Last year, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, by Chantal Akerman (Brussels, 1950-Paris, 2015), was chosen the best film in history according to the results of the canonical survey carried out by Sight magazine
This facet, the most unknown of his work, is now the subject of an intimate and beautiful exhibition at La Virreina Center de la Imatge, Face the Image, which brings together seven video installations of the fifteen he signed throughout his life. “We have a permanent need to understand, because the world is becoming very complicated, very hard, but I think we have to transform that demand and begin to allow ourselves to feel. From there the reflection will come,” says Claire Atherton, the curator of the Barcelona exhibition and a close collaborator of Akerman for three decades, both in the editing of his films and in the installations for museums.
“The human species is very mysterious, life is too, and art is the only place where we can respect that mystery,” continues Atherton, who invites us to wander through the works without trying to decode them. “You have to live them. His works are vital because they excite us and will take us to many places,” he says. In the center he has placed a video installation from 2004 with a strange title, Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (Walking next to your shoelaces in an empty refrigerator). The words written in a diary by the filmmaker's grandmother, who died in Auschwitz along with the rest of her family, from which only Akerman's mother was saved, are projected on a tulle screen. “I am a woman! Therefore I cannot...”, she writes in Polish at 15 years old. On the other side of the translucent screen, Akerman and his mother talk about the diary, to which both of them, after finding it in a drawer after the war, added their own words.
Akerman believed that movies that drag you down and make you forget even about yourself are stealing your time. It is not what he wanted for his work, full of life, from its extraordinary everyday life to its most painful aspects. We see her again, this time lying in bed, eating an apple lying in bed in La Chambre (2012), made like a good part of the works exhibited here from the 1972 film of the same title. “Chantal “He always sought to free himself from the linearity of the narrative and the facilities allowed him to do just that,” says La Virreina director Valentín Roma. She was convinced that you can never tell everything about a world, since there is no single truth, you can only share experiences and that idea is what led to fragmentation.
An example of this is Je tu il elle, l'installation, created in 2007 from a black and white film about the last moments of adolescence of a young woman who is about to enter adulthood. She filmed it when she was 24 years old, and she herself was the enigmatic and fluid protagonist who shares a sex scene with a woman but also has relations with a truck driver. The triangle reappears here but now the stories between them are encapsulated in different screens where the coordinates of space and time disappear.
Face the Image, which will be on display until April 14 and will have a series of screenings at the Zumzeig cinema, also includes two series of photographs based on two films (Là-bas and D'Est), and one of his video installations most celebrated of Documenta 11, Une voix dans le désert, a large screen that he placed in the Arizona desert between two mountains, one North American and the other Mexican, on which he projected the end of the documentary De l'autre côté, about the disappearance of migrants at the border, with different images depending on the side from which they were viewed, which faded with the arrival of daylight.
