A Nos Amours
Press release: 15 September 2014
Chantal Akerman retrospective: Part II
Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975
Continuing the most complete retrospective ever mounted of the single screen work of a key woman film-maker
18 September 2014 – 8 October 2015 at the ICA, and nationwide in 2015
The ICA and A Nos Amours are delighted to continue a complete retrospective of the single screen work of Chantal Akerman, perhaps the most unpredictable, far sighted, indefinable, rigorous, playful film-maker of her generation.
As the critic J. Hoberman has said: "Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation".
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This retrospective, the first of its kind in the UK, and the most complete ever attempted anywhere, encompasses in all over 49 hours of film and spans a body of work made over 43 years. Seven films have been subtitled in English for the first time. Akerman’s astonishingly varied and endlessly challenging body of work is so substantial that it has taken two years to encompass it, in what is a novel approach: a slow retrospective that allows audiences to digest and reflect between the monthly screenings.
The first part of the retrospective has encompassed not only her legendary experimental work from the 1970s, including her breakthrough masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, but also numbers of films of all durations that play with form and content as no other established film-maker ever dared. She has produced musicals, romantic comedies, documentaries, short form documentaries about art and medium length television drama commissions. She has not only put herself in front of the camera but also recruited some of the most illustrious performers of the day: Delphine Seyrig, Pina Bausch and Aurore Clément.
The 2nd part of the retrospective will begin with a film of a stage play based on letters written by Sylvia Plath, Letters Home. The retrospective then continues with a varied series of formal experiments, including a sexy aubade in the form of Nuit et jour where a young couple are in bed but must part at dawn, a monologue chamber piece called Le déménagement that presents a Beckett-like dilemma about having moved home but then regretting it, a mainstream comedy of psycho-analytical manners in the guise of Un divan à New York, two late masterpieces in the form of La captive which adapts Marcel Proust’s story of forbidden sexuality and La folie Almayer, taken from Joseph Conrad’s story, intermixed with a series of ever more penetrating documentary meditations on frontiers, migration and rootlessness: D’Est, Sud, De l’autre côté and Là-bas.
The Chantal Akerman retrospective is supported by the ICA, by the British Film Institute, Wallonie- Bruxelles International and also by Film Hub London, managed by Film London.
Press information:
For further press information, images and interview requests please contact:
Naomi Crowther - Press Manager ICA [email protected] tel 0207 7766 1407 Adam Roberts - A Nos Amours [email protected] tel 07879 420 931
Listings information:
Chantal Akerman retrospective 18 September 2014 – 8 October 2015 at the ICA and nationwide in spring 2015, dates and venues TBA.
Dates:
At ICA London:
Akerman 12: Letters Home (1986) 18 September 2014 7pm
Akerman 13: Histoires d'Amérique (1989) 23 October 2014 7pm
Akerman 14: Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert (1989, with Alfred Brendel) 3
Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher (1989) Le déménagement (1992) 13 November 2014 7pm
Akerman 15: Nuit et jour (1991) 11 December 2014 7pm
Akerman 16: D'est (1993) 22 January 2015 7pm
Akerman 17: Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles 1993 Visions/ Family Business (1984) Ecrire Contre l'oubli (1992) 12 February 2015 7pm
Akerman 18: Un divan à New York (1996) 12 March 2015 7pm
Akerman 19: Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1997) Sud (1999) 23 April 2015 7pm
Akerman 20: La Captive (2000) 28 May 2015 7pm
Akerman 21: De l'autre côté (2002) 18 June 2015 7pm
Akerman 22: Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton (2003) A l'est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton pts 1&2 (2009) 16 July 2015 7pm
Akerman 23: Demain on déménage (2004) 17 September 2015 7pm
Akerman 24: Là-bas (2006) 1 October 2015 7pm
Akerman 25: La Folie Almayer (2011) 8 October 2015 7pm
