DOCSLIB.ORG

Goodnight, Chantal

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Goodnight, Chantal GOODNIGHT, CHANTAL CORINA COPP Rules prevent us from living. I go out in my pajamas, I’ve dispensed with fashion. I filmed all of my last film in pajamas. Today, I’m in my pajamas. — Chantal Akerman But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. — Clarice Lispector Top: Chantal Akerman, still from Portrait d’une parasseuse (Sloth), 1986. Bottom: Charlie Chaplin, still from A Beautiful Sunday Morning, 1919. 65 In Portrait d’une parasseuse (Sloth), a short film made for a group commission to support independent women filmmakers in 1986, which resulted in the omnibusSeven Women, Seven Sins, Chantal Akerman’s digital clock—a radio alarm—reads: 12:12. Make a wish. Her second clock, a square analog set atop the digital, a mere insistence, reads: 12:25. What time is it? A classic move by us sloths, to keep more than one clock around the room we sleep in, all set a few minutes ahead or behind another, so as not to know. The camera is held on the clocks, then cuts to the bed. Here, the director sits up straight, under the covers, en face. It’s not unfamiliar, this image of Chantal in bed. Beds dot her films, appearing frequently as grounds zero for lived reality—fromLa Chambre, 1972, where she rests also under the covers, sometimes with apple; to the famous mattress in Je tu il elle, 1974; to Sylvain’s sofa bed in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (not to mention Jeanne’s own, of course, host to the event of events); to the “beds, pajamas, and people complaining of the unbearable heat,”1 of Toute une nuit (All Night Long, 1982); all the way up (and back) to mother and daughter sharing a bed in both Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings With Anna, 1978) and Demain on déménage (Tomorrow We Move, 2004), tonally dissimilar films that rely on a common, heartfelt thread to entwine them: the actress Aurore Clément, who plays, first, the role of the daughter; and, 26 years later, the mother. “To make a film, you have to get up, and get dressed,” Chantal says inSloth . The punchline is that she’s already dressed in her clothes for the day, a fact revealed in a sweep of the lavender blanket. “But if you don’t undress, you need not get dressed.” Rather than wear her night-clothes beneath her day-clothes, as Chantal did for many of her middle and later years—if not simply outright pajamas—in Sloth, she flips the script she does not yet have, placing herself outside of linear time while remaining deeply affected by it. Encapsulating in a daytime outfit the flow of night entering day, the director-actor is better equipped—having both efficiency and closer proximity to dream on her side—to handle whatever conditions she may encounter when making the film we’re in. It’s tempting to involve more philosophical territory: Night and day contain each other, much as Akerman’s films do contain the Other and contain each other. “Night must pass into day,” writes Blanchot. “Night becoming day makes the 1 Mateus Araujo, “Chantal Akerman, Between the Mother and the World,” Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1, p. 37. 66 light richer and gives to clarity’s superficial sparkle a deep inner radiance. Then day is the whole of the day and the night…”2 Charlie Chaplin, who is being rushed out of bed throughout his short movie, A Beautiful Sunday Morning (1919), has the same moves as Chantal. Once he’s revealed that he’s already dressed, he turns over, away from the camera, to go back to sleep. His grumpy roommate’s clock reads: 3:55, so it’s true they’ve lost the day. Two instances of someone—if we can call Charlie Chaplin and Chantal Akerman “someones”— engaging in filmed self-portraiture, self-directed, self-motivated, barely. “Get up, lazy one,” Chantal sings to herself. “All by himself, he was the crowd,” wrote Marguerite Duras of Chaplin. “Drowned as in a bottomless pit. Nothing would stop his fall. The event would drop to the deepest part of him. It would be lost and Chaplin would let it be lost, he would let go.”3 “Charlie Chaplin, that’s me,” Akerman wrote to annotate Family Business (1984), for her infamous “Pajama Interview” with film scholar Nicole Brenez. I’d like to argue, or at least to say, that Akerman’s self-alignment with Chaplin—which occurred more than once throughout her life—might be a personal truth-telling, an identification with an attuned kind of clumsiness and a relationship to time that prioritizes transition over rule, that inevitably instructs a viewer to take heart. Put another way: Get up, whenever. This condition of whenever lies along a continuum where night and day belong to each other, where things are not fully resigned to darkness, but where light is not locatable either. I think of it as a temporal modification to Agamben’s whatever singularity:4 It is not affirmed by a strange openness, on one end, a void; neither is it reducible to any manner of societal expectations of the body’s rise and fall. Whenever, in this case, is particular. It could be whatever time it is when you have one clock atop another, reading differently, and are waking, supraliminal, calculating the minutes themselves. “To make a film, you have to get up,” Akerman asserts; the film you make will be made then. I’d like to call this whenever, this moment out of all other moments of waking, and subsequently, of and for making, a “never- night.” This time for art-making is the negation of nightmare. In no closing of the day, no contingent darkening for living by one’s wits. But if it is never night, then it is never, 2 Maurice Blanchot, “Sleep, Night,” The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 3 Marguerite Duras, “Chaplin, Yes,” Green Eyes, translated by Carol Barko, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 65. 4 A good explanation of the “whatever singularity” can be found in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life, eds. Mat- thew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 73–74. 67 also, day. “And without a day, there won’t be a night either. In that,” as Etel Adnan reminds me, “Revelation will have perfected itself.”5 If we wish to find the realm of the self-motivated Chaplin and Akerman, it’s here. “When the event would come back to him, after some time in him, in forgetfulness, especially in the unintelligible, it’s then that Chaplin would recognize it and would make it concrete.”6 In Nuit et jour (Night and Day, 1991), Julie (Guilaine Londez) refuses to sleep, “in an attempt to balance night and day” and “reject the notion of a natural cycle.”7 The camera follows her along the streets of a summer night, and she sings to herself as she passes through the cityscape: “We don’t have a child; it isn’t the right time. At night, he drives his taxi … at night, I wander around Paris … I always get home before him. I wait for the day, I erase the night.” In one wistful moment of multiplicity, Julie stops briefly in front of a black-and-white poster presumably advertising a concert for cellist Sonia Wieder Atherton, Chantal’s life partner. Chantal Akerman, still from Nuit et jour (Night and Day), 1991. 5 Etel Adnan, Night, Nightboat Books, 2016, p. 36. 6 Duras. 7 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996, p. 182. 68 Chantal Akerman, still from Nuit et jour (Night and Day), 1991. Barbara McBane wrote recently, quoting Ivone Margulies: “Songs and humming are conjured […] ‘against the dread of stasis that haunts’ such films asSaute ma ville and Jeanne Dielman.” 8 It might be simple enough then to reiterate (as many have noted) that Akerman’s musical and comedic gestures rely on a system of opposites; nourishing with one hand what is always-already the subject, emotionally punctuating with sing-song, lightness, absurdity, and transference, if I can gather that term here. Akerman herself said to Brenez: “I want to get away from anything concerning the camps, I’ve been so caged in by it that I need to breathe. I’d rather sing.”9 This “caging” of the metaphorical bird began in childhood, despite her mother’s silence around her memories of the war; or rather, Chantal was “born into trauma,” as she herself stated, and suffered recurring nightmares of what she had surmised had happened to her mother in the camps—nightmares of unknown, inherited trauma, events about which her mother, again, never spoke. Importantly, she recalled: “I was so scared to go to sleep, I asked my mom to repeat ‘Bonne nuit, Chantal,’ ‘Goodnight, Chantal,’ until she had found the right tone for it.”10 8 Barbara McBane, “Walking, Talking, Singing, Exploding … And Silence: Chantal Akerman’s Soundtracks,” Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1, p. 42. 