In her first narrative feature, Akerman offers a startling exploration of alienation, vulnerability and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, she plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy. Culminating in an audaciously filmed encounter with a former girlfriend (Claire Wauthion), Je tu il elle finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism and her sense of revolt against the system with a newfound emotional and psychological precision.
Introduced by Dr. Ros Murray (Senior Lecturer in French, King’s College) and preceded by short film Saute ma ville by Chantal Akerman.
This programme is organised as part of the Tate Britain exhibition Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990. It will be followed by Maso and Miso Go Boating + S.C.U.M. Manifesto for a combined price of £20.
Dir. Chantal Akerman, with Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1968, 12 mins
Chantal Akerman’s first film is a 12-minute tragicomic and unmissable critique of domestic life and the literal explosion of the so-called ‘feminine universe’.