Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman - Suivi de Le Déménagement - L'Athénée Théâtre, Paris

Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman followed by Le déménagement Texts Chantal Akerman Performer Stanislas Merhar External eye Maïa Godin Hadji-Lazaro Music Sonia Wieder-Atherton 8:30 PM Salle Christian-Bér

Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman

followed by

Le déménagement

Texts Chantal Akerman

Performer Stanislas Merhar

External eye Maïa Godin Hadji-Lazaro

Music Sonia Wieder-Atherton

8:30 PM

Salle Christian-Bérard

In a minimalist setting, actor Stanislas Merhar performs two texts by Chantal Akerman. A major figure in modern cinema, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) made everyday life, time, and intimacy the subject matter of her work. Her cinema renews our perception of reality through its attention to the ordinary, to silences, and to sensations. While she devoted little time to theatre, her later years were punctuated by public readings, which she sometimes gave on stage. It is there that Stanislas Merhar reconnects with her and extends their dialogue. After having acted under her direction in La Captive (2000) and La Folie Almayer (2011), he now brings her texts to life and makes her singular voice heard.

Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman

In 1996, André S. Labarthe and Janine Bazin commissioned Chantal Akerman to make a film for their documentary series “Cinéma, de notre temps”. She conceived a self-portrait composed of extracts from her old films and, at their request, she introduced some images and words of herself. From this constraint was born a text in which the director confesses to perceiving “with discouragement the artifice of sincerity”. Little by little, her discourse shifts from “I” to “she”; and behind her, her Jewish and Polish family, her maternal grandmother, a painter, this past, this “nothingness”, which obsesses her work.

Le Déménagement

In Le Déménagement (1992), a film she directed with Sami Frey for Arte, Chantal Akerman presents the monologue of a man alone in his apartment. Amidst furniture and boxes, he recalls “the summer of '82”, when three students had moved onto the same landing as him. In his thoughts, he rehashes those sixteen days of happiness shared with them. They left one by one, he remained… Reservatio