9 “Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview,” Interview with Nicole Brenez, Lola Journal, Issue 2, 2011. http://www. lolajournal.com/2/pajama.html 10 Ibid. 69 I am compelled by this concept of “the right tone,” this accuracy at nighttime; the shift from the mother’s voice to the daughter’s that occurred as Chantal went on to make films; how this voice “itself” is exchanged and replayed in her work through use of voiceover and dislocation; and the responses of insomnia and sleep, the latter a site, for Blanchot, that recalls the “ignorant bliss of early childhood,” where one can “[concentrate] in the narrowness of this place where the world recollects itself,” and where one affirms the world, and is affirmed by it.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • DEMAIN on DEMENAGE Panorama Special MORGEN ZIEHEN WIR UM TOMORROW WE MOVE Regie:Chantal Akerman
    20042534 27.01.2004 13:37 Uhr Seite 114 IFB 2004 DEMAIN ON DEMENAGE Panorama Special MORGEN ZIEHEN WIR UM TOMORROW WE MOVE Regie:Chantal Akerman Belgien/Frankreich 2003 Darsteller Charlotte Sylvie Testud Länge 112 Min. Catherine Aurore Clément Format 35 mm, 1:1.85 Popernick Jean-Piere Marielle Farbe Schwangere Frau Natacha Régnier Monsieur Delacre Lucas Belvaux Stabliste Madame Delacre Dominique Reymond Buch Chantal Akerman Michele Elsa Zylberstein Eric de Kuyper Makler Gilles Privat Kamera Sabine Lancelin Madame Dietrich Anne Coesens Schnitt Claire Atherton Monsieur Dietrich Christian Hecq Schnittassistenz Sophie Bonnard Madame Charpentier Laëtitia Reva Ton Pierre Mertens Ehemann der Mischung Thomas Gauder Schwangeren Olivier Ythier Ausstattung Christian Marti Monsieur Charpentier Georges Siatidis Kostüm Nathalie de Roscoat Madame Lavazza Valerie Bauchau Maske Sophie Benaïche Dame in der Agentur Catherine Aymerie Regieassistenz Olivier Bouffard Pierre Nicolas Majois Casting Richard Rousseau Gerda Diddens Produktionsltg. Antoine Beau Sylvie Testud Jacqueline Louis Aufnahmeleitung Antoine Moussault Marianne Lambert MORGEN ZIEHEN WIR UM Produzenten Paulo Branco Charlotte ist jung und ledig.Sie versucht, sich als freie Autorin durchs Leben Marilyn Watelet zu schlagen,indem sie Bücher auf Anfrage schreibt.Es sind erotische Roma- Redaktion Arlette Zylberberg, ne, die sie verfasst – wobei sie sich allerdings in ihrer Lebensführung nicht RTBF im geringsten von deren Inhalten infizieren lässt. Charlotte wohnt in einem Co-Produktion Gemini Films,Paris zweigeschossigen Apartment, in dem eine produktive Unordnung herrscht Produktion und in dem sie völlig abschalten kann. Paradise Films Doch eines Tages stirbt ihr Vater und das verändert ihr Leben total. Denn 29,rue de la Sablonnière kurz darauf steht mit Sack und Pack ihre Mutter vor der Tür.Catherine ist von B-1000 Bruxelles Beruf Klavierlehrerin.
    [Show full text]
  • It's Not Just an Image
    and geographical surroundings. The most obvious example of this approach may be found in News From Home (1976), in which shots of mostly empty New York streets are accompanied on the soundtrack by the director reading excerpts of letters from her mother back in Bel­ It’s Not Just gium. Whether in “fiction” films like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 10800 Bruxelles (1975) or Toute Une Nuit (1982) or diaristic films such as Je tu il elle (1974) or Hotel Monterey (1972), Akerman manages to consistently integrate different, yet complementary, ways of seeing into each film. The installation is divided into three sections. In the first, the spectator enters a an Image room in which the film D ’Est is projected continuously. In the second, twenty-four television monitors, divided into eight triptychs, fragment various sequences from the film. In the last room, a single monitor features a shot moving down a winter street, at night, with Akerman’s voice reading from a biblical text in Hebrew as well as selections from her own notes in En­ glish and French. The installation is, to use Akerman’s own term, a “translation” of many of the ele­ A Conversation with ments of the film into another context. In fact, one is struck by the filmmaker’s description of these elements—faces, streets, cars, food, and so on—as a kind of anthology, an attempt to describe a place in which she is a visitor. “I’d like to shoot everything.” But it was not that simple. Before any footage for DEst was shot, Akerman made a Chantal Akerman trip to Russia, where despite the obvious differences of language and culture, she felt “at home.” She attributed this to her personal history: Her parents had emigrated from Poland to Belgium, where she grew up.
    [Show full text]
  • Cinema Comparat/Ive Cinema
    CINEMA COMPARAT/IVE CINEMA VOLUME IV · No.8 · 2016 Editors: Gonzalo de Lucas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Albert Elduque (University of Reading). Associate Editors: Ana Aitana Fernández (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Núria Bou (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Xavier Pérez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Advisory Board: Dudley Andrew (Yale University, United States), Jordi Balló (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain), Raymond Bellour (Université Sorbonne-Paris III, France), Francisco Javier Benavente (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Nicole Brenez (Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, France), Maeve Connolly (Dun Laoghaire Institut of Art, Design and Technology, Irleland), Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Gino Frezza (Università de Salerno, Italy), Chris Fujiwara (Edinburgh International Film Festival, United Kingdom), Jane Gaines (Columbia University, United States), Haden Guest (Harvard University, United States), Tom Gunning (University of Chicago, United States), John MacKay (Yale University, United States), Adrian Martin (Monash University, Australia), Cezar Migliorin (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil), Alejandro Montiel (Universitat de València), Meaghan Morris (University of Sidney, Australia and Lignan University, Hong Kong), Raffaelle Pinto (Universitat de Barcelona), Ivan Pintor (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Àngel Quintana (Universitat de Girona, Spain), Joan Ramon Resina (Stanford University, United States), Eduardo A.Russo (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina), Glòria Salvadó (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Yuri
    [Show full text]
  • San Francisco Cinematheque Program Notes
    San Francisco Cinematheque Program Notes 1997 From the collection of the n z m o Prelinger v .Library t p San Francisco, California 2007 San Francisco Cinematheque 1997 Program Notes San Francisco Cinematheque 480 Potrero Avenue San Francisco, California 94110 Telephone: 415 558 8129 Facsimile: 415 558 0455 Email: [email protected] www.sfcinematheque.org San Francisco Cinematheque Director Steve Anker Associate Director Joel Shepard Associate Director/ Curator Irina Leimbacher Interim Managing Director Elise Hurwitz Program Note Book Producer Targol Mesbah Program Note Editors/ Coordinators Jeff Lambert Irina Leimbacher Steve Polta Smith Patrick Board of Directors Stefan Ferreira Oliver Marina McDougall Kerri Condron Sandra Peters Linda Gibson Julia Segrove-Jaurigui Elise Hurwitz Laura Takeshita Wendy Levy Program Co-Sponsers Castro Theatre San Francisco International Gay and Cine Accion Lesbian Film Festival National Asian American San Francisco International Film Telecommunications Association Festival (NAATA) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art New Langton Arts The Spiros Vyronis Center for the Pacific Film Archive Study of Hellenism Proyecto Contrasido por Vida Temenos, Inc. Roxie Theatre Verba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco Art Institute Guest Curators and Co-Curators Robert Beavers Eduardo Morell and Mark Wilson Bruce Cooper Bruce and Amanda Posner Kathy Geritz Charlotte Pryce Jerome Hiler Janelle Rodriguez Ed Jones Daniel Schott and Charles Lofton Wendy Levy and Jay Rosenblatt Jerry Tartaglia Aline Mare Timoleon Wilkins
    [Show full text]
  • “Farewell: an Homage to Chantal Akerman”Frieze
    FAREWELL Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975, 35mm film still A N HOMAGE TO CHANTAL A KERMAN 1950— 2015 Akerman_frieze176 V2.indd 112 09/12/2015 12:42 Tributes by The great flmmaker Chantal Akerman James Benning died in October 2015; she was 65. She made Manon de Boer her frst short flm, Saute ma ville (Blow Up Jem Cohen My Town, 1968), when she was just 18. Her frst Tacita Dean feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, Chris Dercon 1080 Bruxelles (1975), established her reputation Joanna Hogg & Adam Roberts as a radical, feminist flmmaker. Over the next Sharon Lockhart four decades, in her native Belgium and the US — Rachael Rakes as well as in China, eastern Europe, Israel and Mexico, among other places — Akerman made over 40 documentary and feature flms; she also created installation and video art. The infuence her work has exerted is inestimable. Following her death, the director Todd Haynes dedicated the screening of his latest movie, Carol (2015), to Akerman at the New York Film Festival, stating that ‘as someone thinking about female subjects and how they’re depicted’ her work had changed the ways in which he thought about, and imagined, film. Over the following pages, nine filmmakers, curators and artists refect on what Akerman’s work meant to them. Akerman_frieze176 V2.indd 113 09/12/2015 12:42 M ANON DE B OER JAMES B ENNING An artist based in Brussels, Belgium. A flmmaker living in Val Verde, California, USA. In the week following Akerman’s death, as Chantal Akerman.
    [Show full text]
  • Remake: Chantal Akerman's and John Smith's Plays on Reality
    EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org Remake: Chantal Akerman’s and John Smith’s plays on reality Clara Miranda Scherffig NECSUS 5 (1), Spring 2016: 19–39 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/remake-chantal-akerman-john- smiths-plays-reality/ Keywords: autoethnography, Chantal Akerman, hyperrealism, John Smith, materialist film, remake, structural film Introduction According to the Oxford Dictionary a remake is the action of making some- thing again or differently, as well as a film or a music piece that has been recorded again. The construction of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976) and John Smith’s The Man Phoning Mum (2011) can be traced back to the same practice. For the purpose of this discussion I consider the concept of the remake in terms of its elements of repetition and the fundamental presupposition of a viewership. Both authors deal with a re-recording of a previous experience: Smith’s can be properly regarded as a filmic event, while Akerman’s is rather a personal one. The remake’s act of repetition at the basis of both films is found at different stages of the filmmaking prac- tice (in the conception stage for Akerman and during development for Smith, as will be detailed later). When considered within a broader debate on intertextuality the analogy with the remake offers a useful framework to understand the relationship of both films with the topic of reality as well as their link with ‘the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a [film] culture’.[1] Finally, the idea of the remake is here relevant for what it presupposes in terms of audience engagement; in order to exist a remake needs a spectatorship to acknowledge it as such NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES according to its intertextual legacies.[2] In light of such a mutual condition both films trigger crucial reactions in the viewer for their very unfoldment.
    [Show full text]
  • Ageless-Akerman's Avatars Jenny Chamarette Accepted Version
    Ageless: Akerman’s avatars' Book or Report Section Accepted Version Chamarette, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0701-1514 (2019) Ageless: Akerman’s avatars'. In: Schmid, M. and Wilson, E. (eds.) Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. MHRA/Legenda, Oxford, pp. 54-65. ISBN 9781781886397 doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16km0vw.11 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/92937/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv16km0vw.11 Publisher: MHRA/Legenda All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online Ageless: Akerman’s Avatars Jenny Chamarette Chantal Akerman was only 18 when she made her first short film, Saute ma ville. The figure of the young woman, played by Akerman, radically and violently disrupts the domestic space of her apartment, transgressing all of the domestic meticulousness later portrayed in elongated detail in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles from 1975. Of all the films of Akerman that I have watched, this angry, young, singing woman returns to me over and over again. In this vision, there is so much farcical, explosive, rabid anger: a mercurial state of self-rebellion that burns under the surface of many of Akerman’s other images.
    [Show full text]
  • Maternal Trauma, Tears and Kisses in a Work by Chantal Akerman
    This is a repository copy of The long journey: maternal trauma, tears and kisses in a work by Chantal Akerman. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/81887/ Article: Pollock, GFS (2010) The long journey: maternal trauma, tears and kisses in a work by Chantal Akerman. Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1). 1 - 32. ISSN 1759-0434 Reuse Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ The Long Journey: Maternal Trauma, Tears and Kisses in a Work by Chantal Akerman Griselda Pollock I’ve talked so much about my mother in these films. Have I really worked so many years on her, around her, about her? (Or, as I have just read in a review, against her.
    [Show full text]
  • Passages Through Time and Space: in Memory of Chantal Akerman
    Chantal Akerman. Saute ma ville . 1968. Courtesy of the Chantal Akerman Estate and Marian Goodman Gallery. © The Chantal Akerman Estate. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00247 by guest on 29 September 2021 Passages through Time and Space: In Memory of Chantal Akerman GIULIANA BRUNO What viewer of Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has not been affected or even changed by the experience of watching this film? With the minimal simplicity of precisely framed “long takes,” Chantal Akerman’s break - through film, made in 1975, when she was only twenty-five, exposed the strictures of women’s time and space while creating a new cinematic language of observa - tion and a filmic longue durée . At age eighteen, Akerman had already made an explosive start with Saute ma ville (1968), directing herself, shut away and alone in her apartment, blowing up rituals of domesticity and, in the end, blowing herself up, together with her home. Personally full of life and energy but haunted by the dark specter of severe psychic pain, Akerman began her fictional journey with a defiant act of self-destruction that would come to be realized years later, when her life ended suddenly at age sixty-five. Akerman enriched our world through an extraordinarily ordinary journey com - posed of images, of places, perceptively explored and executed within a formally rig - orous aesthetic. Cities, lands, and homes are intimately portrayed in her frontal long takes, which capture the passing of everyday life—especially that of women—as they intensify our sense of time, memory, and space.
