, a simple note into a surrealist catalogue, a word of consolation into a list of possible catastrophes. The excess contained in Akermans signature frontal shots pours out in language, in pleasure.
"In a beautiful interview conducted in 2011, film scholar Nicole Brenez pointed to Akerman that she always talked about herself as of a daughter/girl (its the same word in French), that the heroine of Almayers Folly was called Nina, i.e. little girl. 'I never grew up, responded Akerman. I have remained a girl, my mothers daughter.' No Home Movie, her last film, dedicated to her mother as was, forty years earlier, News from Home, reiterated this one last time.
Les Inrockuptibles
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This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and Bloomberg Philanthropies. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
This screening occurs in conjunction with CHANTAL AKERMAN: CONTRE LOUBLI/AGAINST OBLIVION, a collaboration among Los Angels Filmforum, Cinefamily, Human Resources, REDCAT and Veggie Cloud.
Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student
Contact us at lafilmforum@yahoo.com.
Find us online at http://lafilmforum.org.
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LocationSpielberg Theatre at the Egyptian (View)
6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028
United States
Categories
| Dog Friendly: Yes! |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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