Retro: Chantal Akerman

D'EST

Chantal Akerman
FRA, B 1993
115 min
V'11

The opening image of <![CDATA[<i>]]>D’Est<![CDATA[</i>]]> 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 from the seeming interminable view of the desolate, anonymous urban landscape. A subsequent montage of quotidian shots establish the season as summer in Eastern Europe: a daylight interior shot of an open window overlooking a lush meadow, a Cyrillic café sign swaying in the wind, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt leisurely sitting on a public bench while smoking a cigarette (with a beer bottle politely set to the side of the frame at the foot of the bench for the duration of the shot), an elderly couple playing a board game by an open window, a group of revelers spending a lazy day on the beach, a crowd gathering at an amphitheater for an outdoor concert. Three instances of relative motion in the early sequences of the film reinforce the underlying dichotomy of these introductory images: an extended dolly shot of an elderly woman slowly (and laboredly) walking uphill as a sprightly child on a bicycle momentarily whisks past her; a car longitudinally speeds past a lone tree on a rural dirt road before a plodding, horse-drawn cart eventually reaches the same intersection and transects the vertical axis of symmetry demarcated by the tree on the horizon; a motorcycle crosses a rural intersection at full throttle as another horse-drawn cart lumbers through town and turns to travel in the opposite direction. In each episode, the apparent relativism of the subjects' coincidental juxtaposition serves as a visual metaphor for the transitory juncture (and intersection) between past and present (or more appropriately, future), traditional and modern ways in the rapidly transforming socioeconomic landscape of the region in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is this cultural climate of uncertainty, directionlessness, and supplanted expectation that is inferentially punctuated in Chantal Akerman's ingeniously metaphoric transitional shot of a billboard outpost sign in the unusual shape of an upended cross that serves, not only to indicate the bellweather changing of the natural seasons (and political climate), but also the film's thematic progression from a sense of stasis to physical transience and migration as a group of people are shown walking through dirt roads and empty streets carrying suitcases, visual imprint that are thematically presaged (and figuratively set into motion) in a preceding, double entendred, culminating shot of peasant women cadently harvesting potatoes (a root vegetable) into galvanized steel pails in an open field at the end of the farming season.

Credits
Lieurac Production, Paradise Films, La Radio Télévision Portugaise Co-Produktion Centre de l’audiovisuel à Bruxelles (CBA), RTBF (Carré Noir), Communauté française de Belgique et la Loterie nationale, La Sept/arte, Fonds Eurimages du Conseil de l’Europe
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