Listings information: Cinema prices £11 / £8 Concessions / £7 ICA Members. Prices vary for special events. Matinee cinema prices £8 / £6 Concessions / £5 ICA Members. Tuesday cinema prices £6 / £5 ICA Members. Booking fees for non ICA Members: £1 per ticket or maximum charge per transaction £2.80. Book online at www.ica.org.uk Call Box Office 020 7930 3647 Textphone 020 7839 0737 www.ica.org.uk | www.twitter.com/icalondon | www.facebook.com/icalondon 4
***tickets available for Akerman 12, 13 and 14 at ICA now***
Editor’s notes
About the Chantal Akerman retropsective
Chantal Akerman was catapulted to international fame by the success of the film she made at the age of only 24: Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976). This film was claimed as a benchmark of film-making intellectual rigour, of feminist film-making, of slow art, as a paragon of the modernist sensibility in action, as cinema as art, as a brilliant problematisation of the domestic and the feminine. Akerman has herself admitted that this attention has been something of a burden for an artist with a life time of making to come. Akerman's work is superficially wide-ranging – she works with documentary and narrative forms, on film and video, 16mm and 35mm, for the cinema and the gallery. Her work is invariably characterised by an uncompromising and singular sense of purpose. It is unmistakably her own. What Akerman surely shows us, by means structural and otherwise, is nothing less than the human condition, in a series of astonishing mediations on loneliness and anxiety, alienation and discomfort. Akerman, from her earliest work, has established a startling and provocative project that is among the very greatest in European film.
“I don’t feel like I belong, and that’s without real pain, without pride. Pride happens. No, I’m just disconnected, from practically everything. I have a few anchors, and sometimes I let them go or they let me go, and I drift. That’s most of the time. Sometimes I hang on for a few days, minutes, seconds, then I let go again. I can hardly look. I can hardly hear. Semi-blind, semi-deaf, I float. Sometimes I sink. But not quite. Something, sometimes a detail, brings me back to the surface, and I start floating again…” (from Akerman's voice over to Down There (2006)
The films have been introduced by a number of artists, film makers and theorists, including Xiaolu Guo, Chris Petit, Laura Mulvey, Nina Danino, Richard Kwietniowski, Lucy Cash, Carol Morley and Chantal Akerman in person.
Films
Letters Home (1986) dir. Chantal Akerman, 1986, 104 mins Cast: Delphine Seyrig & Coralie Seyrig With live English subtitles
On 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath, poet and author of The Bell Jar, thirty years old, married, with two children, killed herself. Then, in 1975, Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia’s mother, published selected letters from her daughter as Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963. These letters then became the basis for Rose Leiman Goldembergs’s off-Broadway hit: Letters Home. In 1984, this was staged in Paris, directed by Françoise Merle. In 1986 Chantal Akerman directed this film version. Letters Home is therefore an object passed from a poet to her mother, from her mother to a woman playwright, then to a woman theatre director, and finally to a woman film-maker. This is a remarkable heritage: an object passed from hand to hand, a form of exchange between generations of mothers and daughters, between sisters in spirit. Hardly seen, but surely a work that elaborates Akerman’s perpetual concern with communication and exchange between mothers and daughters. Moreover, the cast for the Paris production, and for this film version also, are themselves a mother and daughter: Delphine Seyrig and Coralie Seyrig.
Histoires d'Amerique (American Stories, Food, Family and Philosophy) (1989) dir. Chantal Akerman, 1989, 92 mins Cast:Maurice Brenner, Carl Don, David Buntzman, Judith Malina, Eszter Balint, Dean Jackson, Roy Nathanson et al.
Histoires d’Amerique was shot in New York, conjouring up a specific diasporic context – not dissimilar to that of Woody Allen’s masterpiece Broadway Danny Rose. This may be the new world, but the horror of the old is never far from the surface. Mordant observation and biting cynism rule. Akerman 5 asked her cast to recreate jokes, fables and anecdotes, culled from real-life testimony, sashaying from the comical to the tragic, interleaving all with slapstick humour as only Jewish New York knows how. As Akerman has said: 'when history becomes impossible to bear, there is only one thing to do: send yourself up and laugh'.
Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert (Franz Schubert's Three Last Sonatas) (1989) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1989, 49 mins
Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest of all pianists, plays and reflects on Franz Schubert’s last three piano sonatas. As he points out, Schubert can’t have known that he was soon to die, so they probably do not embody the air of resignation and finality future generations have sentimentally insisted they bear. They were however long neglected, all but forgotten, and only in more recent times have they come to be treasured and performed. The repose and wisdom of the maestro, together with the patient observation of one who is no stranger to the idea of the irrevocably lost, of the erasures of history, and of the value of fragile objects passed carefully from generation to generation, is a joy.
Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher (Three Strophes on the name 'Sacher') (1989) Dir. Chantal Akerman 1989, 12 mins
The first of Chantal Akerman's screen collaborations with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. Here Wieder- Atherton performs Henri Dutilleux's Strophes, composed between 1972 and 1986. These are ethereal, at times hesitant, but lyrical pieces. This is a film about one woman looking at another, and a film about how films and music can work together, help each other, inform each other. The fruits of Akerman’s exporation and contemplation of music could change the style and substance of other work.
Le déménagement (The Move) (1992) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1992, 42 mins Cast: Sami Frey
It is a predicament and agony that is worthy of Beckett: 'I should never, never have moved. What got into me? I was happy before. Well, almost. No, mostly I was not. Not good at all. I had to move.' The man in his new home, unable to unpack the many boxes and crates that surround him. His soliloquy is one of indecision, of regret, of a sense of predicament that is inescapable. Through this protagonist, Akerman reflects on the impossibility of making decisions, of the forlorn hope of certainty. A monologue for screen, and a philosophical, existentialist meditation.
Nuit et jour (1991) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1991, 90 mins Cast: Guilaine Londez, Thomas Langmann, François Négret
Julie (Londez) and Jack (Langmann) are a provincial couple in love who have only just moved to Paris. Home is a small flat, but just the nest for young lovers. By day they make love, while by night Jack drives a taxi, and Julie walks the summer streets, singing happily to herself. They meet Joseph (Negret), another newcomer to the city, driver of Jack's cab by the day. Julie falls for Joseph. Julie now has lovers round the clock. Julie resists making a choice. Why should she? She can even happily, dreamily make do without sleep. Is night better than day, or vice versa? Picking up on the insomnia and nocturnals of Toute une nuit and Les rendez-vous d'Anna, but finding a new ease, and musical cadence to the marking of time and gesture that seems quite composed and song-like. Perhaps Akerman is channeling the mysterious and other-worldly patterns of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse dancing in the dark in Central Park (thinking of course of the Bnad Wagon of 1953). In any case, this is a remarkable, ravishing film, full of brilliance.
D'est (From the East) (1993) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1993, 110 mins
D’Est is a wordless winter travelogue through the countries of Eastern Europe, from East Germany, through Poland and the Baltic states, across Russia towards Moscow and its cavernous terminal stations.The Soviet era has gone, a collapse leaving behind a seemingly stunned, endless waiting populace. The film begins with a series of late summer images, at the beach, or lazily in the park. 6
Winter threatens. Long lines of anonymous people, suggestive of resignation and an unfathomable fortitude. Akerman’s camera tracks these lines, catching the stamp of frozen feet, the hunch of shoulders bearing the cold. Domestic life is a silent one though sentimental songs can be played on a gramophone and may be company of a sort. Sausage and bread and salt are on the supper menu for one. Even the grand terminal stations of the capital serve only to lend the waiting crowds a new kind of insignificance. Bleak, for sure, but beautiful image-making and laying our of materials, the deft and caring work of a great artist. It is hard not to think of Samuel Beckett in this absorbing study of human futility, especially the exchange from Endgame: Clov: “If I don't kill the rat, he'll die”… Hamm: “That's right.”
Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl from the Late Sixties in Brussels) (1993) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1993, 60 mins Cast: Circé Lethem, Julien Rassam, Joëlle Marlier
To quote Judith Mayne, who exactly captures the delightful manner and audacity of this delicious film:
“Chantal Akerman's 1993 film… is a beautiful and haunting evocation of female adolescence and its discontents desire, loss and the complicated, ambiguous relationship to the transitions between girlhood and womanhood. Central to it are the dynamics of a love that does not exactly dare not speak its name (according to Oscar Wilde's famous definition of homosexuality), but rather does not quite know how to speak its name. Portrait of a Young Girl is in many ways a coming out story, for the love of one girl for another moves the film forward :1nd structures its narrative development. But it will come as no surprise to those familiar with Akerman's work that this is no transparent coming out tale, and that the film resists any of the simple oppositions between inside and outside, past and present, before and after, which are suggested by the very term "coming out". “Rather, this explores how lesbian desire is both shaped and repressed by the codes and conventions of heterosexual romance. On the surface, the could be described as a somewhat conventional girl- meets-boy tale. But what shapes the girl-meets-boy story is the simultaneous desire, for the girl, to connect to another girl and to tell stories. ln other words, this is a lesbian narrative with a difference; girl still meets boy, but that classical and timeworn plot is the pretext for the connection between two girls”. One scene is a stand out: the jeunne fille dances with the girl she loves. A boy cuts in and the next song plays over her moist eyed longing: It’s a Man’s world. Commissioned as part of the series: Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge
Family Business (1984) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1984, 18 mins Cast: Aurore Clément, Coleen Camp, Chantal Akerman, Marilyn Watelet, lloyd Cohn, Leslie Vandermeulen In English with some subtitled French
Every film maker must raise money for their project. Even the author of Jeanne Dielman is not exempt. Here Chantal takes the camera for a trip to Los Angeles, in search of a rich uncle who may have a cheque book. He may be rich, but will he be found? Aurore Clément is welcoming, and eager to get Chantal’s help with a rehearsing for her part in another film. The battle to pronounce “cheated” without the inevitable mispronouncing of a French speaker takes up all their energy. Her American companion, an actress, complains bitterly about the casting process, usually a matter of meetings late at night. Meanwhile word is received, Chantal’s Uncle has gone to New York. Like Alice, Chantal must chase her white rabbit. Commissioned by Channel 4 for Visions strand.
Écrire Contre l'oubli (Pour Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador) (1991) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1991, 4 mins Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Sonia Wieder-Atherton
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Commissioned by Amnesty International as apart for a portmanteau project to high light the fate of the murdered, the detained, and the tortured. Akerman’s contribution is dedicated to an El Salvadorian trade unionist, a mother of three, murdered by the US backed junta. Catherine Deneuve emerges from the calm of a Parisian night to deliver a heartfelt a plea for the significance of Febe Elizabeth’s life, that there be some remembering of her too short life and her orphaned children. Sonia Wieder- Atherton’s cello weeps appropriately.
Un divan à New York (A Couch in New York) (1996) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1996, 105 mins Cast: Juliette Binoche, William Hurt, Stéphanie Buttle, Barbara Garrick
The plot reads like the outline of a film from long ago: a dour New York psychoanalyst Henry (William Hurt) decides to house swap his Fifth Avenue apartment for a place in Paris. He ends up in the bohemian home of a dancer named Béatrice (Juliette Binoche). She is insouciant as he is dour, and messy as he is tidy. Henry’s patients love Béatrice, and she finds she really can help them. Coming home, Henry finds his world in superb shape. Even his dog is happier. Henry has the wit to lie on her couch. Akerman’s confection has a lightness that is hard to catch if in a hurry. Good to watch some Lubitsch to get in the mood. Then think of Peter Bogdanovich on Lubitsch’s style but could have been talking about Akerman: “Something light, strangely indefinable, yet nonetheless tangible… one can feel this certain spirit; not only in the tactful and impeccably appropriate placement of the camera, the subtle economy of his plotting, the oblique dialogue which had a way of saying everything through indirection, but also - and particularly - in the performance of every single player, no matter how small the role."
Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1997) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1996, 63 mins
The Legendary series of film-maker portraits curated by Janine Bazin and André Labarthe offered Akerman a commission. She chose, entirely consistently with her project to date, to make a study of herself as film-maker. Why not? She had turned film-making back on itself, and discovered a feminised and ‘other’ sensibility, another way of seeing the world and self. Akerman delivers a monologue about her work and thinking. What follows is a montage of clips from her work, including Jeanne Dielman, Saute ma Ville, Hotel Monterrey, Histoires d'Amerique, Toute une nuit, Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles, Les années 80 and so on. Akerman closes with a simple statement of fact, without biographical adornment: ‘I was born in Brussels, that’s the truth’. Commissioned as part of the series: Cinéma, de notre temps
Sud (1999) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1999, 71 mins
Inspired by a love of the literature of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, Akerman planned for a meditation on the American South, modeled perhaps on her prior D’est. But, just as she began work, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered in Jasper, Texas. A black man, he was severely beaten by three white men, chained to their truck, and dragged three miles through a black neighborhood. Akerman’s engagement is not that of news reportage. Jasper must be looked at. Patient interviews reveal the people and their attitudes. Byrd's funeral is a moment of deep feeling. This is a film that finds another way than the forensic investigation of In Cold Blood. This is a film that evokes a terrain, the folds of a psychological condition. The cold heart of white supremacism, and the extraordinary nobility of the black community under attack. Perhaps it is Akerman’s sense of exclusion, of her family’s experience of the holocaust that enables her to look and see. Akerman has written, "How does the southern silence become so heavy and so menacing so suddenly? 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?"
La Captive (2000) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2000, 107 mins Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Sylvie Testud, Olivia Bonamy, Aurore Clément, Liliane Rovere, Françoise Bertin.
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A woman’s high heels walking in Place Vendôme, the camera following such an elegant appearance until they disappear into a car. A young man (Stanislas Mehrar) is following, keeping his eyes on the heels. In Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, the young woman was Albertine, and the man Marcel. For La Captive, Chantal Akerman, adapting La Prisonnière, the fifth volume in the series, calls the woman Ariane (Sylvie Testud), the man Simon. Simon is house bound, Ariane happily not. But Simon forces himself to follow outside suspecting Ariane has girlfriends. His questions are relentless. Where has she been? Who with? Proust is one kind of enquiry into subjective agony, a decidedly male one, but Akerman here builds a subjectivity for Ariane, who must negotiate the surveillance and microscopic scrutiny, or at least as much as possible given her situation as object, or “woman as image, man as the bearer of the look” (in Laura Mulvey’s famous formulation). In one scene of sublime cinematic invention, on a par with a single shot of one women in profile and another in full face, but overlapping in Bergman’s Persona, Akerman here has her male protagonist on one side of a blurred glass partition in his bathroom, first in dialogue with the women then as she appears in outline, an unstable figure that leans first one way and then the other in a vain attempt to merge with her body. Simon would love to inhabit or possess Ariane’s body, his agony is boundless.
De l'autre côté (From the Other Side) (2002) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2002, 103 mins
One side of the line is Arizona, the other Mexico; on one side is the town of Agua Prieta, on the other Douglas. What a difference a line makes. The project apparently came about after Akerman read a news story on American ranchers who liked to hunt clandestine immigrants with their magnum shotguns and night vision goggles, claiming that the Mexicans were bringing dirt. It was this word “dirt” that struck Akerman, reminiscent as it is of the anti-Semitic vocabulary of the Nazis: “Dirty Jew” and the like. The blood lust is astonishing. Beyond that there are other lives and people to talk to, not least in Agua Prieta. These faces, eyes and stories are given their time and Akerman gives them their due. We hear from the sheriff, immigration lawyers, and relatives of those who didn't survive the northern passage. But alternating too with these voices, Akerman offers wordless observation of barren, windswept roadsides or Mexicans kicking pebbles at the border wall. She gives time to think.
Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton (2002) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2002, 40 mins Perfomers: Sonia Wieder-Atherton (cello), Imogen Cooper (piano), Sarah Iancu (violin), Matthieu Lejeune (violin)
Sonia Wieder-Atherton has been present in much of Akerman’s work since the 80s, weather on soundtracks, as a protagonist, and in this case as subject of an extended documentary showcase. In the traditional manner of French television cultural documentation we begin with a voice over from the film-maker, situating and describing her subject. Following this Wieder-Atherton takes over the narrative, sitting before the camera for an extended presentation of her life and art. Of particular relevance, given her relationship with Akerman, are her thoughts on interaction and exchange between artists. Following this, Akerman moves her camera around as music is made, creating lovely views and angles and framings at will. The music played includes a Jewish folk tune, Monteverdi, Janáček, Berio, Schubert, and not least Wieder-Atherton’s famed partnership with Imogen Cooper to play Brahms.
A l'est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton pts 1&2 (In the East with Sonia Wieder-Atherton, parts I & II) (2009) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2009, 43 + 42 mins Cast: Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Cyril Dupuy and others.
Sonia Wieder-Atherton announces her programme: to gather music from the east of Europe, from Mitteleuropa. First she reveals her approach to curation, to orchestration and arrangement. The composers she chooses and arranges include Rachmaninov, Dohnanyi, Tcherepnin, Franck Krawczyk, Martinu, Mahler and Martinů.If these works have anything in common, it is above all a sense of longing, of a honeyed lyricism that evokes distant horizons and resignation. Akerman is content to find a series of angles and to edit as little as necessary, above all to limit her presence. This is a tender offering. Wieder-Atherton is a remarkable cellist. The plangent tone of the cello must bring tears to any eye.
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Demain on déménage (Tommorrow We Move) (2004) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2004, 110 mins Cast: Sylvie Testud, Aurore Clément, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Natacha Régnier, Lucas Belvaux
Catherine (Clément) is recently widowed, and so moves in with her grown up daughter Charlotte (Sylvie Testud). While Charlotte is always sympathetic, her mother brings with her baggage of life: a grand piano, and a blustery manner that leaves Charlotte little peace and quiet for getting on with writing her pulpy soft-core novel. Agreeing at last to stay living together, but look for a more spacious apartment a raggle-taggle band of potential buyers arrive. Doors open and close, and rooms get very crowded indeed, as in Feydeau farce, until Charlotte finds herself an office and gets on with her work. Akerman has often dealt with the relationship between mother and daughter, for good and ill. She has also made comedies about writers block, about the distractions of noises off, about the appeal of rebellion in the face of insufferable constraint. A film without many admirers in the mainstream critical community, but the French comedic surface overlays a study of Akerman’s abiding themes.
Là-bas (Over There) (2006) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2006, 79 mins
A camera in a room. A series of shots of window, balcony, light of an exterior world. Off screen we hear the voice of Akerman, on the phone. Has she been to the beach? No. She is indoors. Akerman’s camera see life beyond, glimpses of lives lived as in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But the story told is very different: for this is Tel Aviv, and Akerman is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She is apprehensive about a recent bombing, and meditates on the whether Israel is indeed the ‘promised land’ or merely a new form of exile.
