lofi chantal akerman radio chill beats to study/relax to

go chantal akerman that's chantal akerman y'all

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

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.

J'ai envie de dire que c'est un film sur l'acteur: la caméra tourne en rond, dans un mouvement qui semble d'abord peu intéressé à distinguer la figure humaine sur un lit du reste de la chambre, mais après 2-3 tours la caméra commence un va-et-viens qui repasse encore et encore sur cette femme (Chantal), qui semble devenir l'intérêt premier de la caméra, plus que son environnement. Pas de cinéma sans acteur. Mais bien sûr, c'est surtout un film qui pense la relation de cette femme à sa chambre, et qui utilise le lieu pour traduire un état émotionnel, la répétition (ici d'un mouvement de caméra) dans un lieu clos étant assez central à ce que je connais du cinéma d'Akerman.

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.

Another interesting short with a cool idea, a full-length Akerman film is a watchlist priority!!

J'ai jamais vu quelqu'un manger une pomme de manière aussi peu convaincante.

wish it was like thousand hundred mins long. im willing to wait two minutes to watch eight seconds of akerman in bed eating apples and shit six hundred times

LA CHAMBRE's 1972, Belgian. A Criterion short by Akerman. Yes? Pretty good. Like Robbe-Grillet's L'IMMORTELLE in one room for one little strange bit: snappy! I enjoyed myself. Anyone else have a boner, one of these 50-years-later boners?

A Room of One’s Own...

Esto le paso a mi amigo John Brennan

akerman’s preoccupation with the home as a motif in her work has me 🥺💕💭

Each rotation more familiar, the small space becomes home as experience within it accumulates. A space changes without physical changes, memories are grown, places become ours.

yes

Dostoyevsky would’ve loved her.

This is film art in its truest sense. Emphasis on the Art. Don’t get it, not for me.

Like Hotel Monterey, this is a silent study of residential space. Here it's just a cluttered apartment, with Akerman herself reclining in bed. The scene is captured by a fixed camera whose lens rotates in sweeps ... a full 3 1/2 counterclockwise rotations to start, before alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise arcs that frame Akerman in her bed.

As with Hotel Monterey, there is a focus on surface and texture and color. I did like the detail in all the clutter, the viewer either noticing new features (the variety of chairs, a spinning wheel) or stubbornly fixating on other features (a poorly repainted door frame) with each pass of the camera. Akerman is captured in a different attitude each time the camera passes her: lounging, then tousling under the covers, then fondling an apple, then eating it. There is something very odalisque-like in Akerman's posture and expression, in her frank address of the camera / audience.