For Claire Atherton, editing is building. It is, as she often states, much like life itself, where one thing leads to another. This week’s selection brings together three important films she collaborated on. In Chantal Akerman’s Sud, the images evoke the cruel history of the United States’ southern landscape, through heavy silences and a wind that gently shakes the trees. Akerman’s “extreme attention to the present” was key to dealing with the material so clearly rooted in the past. Together, Atherton remarks, they would listen to Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit” whilst editing the film, only to decide that the image of swaying branches was enough to set the spectator’s mind in motion. Éric Baudelaire worked four years on Un film dramatique, portraying a group of students from the Dora Maar middle school in Saint-Denis, a banlieue near Paris. The group’s own imagination takes centre stage as they use the camera to document their daily experiences and essentially take on their own way of growing up. The last film of the selection, No Home Movie, unfortunately also marked the end of a long collaboration with Akerman. Atherton has spoken abundantly about the editing and their working habits, about only working in the afternoons, for example, or about the fact that Akerman would like to cook while Atherton was busy editing. “It was a very, very happy moment”, she writes. “It could have been sad, but it was very happy. We were building something, we were laughing. Sometimes it was sad, but it was happy. That’s important to know.”
Sud (Chantal Akerman, 1999)
“It’s hard to explain what guides me when I put one image after another, when I cut a shot or place a sound. I don’t really have a method. What I can say is that, most of the time, I need to start at the beginning. Placing the first shot is like laying the foundation stone of a house; it’s nearly nothing, but at the same time it is momentous because it’s a birth. There’s nothing, and then there is [something].”
Un film dramatique (Éric Baudelaire, 2019)
“During editing, words can be dangerous. The film’s momentum can be killed by words that describe intentions, words that precipitate toward a conclusion or claim to see through its mysteries. But some words help – those that suggest and disrupt, that discover fault lines and send us on alternate routes.”
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
“My advice is to slow down, to respect the time of artistic creation. Embark on an edit with humility, almost with naivety. This process of deliberate groping around in the dark is what allows the film to go beyond its subject, to stay alive, to continue to move and breathe once it is finished. A living film isn’t locked into a specific meaning but is, on the contrary, free and open, growing and evolving in each viewer, endlessly interpreted and reinterpreted over time, always in motion.”
All excerpts are taken from Atherton’s text Living Matter. This text and its original counterpart L’Art du montage appeared earlier on Sabzian, with a Dutch translation.
Sud is available on Arte.
Un film dramatique is available MUBI.
No Home Movie is available on Amazon Prime.
Film Pages
