The Cinematheque

“Monumental … Time slows and expands in Akerman’s mesmerizing travelogue … The people and places of From the East may be unnamed, but they are not anonymous: Their images are indelible.”

Melissa Anderson, Artforum

Chantal Akerman’s now-entrenched position at the intersection of cinema and art installation first emerged out of the fecundity of D’est, perhaps her most formally significant post-Jeanne Dielman work. A dispatch from the rubble of a just-collapsed Soviet empire, Akerman’s wordless documentary chronicles the journey of the artist—filming ​“everything that moves me”—from East Germany to Moscow, late summer to dead of winter. Whether stationary or on tracks (both involving meticulous orchestration), Akerman’s 16mm camera catalogues a mosaic of Eastern Europeans anesthetized to the transformation, already deadened by hopelessness or resigned to worse fates. The structuralist strategies of the film—durational takes, formal patterns—enabled Akerman to detonate the film into 25 distinct, looping channels for its multiroom exhibition in 1995, a reassembly method similarly taken for her subsequent film-to-video installations.

No dialogue

One of the Ten Best of the Decade
J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“[A] haunting masterpiece … Everyone goes to movies in search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman’s sorrowful, intractable film are the shots themselves—the everyday recorded by a powerful artist with an acute eye and ear.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader