From the East (DVD)

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An empty train platform at night – a car whizzes by in the background.

A window opens out onto a country road – another car whizzes by.

A man sits on a bench staring at the camera and waiting for… something.

An old woman walks along the street, the camera tracking her journey.

Tourists luxuriate on an isolated beach as an off-screen singer carries a tune.


It´s tempting to review Chantal Akerman´s "From the East" ("D´est," 1993) by providing a catalogue of its sounds and images because that´s precisely what the film is: a catalogue of the sounds and images that Akerman encountered on a trip through a post-Wall Eastern Europe in the early 90s.

"From the East" is not a traditional documentary, not that there is any such thing. Akerman provides no voice-over, no on-screen titles to indicate place or time, no narrative through-line. Instead she constructs her travelogue as a full immersion experience in the images and the sounds that she encounters on her journey through East Germany, Poland, Moscow and points in-between.

In Akerman´s words, "I´d like to shoot everything. Everything that moves me." And she is moved by people, landscapes, objects, music, movement, summer, winter, day, night and even the most banal chores, the latter of which is no surprise to anyone who has seen "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975).

The film is an exercise in variations, a balancing act between opposite or complementary elements: interior/exterior, domestic/public, stasis/motion, noise/silence, city/rural, people/objects, crowds/individuals. In many scenes, she shoots people who are unaware of the camera, filming spontaneously as they go about their business. In other shots, individuals are carefully arranged like models as they stare at the camera. No doubt some of the crowd shots were rigorously staged as well.

The two major motifs of the film are travel and performance. Trains, buses, and cars are major players in the film, cues that remind us of Akerman´s journey. They also provide evidence of fellow travelers, people waiting in line at the station, their route briefly intersecting hers. As for performance, most of the audible dialogue (none of which is subtitled, and shouldn´t be) comes from singers, some heard off-screen, some on. In the film´s penultimate scene, a woman (Natalia Chakhovskaia) plays cello for an enthralled audience and accepts congratulatory flowers. Perhaps she´s a stand-in for Akerman the performer or, more likely, another person who "moves" the director.