PARIS — The densely layered retrospective Chantal Akerman: Travelling on the Jeu de Paume spans the profession of the influential Belgian filmmaker from her early beginnings in Brussels — together with Tremendous 8 footage she submitted for admission to the artwork institute INSAS in 1967 and her first brief, the 1968 manic tragicomedy Saute ma ville (“Blow Up My Town”) — to her genre-defying documentary A Voice within the Desert (2002), which traces the plight of Mexican immigrants on the US-Mexico border.
As a filmmaker, author, and visible artist, the late Akerman nimbly navigated kinds and genres, along with her work relentlessly insisting on the porosity between fiction and documentary, inside and exterior, tragedy and comedy, the non-public and the political. She was additionally one of many first filmmakers to make the leap from cinema to museum areas, a transfer that — in keeping with her longtime editor Claire Atherton — allowed her higher freedom and the pleasure of demanding extra energetic participation from the viewer. It’s exactly Akerman’s video set up work that’s the focus of this exhibition.
Set up view of D’Est au bord de la fiction (1995) (© Jeu de Paume; picture by Antoine Quittet)
“Woman Sitting after Killing” (2001) is the primary work to greet the spectator: A seven-monitor set up enjoying the ultimate shot of Akerman’s cinematic landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was not too long ago voted the “greatest film of all time” by the British Movie Institute’s influential Sight and Sound Ballot. However the seven-minute loop of the static shot of the titular character Jeanne sitting at a desk in the dead of night, staring blankly forward, feels muted — now remoted from the previous homicide scene, it falters in conveying a way of heightened pressure, leaving one craving the unconventional, mesmerizing, 210-minute masterpiece. (Thankfully, the movie is included within the screening program that accompanies the present.)
The exhibition privileges Akerman’s first set up “D’Est, au bord de la fiction” (“From the East: Bordering on Fiction”) (1995) particularly. Occupying the central room of the higher galleries, the 25-channel adaptation of her 16mm movie D’Est (1992) is a formidable visible meditation on a crumbling Jap Europe shortly after the autumn of the Berlin Wall. All through the maze of displays, sluggish monitoring pictures glide by way of crowds — principally ready in traces and suffused with winter mild — within the streets of East Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
Philippe Chancel, “Chantal” (© Adagp, Paris 2024)
Arrange as a room of archives, the final gallery is anchored by a big desk displaying a myriad of paperwork, many proven for the primary time to the general public — annotated screenplays, administrative correspondence, and press clippings — alongside excerpts from TV interviews for the guests to peruse. On the partitions, manufacturing stills, location scouting images, maps, and photographs from Akerman’s defining time in New York within the early ’70s, in addition to documentation of her travels to the Southern United States and Mexico, are proven alongside projections of movies Akerman produced in the course of the ’80s. The rewarding show is value spending time with, because it creates an affective travelogue that charts Akerman’s trajectory. Along with shedding mild on her artistic course of, it maps her wealthy community of longstanding pals and collaborators such because the cellist and her longtime companion and musical collaborator Sonia Wieder-Atherton; her cameraman Luc Benhamou; and Jan Decorte, who performs Sylvain in Jeanne Dielman, amongst different movies. Witnessing the animated engagement of the 20-something viewers that crowded the galleries throughout my go to, it was obvious that the exhibition is contributing to a renewed curiosity within the groundbreaking filmmaker’s oeuvre amongst new generations.
Chantal Akerman: Travelling continues on the Jeu de Paume (1 Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France) by way of January 19, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Laurence Rassel and Marta Ponsa.
