D'Est

The travelogue format of the film documents the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe.[1] The film was conceived “in the aftermath of impressions, memories, and emotions” which Akerman brought back following a research trip for a film about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, whom Akerman cites as a great influence.[3] The structure of D’Est is characterized by its sobriety and rigour, used to articulate the film’s expressiveness.[4] The film utilizes an obsessive, asynchronous rhythm of repetitions and looping.[1] Characters and locations within the film are meticulously examined but their consequent fates are never resolved.[1] The film's long, meditative shots emphasize the circularity of connections between personal and collective histories.[1] The film presents a complex assemblage of images, sounds and connected fragments, which results in a “hypnotic inventory of people and landscapes.”[1]

The cinematography of D’Est uses only available light and is executed through long, real-time shots, contributing to the genuine and unstaged nature of the film.[5] Akerman uses two main filming approaches: the stationary fixed perspective, with figures flowing towards the camera,[5] and the tracking shot, with the camera moving slowly along streets and paths. The film also includes examples of the panning shot, where the camera rotates around a central point. The moving shots convey a sense of anxiety and vertigo.[5] The stalking nature of the shots reveals the inhumanity of the camera.[5]

The film does not make a claim to realism or objective expertise regarding the collapse of Communism but instead examines the individual stories of characters in intimate ways, surveying their fear of the surrounding political opacity.[1] Akerman presents a continuous, nonsynchronous montage of images and sounds, provoking unfiltered optical and auditory impressions.[1] The smoothness of the visual continuity is used as a tactic to accentuate the effects of narrative disjunction and discontinuity.[1]

D’Est has had several iterations of presentation. Akerman originally showed the film in a traditional format, and later expanded into a multi-media installation. The installation was a part of a discourse about Eastern European identity at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1991.[1] Kathy Halbreich, executive director of MoMA, describes the exhibition as a deconstructive tour of the production process, examining the nature of filmmaking in reverse.[1] The museum installation was segmented into three viewing chambers.[1] In the first gallery, the film plays in a dark theatre space on a continuous loop.[1] In the second gallery, eight triptychs of video monitors show short sequences from the film simultaneously.[1] In the third gallery, a single video monitor shows Akerman reciting two texts: a biblical passage in Hebrew and a selection from her own writing on the film.[1] Based on the performativity of Akerman’s work, Hans Ulrich Obrist, critic, curator and art historian, points to the artist’s occupation of a unique space between the cinema movie and the art installation.[2]

• Official site
• D'Est at IMDb