Week 8/2024

This week’s selection takes us to the 1970s. Cinema Lumière in Antwerp is screening Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1978) on Tuesday. A formal meditation on distance and kinship, the familiarity of home rendered foreign through the displacement of the ways in which home is usually experienced through the senses. The quotidian of the mother survives in the prosody of the daughter’s reading. She’s not answering the letters, but the repeated recital of a mother’s life in Brussels and the montage of images and sounds of her own day to day in New York create an aesthetic space, a distance, a rhythm in which these displaced, muted affects can be shared.

Lina Wertmüller’s Fatto di sangue [Blood Feud] (1978) is being screened at CINEMATEK in Brussels on Thursday. Sicily, just as the fascists take power. Two men fall in love with the widow of a murdered sailor. The political turmoil in their country ultimately takes all three on a journey across the ocean to New York. Wertmüller’s take on popular cinema was heavily critiqued as she struggled to dissociate her successes in Hollywood with her identity as a woman.

On Friday, Beursschouwburg in Brussels is screening De quelques évènements sans signification (1979) by Mostafa Derkaoui. “Around the port’s streets and popular bars of Casablanca, a group of filmmakers conduct discussions with people about their expectations of, and aspirations for, the emerging Moroccan national cinema. When a disgruntled worker kills his superior accidentally, they begin to probe the context and motives of the killing. At the heart of [the film] is an interrogation on the role of cinema in society, documentary and the Real, and what constitutes an urgency for a national cinema that is being born.” (Afrika in Motion Film Festival)

News from Home
Chantal Akerman, 1977, 85’

News from Home consists of long takes of locations in New York City, set to Akerman’s voice-over as she reads letters her mother sent her between 1971 and 1973, when the director lived in the city.

EN

Dear child,

l received your letter and hope you will write often. l hope you won’t stay away too long and that you’ve found a job by now. If you’re doing well, we’re happy. Even though we do miss you. When will you be back? Everything is fine here, but Sylviane is home with the flu. My blood pressure is low. l’m on medication for it. Today is my birthday. l feel sad. lt’s quiet at the shop. Tonight we’re going out to dinner with friends. That’s all. Your birthday is coming up. l wish you all the best. Write to me soon about your work, about New York, about everything. Lots of love from the three of us.

Your loving mother

 

“Tot ik News from Home zag en Les rendez-vous d’Anna, had ik altijd het gevoelen dat een camera een sadistisch instrument is. Gefotografeerd worden betekent: gereduceerd worden tot een weerloos object. Mijn lichaam wordt op verkleinde schaal gestold, de waarneming ervan herleid tot het visuele, en dan nog vanuit één enkel perspectief. Ben ik gefotografeerd, dan kan ik gezien worden zonder zelf te zien. Meer nog dan een wassen pop, uitgevallen haren of nagelknipsels leent een foto mijn lichaam tot een groot aantal van kwaadaardige gebruiken. Niet het feit dat Lewis Carroll jonge meisjes fotografeerde geeft mij te denken, wel het feit dat hij tot elke prijs vermeed zelf gefotografeerd te worden. In de film wordt het object vaak vergroot, en het geeft de illusie dat het zich vrij in de ruimte kan bewegen. In feite wordt het object nog sterker gereduceerd door die illusie. Het gefilmde object is in een kooi van licht gevangen, vanuit een soort van mirador houden wij het object binnen de lichtkegel van onze projector. Waardoor is het dat de films van Chantal Akerman mij een niet-sadistisch gebruik van de camera demonstreren?”

Daniël Robberechts1

screening
Cinema Lumière, Antwerp
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova. Si sospettano moventi politici
Blood Feud
Lina Wertmüller, 1978, 100’

Sicily, 1922, just as the fascists come to power, Angelo Paternò was murdered by Vito Acicatena and everyone in the village knows it: however, no one has the courage to testify at the trial. Months later, a socialist lawyer, wants to convince the widow Titina to ask for the trial to be reopened. Two men fall in love with the widow. The changes in their country's politics ultimately take all three on a journey across the ocean to New York City.

EN

“My greatest desire is to make popular cinema. I continue to do all that I can to avoid addressing an elite, intellectual or otherwise. For example, my first film won fourteen international awards, but it followed the conventional road of the cinema today; it was for the intellectuals. Considering the problem, I changed my politics; I changed my approach, searching for a popular cinema while trying not to reject anything which might enable me to communicate with people. I proceeded with a great faith in the power of laughter and tears, without fearing to be too obvious or to appear banal, always trying to communicate and entertain and hoping, in the end, that people would leave my films with problems to think over and analyze.”

Lina Wertmüller1

 


Gideon Bachmann: Why did you say you wouldn’t want to be successful because of being a woman?

Lina Wertmüller: I have a reserved relationship to feminism. There are many things they say that I don’t agree with. I understand the need for a breakaway, and in our society, patriarchal for so many millennia, the breakaway must be polemic and aggressive. The need for scandal can lead to all those aberrations. But I simply do not believe that the problem of women is the clitoris instead of the other thing. The problem is on another level. The human being is a human being, and I couldn't care less for the sex they happen to be. The humanity is the only sure thing. There are so many social needs that must precede the sexual ones. What does count is that there is a form of social organization that precludes equality between men and women. This problem center is the family. As long as we continue being organized in family units there is always one – the woman – who pays the double price. This whole business of love and sons, the obligations, and feelings that these provoke, are blackmail weapons. All this is so firmly rooted in us, that it will not be an easy battle to eradicate any part of it. I firmly believe that the family must go.

