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". 2 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.