The opening image of D’Est is of an unhurried, stationary shot of a green hazed, obscured highway at twilight, as the intermittent hum and audibly shifting Doppler frequency of a distant, revving engine from an occasional traversing vehicle – some errantly never materializing on screen – provide the sole, false anticipation of a visual break […]
The decontextualized sound of a feminine voice repeatedly delivers the ambiguous, singular declaration, “At your age, grief soon wears off” against the dissociative sight of an extended duration black screen, as the unseen actress subtly modulates her articulated tone from somber resignation to pragmatic trivialization, to optimistic encouragement, and finally, to compassionate reassurance at the […]
Toute une nuit presents a series of brief, disconnected, near silent vignettes that capture the inherently intimate episodes that transpire throughout the course of human relationships. A woman (Aurore Clement) deliberates on placing a telephone call to an absent lover before deciding to hail a taxicab to his apartment. A man and a woman sitting […]
Les Rendezvous d’Anna opens to a shot of an empty train station in an unspecified German city. In near silence, the passengers deboard a parked train and exit through the platform staircase, as a lone woman makes her way towards an empty telephone booth and stops to make a call. Moments later, she emerges from […]
News from Home presents a series of abstract and fragmentary images of everyday urban life in 1970s New York City, accompanied by the distinctive narration of filmmaker Chantal Akerman as she dispassionately reads through her mother’s alternately affectionate, melancholic, and sincere, but maternally manipulative letters from her native Belgium. The film opens to the surreal […]
In the unnerving silence of a sparsely furnished kitchen in Brussels, a poised, anonymous middle-aged woman (Delphine Seyrig) – identified only through the title of the film as Jeanne Dielman – completes her food preparation, places the contents into a large cooking pot on the stove, reaches for a match, lights the burner, and with […]