Lina Wertmüller in conversation with Gideon Bachmann2

 

“Wertmuller’s powerful 1970s films combined the intense energy and physicality of the commedia dell'arte tradition with the high emotionalism of her theatrical training, and applied them to the post-1968 political consciousness. Her achievement was not met without controversy, however – critical discomfort ran high, especially in feminist circles. Wertmuller’s resolve to communicate her political messages to mass audiences through hyperbolic and grotesque comic techniques raised serious questions about whether or not the regional, gender and class stereotypes which sustain her cinema do not reinforce the public’s most regressive prejudices. If such polemics are an index of success, then Wertmuller’s 1970s production fully achieved its goals.”

Ginette Vincendeau3

 

“Dealing with Hollywood studios is like being courted by a great prince. At first they’re lovely, murmuring ‘Oh, my sweet girl, how I adore you and want you’ … But you can see in the brightness of their eyes that they know they are the great prince and in the end they are going to break your ass.”

Lina Wertmüller4

  • 1Quoted in Dan Georgakas & Lenny Rubenstein, The Cineaste Interviews. On the Art and Politics of the Cinema (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983), 131.
  • 2Gideon Bachmann & Lina Wertmuller, “‘Look, Gideon—': Gideon Bachmann Talks with Lina Wertmuller”, Film Quarterly 30, no. 3 (Spring, 1977): 2-11.
  • 3Ginette Vincendeau, Encyclopedia of European Cinema (Los Angeles: Cassell, 1995), 452.
  • 4Quoted in Rebecca J. Sheehan, “One woman’s failure affects every woman’s chances: stereotyping impossible women directors in 1970s Hollywood”, Women’s History Review 30, no. 3, 483-505.
screening
CINEMATEK, Brussels
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
De quelques événements sans signification
Mostafa Derkaoui, 1974, 76’

A team of filmmakers in search of a theme to deal with questions young Casablancans about their expectations and their relationship to Moroccan cinema.

EN

“Around the port’s streets and popular bars of Casablanca, a group of filmmakers conduct discussions with people about their expectations of, and aspirations for, the emerging Moroccan national cinema. When a disgruntled worker kills his superior accidentally, their inquest shifts focus, and they begin to probe the context and motives of the killing. At the heart of De quelques événements sans signification is an interrogation on the role of cinema (and art) in society, documentary and the Real, and what constitutes an urgency for a national cinema that is being born. The film was first screened in Paris in 1975 but was immediately taxed with censorship and forbidden from exhibition and export. It was forgotten until a negative print was found in the archives of the Filmoteca de Catalunya in 2016 and digitised and restored there.”

Africa in Motion Film Festival1

 

“We should understand that De Quelques Événements Sans Signification was created in a complicated era. The magazine Souffles, that was published by a small group of self-professed ‘linguistic guerillas’ had just been banned and its founder jailed along with other supporters of a Marxist-Leninist revolution. Two failed attempts at military takeovers in 1971 and 1972 had exacerbated the political situation and the following repression isolated Morocco under King Hassan II. This helps to explain why the film was banned.

But the artistic dilemma still exists in many ways. In the film, we witness how Derkaoui and his comrades discuss what to do when they realize that they have filmed a suspected killer. Should they show it?”

Hans Henrik Fafner2

FR

« Casablanca, 1973 : un réalisateur prépare un tournage, mais désireux de prendre en charge le cinéma de son pays, parcourt les rues de la ville, interrogent les passants sur ce que pourrait et devrait être le cinéma marocain. Les réponses fusent, contradictoires, à l’image des personnes interrogées. Les membres de l’équipe de tournage discutent : ils s’efforcent de construire la théorie d’un cinéma national indépendant, entre expérimentation formelle et représentation sociale, exemples cosmopolites et rejet de l’écrasant regard français. Mais au cours de leurs repérages surgit un jeune homme qui les fascine, et dont le destin se nouera alors même qu’ils regardent ailleurs. Soulignant les apories du cinéma national aussi bien que la violence qu’engendre la misère sociale, De quelques événements sans signification, après une unique projection parisienne en 1974, fut immédiatement censuré et longtemps cru disparu. Derkaoui y construit une esthétique de la focale longue, habituellement propre au documentaire, pour brouiller les repères entre les niveaux de réalité de son film ; la bande-son, avec son free-jazz virevoltant en contrepoint aux rares images de violence du film, achève de confondre toute lecture univoque. Car De quelques événements sans signification n’est rien moins qu’une critique des ambitions du cinéma par les armes mêmes du cinéma, un film qui n’a de cesse de relancer la question qu’il pose : que peut véritablement la caméra ? »

FID Marseille1

 

screening
Beursschouwburg, Brussels
Followed by a conversation between Mustapha Bandini and Léa Morin.
MORE INFO→ venues and hours
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