It's alright, it's alright to be standing in a line, standing in a line.
"D'est" is one of those damnable non-literally translatable fragments. "Of is" is what it comes to. I should have paid more attention to my one semester of French. Interesting though is to think of "d'est" as a literal translation. "Of is" becomes strangely appropriate. As I got more and more into the film, I found I could not escape a mood of recent disaster in the long rolling takes across people waiting, waiting... what happened here? How can they stand to wait? The film draws a strong picture of cultural distance between ours (the "west") and theirs, even if it is a line that has faded. Only the children at play seemed familiar in action.
It is this "permanent sense of fear and disaster" and the unwillingness to question the film crew (which couldn't have been hidden with bright moving lights and a dolly) that reminds me of Akerman speaking about talking on the telephone after it was no longer dangerous: "what they have to say, they don’t feel like saying." Perhaps when they were young, they would have looked into the camera, they would have asked impertinent questions (like the occasionally surly sounding adult did), but now, after years of learning to watch what they say, they have become mute because survival favored those who spoke the least.
What you do hear is a background noise that absorbed the sounds of the auditorium we viewed it in, really, blending almost perfectly with the shuffling of however many very quiet people in our theater. When my change spilled on the floor (was it even mine? I still don't know-somehow it rolled up hill) or the snoring a few feet away, or the trying-to-be-so-quiet whispering, or the sudden floods of light happened, they too, for me anyway, were absorbed by the film space. This is definitely one of the few time the word "immersion" has been used before a film and become completely true for me. "D'est" absorbed a room full of people with its own.
Of course, it is a partial fiction. It was Akerman's choice to capture that mood, and it just so happened that she had an easy target, one that she understood from her own life. In that way, "everything that moves me" becomes a different meaning, or , more pointed at the the title of the film in my blog here "everything that is moving to me." Then, it becomes une question "d'est" et "d'était." It is a fiction of what she chose to show, a partial but moving truth that she created with her camera and her pacing to capture a certain feeling at a certain time. That feeling I think is unique, and I think that is the function of the opposition of the countryside to she slow moving cars and the quiet waiting crowds. This countryside is like any other, but this mood is unique to this place and this time.
So what's up with my title? Well, by the end of the film, my mind began to toy with me. I couldn't help it. The people in lines began to look familiar. I started naming them, like in a National geographic way. I am terrible with names, but there were so many instances by the end that when I thought I recognized one I would try to get a name that would stick. Finally, I just wanted them to be free of that feeling I had lost myself in, and Stevie Nicks, great sufferer that she is, offered her line to theirs. And I walked around in the cold as I often do and stood in line for food and thought about how they are now able to stand in the same line at Taco Bell now as well.
posted by Daniel Kelly at 2:25 PM
6 Comments:
Interesting what you have to say about this being a personal creation rather than a literal history. The best films probably share some ground between the two. And as far as your money rolling uphill -- that can only be explained with mystical, magical thinking.
And what is this blog owner approval thing? Do you think someone is going to blast you for your opinions?
And please feel free to delete this.
What gives with the video? It says it is no longer available. Do I have to wait in line or something?
maybe it is a personal account of hers, but somehow i still think that it wasn't the personal that moved her, it was the idea of exploring. what you said about her commentary on the use of speech and silence was something i think all people should learn from, not that we cannot speak, but that we should have a reason or talk when it is necessary not talking for it's own sake.
From "Chantal Akerman on D'est"
"My parents are from Poland. Since the thirties, they’ve been living in Belgium, where they feel very much at home.
For a long time – my whole childhood – I believed that their way of life, the way they ate, talked, and thought, was the way all Belgians lived.
It was only much later, as an adolescent, that I understood the differences: between them and other parents and even between me and the other young girls in my class."
and
"It used to be, for instance, that when you telephone Moscow, you had to go through an operator. She would make you wait an hour, two hours, sometimes three. After a long time, she would call back, and you would get a line.
There were things you did not say, or you said them, but in a different way. People communicated in code and sometimes didn’t make themselves understood at all."
I was saying that the quietness that she shows is related to the idea that history has destroyed a part of these people. That also, in some instances, there is a sense of rich internal dialog and joy, but those are hidden because it became difficult for adults to really understand what was treason and what wasn't.
Something for us all to learn? Maybe, but I don't think that was what she was trying to relate.
An interesting quote from the governator of California, Arnold Schwartzenegger (sp) that I came across while doing some speech research that speaks further to the mood and images presented by "D'Est":
"I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told, "Don't look the soldiers in the eye. Just look straight ahead." It was common belief that the Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him back to the Soviet Union as slave labor."
Interesting that basically this is the very action that is provoked by Akerman's rolling camera. Equally interesting is that it was only the soldiers in her film that felt comfortable making eyes at the camera.
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