Synopsis
Furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back. This breakthrough formal experiment is Akerman's first film made in New York.
La Chambre
1972 Directed by Chantal Akerman
Cast
Genre
Popular reviews
More-
-
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…
-
-
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
-
![nathaxnne [hiatus]](https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/avatar/upload/1/9/5/2/4/3/shard/avtr-0-80-0-80-crop.jpg?k=6516bf4433)
Dear Heart-Shaped Chair: You are very cute but you look very uncomfortable to sit in but i was always happy to see you again. Thank You For Existing. <3
Dear Heart-Shaped Room: I know you are probably not actually heart-shaped but you felt heart-shaped to me. You felt full of love and of fire not actual fire but creative fire just like you are more than likely not actually heart-shaped. I am glad i got to know you and all of Chantal's stuff in you which is pretty organized given everything and trust me you should see my apartment but let's not <3
Dear Heart-Shaped Film: You glow and twirl like a gentle carnival ride for kids or old people…
-
Call me a lecherous, gutter-minded broad, but I found being in confinement with Chantal Akerman for 11 minutes to be particularly provocative. There are strong elements of voyeurism and captivity at play La Chambre; we are dropped into the scene and are at the mercy of the camera, each creeping surveillance a measured increase in suspense.
The table was adorned with breakfast accoutrement, the kettle on the stove, and Chantal was in bed—perhaps just waking, eyeing me intensely, wordlessly. I felt unable to escape the small efficiency; I surveyed the room again—the tiny hand sink brimming with yesterday’s dishes, then my eyes were involuntarily roving her body as she writhed luridly under her sheets. I wondered if the teakettle came…
-
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.
-
"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…
-
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,…
-
damn can’t believe chantal akerman was also confined to her bedroom for months after being abandoned by edward cullen :(
-
Though she had already filmed Blow Up My Town in her native Belgium, La Chambre represents the first of the three films Chantal Akerman would make during an eighteen-month stay in New York City's East Village beginning in 1971. More importantly it demonstrates her burgeoning interest in formalist filmmaking, an early signal of her cardinal passion for making the viewer acutely feel the passage of time.
La Chambre is an eleven-minute silent short consisting of a panoptic series of recurring quotidian tableaux arranged in Akerman's apartment (e.g. cluttered writing desk, stove-top with tea kettle, dining table laden with plates and fruit). The camera is placed in the center of the small efficiency unit and pans slowly, making a number of…
-
