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25th January: Cine Doré: 19.30. Screening of the film Toute une nuit, 1982. An introduction to the film season and a discussion in the presence of the artist. 26th January: From the 26th January to the 18th March, 2005, the Galería Elba Benítez will show Chantal Akerman's installation From the other side/Desde el otro lado. In 2002, Chantal Akerman made the film De l’autre côté about the border between USA and Mexico. That same year she exhibited the installation From the other side at the Documenta in Kassel. Parallel to the exhibition shown at the Galería Elba Benítez, the Filmoteca Española (Spanish National Film Theatre) has organized a film season, starting on 25th of January and running until the end of February, featuring the artist's most recent film work. In addition, this exhibition is one of a series of events related to Mexico's tenure as guest country at ARCO05, held in Madrid in February. “When I was a teenager I had a manual for learning cinema; a very simple one; the opening had a definition of a shot as a unity of space and time. The first definition caused me such a mixture of excitement and vertigo that the following paragraphs of the book were silenced. The mystery of that notion of shot, understood in this manner, by itself, fascinated me. And the cinema of Akerman and Garrel, and a good deal of American underground cinema, which was very important to me at that time too, was built on that principle, as were the films of the Lumière, though I did not realize it until much later. The revelation came with Chantal Akerman's first films”.(1) J. L. Guerín Chantal Akerman's film work is a key component of European experimental cinema of the 70s. Since the beginning of her career at the age of eighteen, Chantal Akerman has portrayed in numerous and wide-ranging genres - documentary, comedy, drama, musical - her most intimate concerns. Such is the case of her first film Saute ma ville, 1968, filmed in her kitchen, in which she plays herself, and it is also true of Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Comerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975. In both films Akerman focuses on the theme of womanhood. In other films, such as News from Home, 1976, Letters Home 1986 and Aujourd'hui dis- moi/ dis moi 1980, the family is the subject under her gaze and one that turns up repeatedly in her filmography. The relationship with the history of her family, with Judaism and exodus, has also left its mark on the artist's work: Histoires d’Amérique 1988, D’est 1993. Domestic affairs are another characteristic feature of her work in films such as La chambre 1972, Saute ma ville, 1968 L’homme à la valise, 1983 and Le deménagement, 1992. In terms of form, from the very onset Chantal Akerman's films reject classical conventions regarding space, time and place, preferring a narrative that is not stamped with a beginning or an end (Hotel Monterey, 1972 o D’est, 1993) and using a rhythm created by long, fixed shots which denies edited cinematic language, to arrive at a cadence resembling real time, reflecting the real rhythm of the flow of things, of events and people (News from home, Toute une nuit, 1982, Sud 1998/99). Along these lines, in the early nineties the artist began to use video art in her exploration of film form. The growth this type of artistic manifestation has experienced since the seventies granted her new areas of work. D’est au bord de la fiction 1995 is the artist's first installation. From this moment onwards, in her installations Akerman offers a reinterpretation of her films. By using this new media she is able to continue her exploration of form and to break, for example, the lineal structure of the image – D’est au bord de la fiction and From the other side- by means of the multiplication of image by the numerous monitors comprising the piece, or by setting up a new kind of physical relationship between her films and the spectator. Spectators entering the second room of D’Est au bord de la fiction, watch and are watched, face to face, by the actors of the film –the monitors are placed at eye-level- and From the other side, in a simile of the path trodden by Mexicans bold enough to try crossing the border, the spectator advances through images depicting the tragedy of this separating line. In other installations, such as Selfportrait: Autobiography in Progress, 1998, built using excerpts from her films, she juxtaposes and sets up new relationships between the fragments, thus furnishing new readings and revealing new meanings in her film work. From the other side has signified an important step in the evolution of Chantal Akerman's installations. Previous to it, Akerman made installations exclusively from materials culled from her finished films. The From the other side installation, however, goes much further because from the moment that shooting began on the film, Akerman was aware of the intervention she was going to carry out on the installation. The filmmaker installed a large screen at the border onto which the last pictures of the film are projected, the back or the front of the same picture/reality, depending on which side of the border you see it from. In Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide, 2004, Chantal Akerman continues to add new elements to her installations and on this occasion she has made a film specifically for it. In addition, this work, which consists of various film projections, also includes a large fabric sculpture, an element, the sculptural, that appears for the first time here in Chantal Akerman's work. The film De l’autre côté on which the From the other side installation is based is the last part of what has been transformed, together with D’Est and Sud (1999), into a documentary trilogy. In these films Chantal Akerman deals with real subjects such as the fall of the Communist bloc in Europe, racism in the south of the USA and the problem of the border between Mexico and USA. All of them portray contemporary situations, but have similarities with historical episodes in which borders or conflict between cultures and/or religions led to other tragedies. In her documentary trilogy Chantal Akerman attempts to present spectators with specific stories, and invariably avoids making value judgments. The From the other side installation, based on the film De l’autre côté, was conceived for the Documenta of Kassel in 2002 and is arranged as a walk-through structured into three parts. ”In the first room a monitor plays the last scene of the film in a loop: the camera placed inside a car, captures night pictures of an American highway, while the voice of Chantal Akerman reads a text about the disappearance of a Mexican woman who works in USA. [...]. In the central room, six triptychs formed by monitors multiply the image of the border thus prolonging the viewer's contemplation of it and questioning the senselessness and violence of a barrier that allows everything to pass through -wind, dust, animals...- everything, that is, except people. Lastly, in the third room pictures of a screen are projected onto another screen. "We placed a ten metre wide screen on the borderline in the Arizona desert between two mountains, one of them American and the other Mexican. We projected the last minutes of the film De l'autre côté onto this screen [...] and filmed it". It represents a great paradox: the image becomes part of the desert landscape which at the same time fades as day breaks. The disappearance of the image is populated by broken dreams. The dreams of men and women, living and dead, searching for a better life”(2). Of her large filmography (see attached document) Chantal Akerman currently has two films in distribution: Demain on demenage 2003 and La Captive 1999. Installations made by the artist since 1995 are: D’Est au bord de la fiction, 1995: 1995 Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux Arts de Bruxelles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia; The Jewish Museum, New York; Selfportrait – Autobiography in progress. 1998: 2004 Centre Pompidou. 1999 So far away so Close, Espace Meredian. Brussels. 1998 Voilà, Musée d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris et de Clermont Ferrand, Sean Gallery, New York. Frith Street Gallery, London; Woman Sitting after killing. 2001: Venice Biennial 2001; From the other side. 2002: 2004 Centre Pompidou; 2003 Galerie Marian Goodman (Installation Fragment. A reduced version of the From the other side installation), Documenta in Kassel 2002. Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide. 2004: 2004 Galerie Marian Goodman. Paris (1) Chantal Akerman. 2005. Jose Luis Guerín. Catalogue published by the Filmoteca Española and Galería Elba Benítez (2) Cinéma. Centre Pompidou. Avril-Mai-Juin 2004. François Bonenfant. (extract of the text published on the occasion of the Chantal Akerman exhibition and the film season about the artist's work) Pia Ogea
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