    [Show full text]
  • Cinematic Aided Design
    ‘In Cinematic Aided Design François Penz has invented a kind of meta architecture, an imaginary Cinecitta where the production of architecture and film reflect and refract each other’s gaze on the everyday. Penz casts Henri Lefebvre and Georges Perec to lead a purposely in-disciplined ensemble cast of film makers and architects to find our truths in the everyday space of our lives.’ – Tom Emerson, director, 6a architects, London & professor at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, Switzerland ‘In Cinematic Aided Design, François Penz argues persuasively that narrative cinema offers a vast library of demonstrations of architecture in use. Exploring the everyday spaces of fiction films, he identifies the essential value of moving images for architects and architecture.’ – Patrick Keiller ‘Francois Penz is interested in what happens to architecture once it is handed over to a client, and he sees film as an accidental archive that makes visible how we live, love, work and sleep in buildings. His fascinating book offers some sparkling insights into how architects can enrich the design process with mundane knowledge. More than that, it is the best account I have read of how cinema can help us to understand the everyday.’ – Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University, UK CINEMATIC AIDED DESIGN Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life.
    [Show full text]
  • French Film Festival UK? Panorama Horizons 23–29
    Astér & ix Obélix Exclus Pr ive emière 8 November – 2 December 2012 www.frenchfilmfestival.org.uk London I Edinburgh I Glasgow I Aberdeen I Dundee I Inverness I Bo'ness I Kirkcaldy I Bristol I Manchester I Warwick The Caledonian, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel, known locally as the “Caley”, is one of Edinburgh’s most significant landmarks... Located at the heart of the hotel, Peacock A l l e y is a stunning setting for The chic but informal Galvin Brasserie de Luxe brings guests and locals alike Parisian style to the heart of Edinburgh and the design to meet, relax and “to theme pays homage to the grand urban French bistros see and be seen” of Paris and Lyon, with its highly polished surfaces, ceramic tiles, archetypal lighting, and reflecting mirrors. Princes Street Edinburgh, EH1 2AB T: (44) 131 222 8888 www.thecaledonian.waldorfastoria.com INDEX Bienvenue Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia 4/5 and welcome Guests 6/7 On an Oscar-fuelled roll after the global success of The Artist earlier in the year and Preview 9/11 the more recent release of Untouchable (vying for a place as the most successful French film in history) le cinéma français is thriving as never before. What better Chantal Akerman Retro 17–20 news could anyone wish to herald the advent of the 20th anniversary edition of the French Film Festival UK? Panorama Horizons 23–29 Not only that but French cinemas sold more tickets last year than they had for Georges Méliès 30/31 almost half a century.
    [Show full text]
  • Bamcinématek Presents Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images, Apr 1—May 1
    BAMcinématek presents Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images, Apr 1—May 1 One of the most comprehensive retrospectives of Chantal Akerman’s work to be exhibited in the US Opens with the NY premiere run of the filmmaker’s final work, No Home Movie “A pioneer of modernist feminist cinema” —The Guardian “Arguably the most important European director of her generation” —Village Voice The Wall Street Journal is the title sponsor for BAMcinématek and BAM Rose Cinemas. Mar 1, 2016/Brooklyn, NY—From Friday, April 1, through Sunday, May 1, BAMcinématek presents Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images. Following the untimely passing of the great filmmaker last October, Chantal Akerman (1950—2015) will be honored via cinematic tribute around New York City. In a career that began in the late 1960s, Akerman quickly carved out a place in cinema for a female, avant garde filmmaker compelled to tell personal and intimate stories. Preferring long takes, and the drama of day to day life, her films resonated with progressive audiences. BAMcinématek is proud to honor the artist with a month-long tribute anchored by the New York premiere run of a film The New York Times called “candid and open-hearted,” Akerman’s crowning film, No Home Movie (2015—Apr 1—14). Chantal Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie is a portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor and familiar presence in many of Akerman’s films. The film fixates on Natalia’s world inside her Brussels apartment, with only glimpses of the hustle and bustle just outside her window.
    [Show full text]