There are of course no conclusions to be drawn, because the debate is only ever at best provisional. ‘It’s complicated,’ she states. Her relationship with Israel is overwhelming and frustrating, a matter of love and hate. And what of the sea? The vast untroubled waters have lapped these shores throughout human history. The sea is an image of freedom, or ease, of human concerns dwarfed. But as ever, it is back to the apartment, and the glimpse of life outside, beyond the shutters.
La Folie Almayer (2009) Dir. Chantal Akerman, 2009, 127 mins Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Aurora Marion, Marc Barbé, Zac Andrianasolo, Sakhna Oum
Almayer (Merhar) is not a well man. His house has seen better times and the jungle aims to take it back. His Malaysian wife is mad. Their daughter has been sent away for a better life and an education. This is Conrad’s novel about the malaise of a prospector in the dog days of colonialism. Conrad would have his protagonist forget, forget his wife and daughter, and die happy. Akerman, as we might expect, allows her Almayer no such comfort. He will see the horror of it all and die in agony. This is Akerman’s last foray as a film maker of conventional narrative, and the end point of the two year long retrospective. Almayer’s Folly is therefore her last single screen work, unless Akerman makes another film, a swansong, a final statement. The metaphoric image of a film-maker sitting amid the ruin of cinema is inescapable. Luckily Akerman has transformed herself into another kind of artist altogether.
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About A Nos Amours
A Nos Amours is a collective founded by film-makers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema. A Nos Amours is a moveable feast that goes wherever and whenever opportunities arise. A Nos Amours invites film-makers and others to advocate and present films that they admire or would like to see on a big screen. A Nos Amours believes in the value of watching film as a shared experience.
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A Nos Amours and the Chantal Akerman retrospective are supported by ICA, Film London, the British Film Institute, Wallonie-Bruxelles International and by Film Hub London, managed by Film London (proud to be a partner of the BFI Film Audience Network, sponsored by the National Lottery). www.anosamours.co.uk, www.twitter.com/a_nos_amours, www.facebook.com/ANosAmoursFilms
About ICA
The ICA supports radical art and culture. Through a vibrant programme of exhibitions, films, events, talks and debates, the ICA challenges perceived notions and stimulates debate, experimentation, creativity and exchange with visitors. Founded in 1946 by a group of artists and critics including Roland Penrose, Peter Watson and Herbert Read, the ICA continues to support artists in showing and exploring their work, often as it emerges and before others. The ICA has been at the forefront of cultural experimentation since its formation and has presented important debut solo shows by artists including Damien Hirst, Steve McQueen, Richard Prince and Luc Tuymans. More recently Tauba Auerbach, Pablo Bronstein, Lis Rhodes, Bjarne Melgaard, Hito Steyerl and Juergen Teller have all staged key solo exhibitions, whilst a new generation of artists, including Luke Fowler, Lucky PDF, Hannah Sawtell and Factory Floor have taken part in exhibitions and residencies. The ICA was one of the first venues to present The Clash and The Smiths, as well as bands such as Throbbing Gristle. The inaugural ICA / LUX Biennial of Moving Images was launched in 2012, and the ICA Cinema continues to screen rare artists’ film, support independent releases and partner with leading film festivals. The ICA has recently developed an ambitious Off-Site programme starting with a display of BMW Art Cars in a multi-storey car park as part of the London 2012 Festival. Thereafter, the ICA supported presentations at Glastonbury Festival and Latitude, as well as an outdoor film season 'Cinema on The Steps: Contemporary Middle Eastern Film'. Taking place at The Old Selfridges Hotel, 'A Journey Through London Subculture: 1980s to Now' was followed by a collaboration with Art on the Underground and its Canary Wharf Screen. The ICA will return to The Old Selfridges Hotel in autumn 2014 for a week-long programme of live events to coincide with Freize. The ICA welcomes over 400,000 visitors a year to its home on The Mall in the heart of London. The Director of the ICA is writer and curator Gregor Muir, author of Lucky Kunst.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is supported by arts Council England www.ica.org.uk, www.twitter.com/icalondon, www.facebook.com/icalondon