The Brooklyn Socialite Covers Akerman

And the long shot, and many faces, "in Russian without subtitles + diegetic music"

FROM THE EAST -- filmref treatment

The opening image of D'Est is of an unhurried, stationary shot of a green hazed, obscured highway at twilight, as the intermittent hum and audibly shifting Doppler frequency of a distant, revving engine from an occasional traversing vehicle - some errantly never materializing on screen - provide the sole, false anticipation of a visual break from the seeming interminable view of the desolate, anonymous urban landscape. A subsequent montage of quotidian shots establish the season as summer in Eastern Europe: a daylight interior shot of an open window overlooking a lush meadow, a Cyrillic café sign swaying in the wind, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt leisurely sitting on a public bench while smoking a cigarette (with a beer bottle politely set to the side of the frame at the foot of the bench for the duration of the shot), an elderly couple playing a board game by an open window, a group of revelers spending a lazy day on the beach, a crowd gathering at an amphitheater for an outdoor concert. Three instances of relative motion in the early sequences of the film reinforce the underlying dichotomy of these introductory images: an extended dolly shot of an elderly woman slowly (and laboredly) walking uphill as a sprightly child on a bicycle momentarily whisks past her; a car longitudinally speeds past a lone tree on a rural dirt road before a plodding, horse-drawn cart eventually reaches the same intersection and transects the vertical axis of symmetry demarcated by the tree on the horizon; a motorcycle crosses a rural intersection at full throttle as another horse-drawn cart lumbers through town and turns to travel in the opposite direction. In each episode, the apparent relativism of the subjects' coincidental juxtaposition serves as a visual metaphor for the transitory juncture (and intersection) between past and present (or more appropriately, future), traditional and modern ways in the rapidly transforming socioeconomic landscape of the region in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is this cultural climate of uncertainty, directionlessness, and supplanted expectation that is inferentially punctuated in Chantal Akerman's ingeniously metaphoric transitional shot of a billboard outpost sign in the unusual shape of an upended cross that serves, not only to indicate the bellweather changing of the natural seasons (and political climate), but also the film's thematic progression from a sense of stasis to physical transience and migration as a group of people are shown walking through dirt roads and empty streets carrying suitcases, visual imprint that are thematically presaged (and figuratively set into motion) in a preceding, double entendred, culminating shot of peasant women cadently harvesting potatoes (a root vegetable) into galvanized steel pails in an open field at the end of the farming season.

The film's intrinsic diurnal rhythms of isolated, interior spaces (people sitting at their dinner tables, applying cosmetics, watching television, or eating alone) and crowded, anonymous exterior spaces (most notably in the ghostly, nocturnal silhouette of people passing through the streets amidst the sound of a rock and roll tune from an overdriven radio that eventually dissipates - and is visually reduced - to the entrancing syncopation of alternately blinking, red traffic lights) similarly carries through to the blue-hued, winter images of perpetual displacement and migration as sinuous, hyperextended tracking shots of foot traffic and endlessly winding queues begin to dominate the latter half of the film. As in the earlier sequences, coincidence and synchronicity play an integral role in the resolution of the images as bystanders alternately engage, challenge, appear bemused by, or confront the camera, while others appear (perhaps deliberately) oblivious of its presence (in an understatedly insightful episode, an attractive, handsomely dressed woman feigns indifference at the approaching camera, but inevitably finds the temptation to look too irresistible and is captured betraying a momentary gaze directly into the eye of the apparatus). (Also note that the initial, transitional, nighttime image of a public queue as people stare out into an undefined space is similarly incorporated by Philippe Grandrieux in the post-apocalyptic prelude of La Vie nouvelle, a film that similarly hints of the collapse of a political bloc, in this case, the break up of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.) A delirious, sweeping panning shot through the atrium of a grand, central train station reinforces its figurative representation as an existential weigh station for lost souls as interminably waiting travelers come in from the cold and encounter even more queues within for the use of telephone booths, ticketing, train boarding, and departure. Concluding with a truncated traveling shot of yet another, seemingly ubiquitous public queue, the film reveals an intriguingly transitory and unresolved intrinsic reality: a haunted and indelible reflection of spiritual rootlessness and inertia in the wake of a crumbled ideology, human abandonment, and directionless revolution. http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/akerman.html

FROM THE EAST

Thursday, October 29
Doors at 7:30pm
$9

Chantal Akerman's FROM THE EAST at Monkey Town

FROM THE EAST traces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Chantal Akerman made shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc "before it was too late," reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction.
By filming "everything that touched me," Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of this subjective crossing. Without dialogue or commentary, FROM THE EAST is a cinematographic elegy.

Icarus Films releases FROM THE EAST on DVD October 6th. DVDs will be available for sale at the screening.

Monkey Town serves fantastic food and drink, by the way.

Kings of the Sky/ Utopia: Part Three/ Dogs of Straw at UNIONDOCS

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17

7:30pm at UNIONDOCS
Suggested Donation: $7

Disparate? pieces of contemporary China: the marginalized but fiercely independent Turkic-Muslim community of Ughyurs; a failed mega consumer center; and throngs of Taiwanese together in the streets before the 2008 elections.   

Kings Of The Sky
dir. Deborah Stratman
2004, video, 68 minutes
An experimental documentary about resistance, balance and fame, Kings of the Sky follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy. The film gracefully hovers between travelogue, ethnographic visual poetry, and an advocacy video for preserving a traditional art form.

"Kings of the Sky hovers between a traveler’s diary, a visual poem of ethnographic imagery, and an advocacy video for preserving a traditional art form. It’s as if Stratman ran off, joined the circus and learned a balancing act of her own."
- Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun Times

Utopia: Part 3, the World's Largest Shopping Mall
Directed by Sam Green
2009, video, 13minutes

More than twice the size of the Mall of America, the South China Mall in Dongguan, China, seems to have it all: gondolas, carnival rides, palm trees, Teletubbies. Conspicuously missing, however, are the bustling tenants and hordes of shoppers.  Promo pieces promised a "one-stop consumption center," but what mall developers now have is nearly seven million square feet of empty retail space.  Buoyed by a mellow yet optimistic techno-pop soundtrack, this short film takes us on a tour of this failed monument to consumerism—down its empty escalators and lonely corridors, pausing to speak with the store clerks, maintenance workers, and very occasional visitors. 

Dogs of Straw

Directed by Yin-Ju Chen & James T. Hong
2009, video, 11min

Dogs of Straw is both a portrayal of Taiwan's 2008 presidential election and a meditation on democracy, manipulation, and nationalism. In Taiwan's fledgling democracy, it is only during a presidential election when the "people exists" as a formless abstract multitude removed from concrete social structures.