Heh heh. This starts with this shot for a couple of minutes — like a cheeky comment on Akerman’s way of filming. Then a rumble that we understand is an elevator, and then Akerman appears. It’s fun.
“And a camera there? Oh my god.”
Yay. She said “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” the correct way! People never do that.
Heh, they’ve just told her she can’t smoke here. “Don’t worry.”
So this is basically just a filmed interview. The questions he asks are inane like “what is cinema” and “how do you do framing” — reading them up from a sheet of paper, obviously, one after another, and not engaging in any kind of conversation. I think if we’d get a closer shot, we’d see Akerman’s eyes rolling all the time, but she gives really good answers, about not being interested in naturalism, and ways of making a movie as tense as a Hitchcock movie without anything much happening.
It’s a fun conceit — doing an interview that tries to mimic an Akerman film, but they mostly manage to illustrate how difficult it is doing this sort of thing in the way Akerman does it and make it have tension.
And he’s really a kinda bad interviewer. Akerman soldiers through and says interesting stuff, and that saves it.
Chantal Akerman, From Here. Gustavo Beck & Leonardo Luiz Ferreira. 2010. ⚃
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