Synopsis
Chantal Akerman's one-take short spins around a room.
La chambre
1972 Directed by Chantal Akerman
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Movement through confined space, revolving with the clock, showing slight progression, showing very little movement, being movement while showing almost none, dominating expectation with the camera and not the content, allowing slow, steady observation of every detail, detailing the objects repeatedly--stove, bed, chair, apple, body, etc. Change signifies a shift in focus, slowly penduluming back to the body, the woman, the person, in bed, returning to something more traditional, yet never quite traditional.
52 project: 46/52
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An experiment in space and what we focus on in those spaces. A camera is placed in the middle of a small room and in a 360 degree motion shows off this entire living space. Nothing changes except for a girl in a bed. I found myself waiting each time for the camera to come back around to the girl because she was the only thing in motion. Why do I prioritize motion in space over those objects that do not move? I'm not sure, but it's a question I find myself asking. As the camera moved continually through this chamber I found myself wondering how she'd change each time around and not paying nearly enough attention to those items…
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It is easy to talk about the death of artists in a theoretical manner, as if they are only tangentially affecting, as if we are not deliberately or meaningfully shaken by the loss of creators that we never had the chance to meet, or talk to, or open a two-way dialogue with. The attitude of so many toward art is dismissive but there are and always have been those of us who connect on a fundamental level not just to the pieces themselves (not just to our own response to the pieces) but to the actual creator behind the piece. If we are going to talk about the deaths of numerous filmmakers in 2016, we must first acknowledge Jacques Rivette,…
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"Unlike her first film, Saute Ma Ville, there isn't a narrative in La Chambre, and Akerman has begun to twist away from conventional cinematic goals into something both entirely her own, and daringly experimental. In La Chambre, Akerman asks many questions and none of them have explicit answers, but the function of the movie is to get the viewer to think of how they view cinema as a narrative art-form and how we latch onto any tidbits of information that may move a story forward. Akerman has consistently been concerned with stillness in her movies, and how that plays into realism (look at the opening third of Je, Tu, Ill, Elle for example), and La Chambre's only progression is how…
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Very simple—a camera moves around a room three times; nothing changes except the girl lying in bed. And then the camera starts turning back and focusing on the girl, swaying like a pendulum and then eventually deciding the carry on its moving way. Surprisingly dense for 12 minutes, or at least the type of structuralist short that suddenly had me asking a number of questions: what is space in a cinematic realm when we can’t see it? Why are we attracted to movement in cinema? What is the relationship between movement of captured objects and movement of the camera itself? Is the pleasure of movement a suggestion that spectatorship demands narrativization, even at the molecular level? And why is movement always placed most importantly on the human instead of other moving objects? Needless to say, a fascinating work that once again redeems the fact that I’m not hopeless when it comes to avant-garde cinema.
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Someone should write a story that takes place during this movie about Chantal Akerman fighting off an assassin or some other threat while she's off screen, just barely in time to appear to be relaxing comfortably when the camera sweeps by her.
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Experimental short from Akerman that neatly encapsulates much of her work with everything happening within a room and a pattern of routines and much that is implied or unexplained.
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an early, rough, but very characteristic look at what would become Akerman's trademark style, replete with isolation and anxiety in a gender normative space.
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Structural filmmaking that expands on, rather than excludes, the visual properties of the medium. It consists of circular panoramic shots in which the camera slowly pans an entire residential space with slightly differing results.
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Something about a 360 degree-plus unbroken shot as a really hot (long) take, but never mind.
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You think you know where this is going, and then suddenly, without any warning, it zags when it was supposed to keep zigging. Well played, Chantal.
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Your omnipresence in that room will haunt me forever, you are now more present than anything in La chambre, Chantal..
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