Synopsis
It’s all over!
A young girl shuts herself away in her apartment and goes about her business in a strange way, as she wastes the night in the kitchen – humming all along.
A young girl shuts herself away in her apartment and goes about her business in a strange way, as she wastes the night in the kitchen – humming all along.
我的城市, 내 마을을 날려 버려, Wylatuj w powietrze miasto moje, 街をぶっ飛ばせ, Exploda Minha Cidade
In 1965 Chantal Akerman saw Pierrot Le Fou and decided that night she was going to be a filmmaker so it comes as no real surprise that her first short feels very inspired by Godard's work in the sixties. It's a little frantic in a way and Akerman almost personifies a Karina-esque character toiling away in her kitchen for the night. Where it gets a little weird and distant from those early Godard inspirations is where it takes up some of the same themes that are visible in second wave feminist filmmaking in this time period. It almost recalls Daisies brash feminism without the visual circus of Chytilova's picture. She would toil away in her kitchen, rebelling more and more…
me to myself as i go about the menial tasks that make up my day-to-day life: sick chantal akerman reference
CW: feminism, suicide, mental health
It's sad knowing that there are still people who would argue against this film's sentiment. Second wave defiance that eats a poor kitty along with it, a disorderly breakdown of urban European domesticity, this film gradually but not slowly, loudly but not violently peels away normality, each new chore shedding yet more reason until she is taping up the doors, no longer bearing any resemblance to household chores. This breakdown is less a depiction of mental distress and more a gob of spit in the eye of expectation, ending in darkness. My main objection is the use of the Plathian exit; it feels like a cheap shock. At its time, perhaps an opening cinematic salvo…
Imagine being this cool at 18: watching Pierrot le Fou and then making your own death spiral home movie about the insanity of domesticity.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
There is a fact of utmost importance that must be addressed before stating anything: Akerman, featuring herself in her first short film as she would in many subsequent features, made this statement at the age of 18. Akerman died at the age of 65, reportedly comitting suicide. This is one of the frightening cases where the protagonist and director of a debut film, short or feature-length, announces the future death of the auteur, just like Yukio Mishima's Patriotism (1966).
Akerman is a direct product of the Nouvelle Vague. Her singing of the theme of Truffaut's feature-film debut and the editing and visual aesthetics of Godard and Truffaut are there for the opening three minutes as a homage of respect. The…
wow she's just like me fr
I'd never seen anything by Chantal Akerman before - I'd been put off by her difficult reputation, which is what happens when your signature film is nearly three and a half hours long. From what I understand of Jeanne Dielman, this twelve-minute short is an early exploration of the same idea; the use of apparently banal, unremarkable scenes from a woman's life to create a cumulative portrait of her despair.
After watching Blow Up My Town I watched this 2011 interview with Akerman. I could identify with a lot of what she said, particularly when I learned she got into film as a teenager. When you get into films as a teenager rather than a kid, your tastes follow a…
"Saute Ma Ville is the mirror image of Jeanne Dielman"
-Chantal Akerman
"In Jeanne Dielman there is a woman who lives her life through rituals. She cooks and cleans every single day. It's mechanical, perfectly shaped and fills her life with purpose. When there are slight breaks in those tasks the woman of that film begins to fracture. Jeanne Dielman shows a structure to live in. Saute Ma Ville seeks to destroy those structures."
Read the entire piece over at Curtsies and Hand Grenades
curtsiesandhandgrenades.blogspot.ca/2015/10/female-filmmaker-project-saute-ma-ville.html
nobody had the decency to tell me this is what i sounded like humming all the time... terrifying
honestly she gets me
existence is futile
Akerman's debut short is truly disturbing. It is a suffocating picture of the limited scope for femininity, an incendiary exploration of themes that would be perfected in her later masterwork, Jeanne Dielman.
All we see is Akerman playing a woman in her tiny apartment. We see her atonally take on domestic chores, echoing evident themes about the space for (and expectations of) women, through jerky camera angles and harsh cuts. The style is abrasive, with a syncopated soundscape in which we frequently hear humming and hysterical laughing, but it is not actually matched up to the visual. It is a chilling portrayal of forced hysteria in which we feel locked into a characters head.
The ending moments are alarming, but…