X-Ray: Chantal Akerman

Je, tu, il, elle

A young girl leaves her town after a difficult love affair and takes refuge in a room in another town. Later she leaves this room, stops a truck on the side of the highway and spends most of the night with the truck driver, a man who could have been a friend. At the end of the road, she finds, probably for a short time, the girl she really loves.  Je, tu, il, elle tells the story of the last three moments of a young girl’s adolescence, painfully approaching adulthood, and who will have to give up something of herself to conform to it.

EN

“René Magritte’s painting Man With Newspaper (1927-1928) tells me something about the customary disquiet of Akerman’s world. In it, four panels, two on top and two on the bottom, show the same corner of a sitting room, with one difference: in the first panel a man is seated at the table by the window reading a newspaper, and in the other three panels, neither the man nor the newspaper is in evidence. A narrative is implied between the first and second panel – the disappearance of the man and newspaper – without being confirmed, and we’re left with the eerie fact of three identical ‘empty’ rooms. Similarly, many of Akerman’s settings suggest absence even more than presence.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum1

  • 1Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

FR

« Je, tu, il, elle est un film unique, pour moi : il reste extrêmement fort parce qu’il est fait avec sa chair, sa peau, sa vie. Quand on dit que quelqu’un a tout mis dans un film, on peut dire qu’elle a effectivement toujours tout mis dans son cinéma, sans artifice. »

Claire Denis1

 

« C’est dans Je, tu, il, elle que le désir d’Akerman et son regard se forment pour la première fois dans son cinéma. Ce n’est qu’à partir de ce moment inaugural que le désir devient visible dans les films suivants. Comme chez Hitchcock, le désir est énoncé par la désignation d’un regard ; cependant, à la différence d’Hitchcock, le regard se fixe non pas sur une, mais sur trois figures du désir : le moi, un homme et une femme. »

Catherine Fowler2

screening
KASKcinema, Ghent