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Icarus Bows Chantal Akerman’s Travelogue-Style ‘From the East’

14 Sep, 2009 By: Billy Gil

Street Date: 10/6
Studio: Icarus Films
Price/Format: DVD $29.98
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Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (From the Other Side) takes a journey through Eastern Europe, from East Germany across Poland and the Baltics to Moscow, in From the East (D’Est). From the end of summer through winter, Akerman films her travels, made shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the resulting film has no dialogue and no commentary; rather, it makes her travels into a soundscape consisting of the noise and voices around her. The 1993 film was salivated over by every hoity-toity this side of the Atlantic (New York Times, Chicago Reader, Village Voice etc.). I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of another film like it; the closest thing that comes to mind is something like Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I or a human version of Winged Migration. The DVD includes a booklet with an essay by Akerman.

 

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