Film #4
e-flux and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen are pleased to present Chantal Akerman’s La Chambre, the fourth film in the joint series From My Window / From Your Window.
Chantal Akerman, La Chambre, 1972
Belgium, 11 minutes
Two 360° traveling shots describe the space of a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table—solitary, waiting objects. Glimpsed within these movements, one sole presence: a young women sitting on a bed. The third shot stops in mid-course, to reverse its movement and reframe the young woman who is eating an apple.
In Chantal Akerman’s early short film La Chambre, we see the furniture and clutter of one small apartment room become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back at us. This breakthrough formal experiment is the first film the director made in New York.
Chantal Akerman (1950–2015) is considered to be one of the most important directors of her generation. The author of almost 50 films, she is best known for her pioneering Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which earned her a central place in the world of avant-garde cinema. From 2013 to 2015, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts held a complete retrospective of her films. Her final release No Home Movie was premiered at the 2015 New York Film Festival.
About the series
Organized by e-flux and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, this joint screening series is inspired by a film by Józef Robakowski titled Z mojego okna (From My Window), made in Łodż, Poland over a 20-year period from 1978 to 1999, as part of a project that Robakowski called My Very Own Cinema: “what I work on when nothing is working out.”
The series will present a short film every week—all of them freely available online—which started with Robakowski’s film and has since featured Marguerite Duras’ Les mains négatives (Negative Hands), and John Smith’s Dirty Pictures. Alongside the films, we have asked artists and filmmakers to contribute a brief video-letter or video statement to this project: a small window into their current situation, and into how they are living through this moment. It is our hope that this collective record of the present will help us imagine a future that we want to live in. Responses have so far featured Emily Jacir’s 24 marzo (dalla mia finestra) (From My Window), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s A Letter to Marguerite, and Nicolas Wackerbarth’s Vier Wände (Four Walls), with new responses presented every week or two.
The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is the oldest and most prestigious festival of its kind, founded in 1954.
e-flux is an online publishing platform and think tank, founded in 1999.
For more information contact program@e-flux.com.
