Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman - Suivi de Le Déménagement - L'Athénée Théâtre, Paris

Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman followed by Le déménagement Texts by Chantal Akerman Performer Stanislas Merhar Outside eye Maïa Godin Hadji-Lazaro Music Sonia Wieder-Atherton 8:30pm Salle Christian-Bérard In a stripped-back setting, actor Stanislas Merhar brings to life two texts by Chantal Akerman.

A major figure of modern cinema, the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) drew on the everyday, on time and on intimacy as the very material of her work. Her cinema reshapes our view of reality through its attention to the ordinary, to silences and to sensation.

Though she rarely worked in theatre, her final years were punctuated by public readings, which she sometimes gave on stage. It is there that Stanislas Merhar first encountered her, and now continues their dialogue.

After being directed by her in La Captive (2000) and La Folie Almayer (2011), he now carries her texts and gives voice to her singular presence. Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman In 1996, André S.

Labarthe and Janine Bazin commissioned Chantal Akerman to make a film for their documentary series 'Cinéma, de notre temps'. She conceived a self-portrait made up of extracts from her earlier films and, at their request, added a few images and words of her own.

Out of this constraint came a text in which the director confides that she perceives 'with discouragement the artifice of sincerity'.

Gradually, her narration shifts from 'I' to 'she'; and behind her, her Jewish, Polish family, her maternal grandmother, a painter, that past, that 'nothing there', which haunts her work.

Le Déménagement In Le Déménagement (1992), a film she made with Sami Frey for Arte, Chantal Akerman gives voice to the monologue of a man alone in his flat. Amid furniture and boxes, he recalls 'the summer of '82', when three students moved in on the same landing as him.

In his mind, he replays those sixteen days of shared happiness with them. One by one, they left, and he remained... Booking