Non-Weekly Cucumber Salad #14 š„
The ideas slow cooker edition
This edition of the newsletter feels like a Iām giving birth to something that just doesnāt want to be born. I have so many ideas all around me and so many themes I want to discuss and Iāve gathered lots of material, but I just canāt sit down and write a coherent piece of text. Iām going to try the best I can to put some of the ideas Iāve been cooking out there, but I canāt promise its going to be a tasty meal, meaning, this is probably going to be a Poorly Written Editionā¢
I know I havenāt written in a long time. I sometimes get into these phases where I need to slow cook ideas for a while and organise things in my head and I take my time, because taking time to absorb things and connect ideas helps me a lot with my creative process.
Sometimes I feel like none of the ideas I have are worth writing about, that theyāre not developed enough, and then something shifts and I fear forgetting every single thought that I have and I want to write everything down. The newsletter follows this creative flux.
Iāve decided that I will divide the topics I want to discuss into smaller publications instead of making a long and exhaustive one, for the sake of being able to organise my ideas a little bit better. I also feel like itās tidier to have each edition dedicated to a topic instead of cramming them all together into one single publication.
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Updates
Recently Iāve been having many vivid dreams, and I enjoy spending my awake time thinking about them and trying to remember more details. I enjoy saying in bed and try to relive the dream a little bit to see if I can expand the experience of the dream and find out more about it.
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Everything is Chantal Akermanās films and nothing hurts
Iāve been very focused on Chantal Akermanās work for the last couple months, and even though I donāt feel like I have the linguistic eloquence to throughly discuss how I feel about her work, Iāll try my best, because this topic deserves attention. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably have seen my Chantal Akerman fancam as a manifestation of my current cinematic obsession with her.
I watched my first Chantal Akerman film earlier this year and it was a transformative experience. Also known as āthe 3 hour film where nothing happensā, Jeanne Dielman immediately became one of my favourite films.
She did that!
I was raised by my aunt, who is an extremely dedicated housewife, and through Jeanne Dielman I was able to observe her tasks from a radically political perspective. The Sisyphean housework tasks acquire a whole new depth and dimension through the film, and I truly feel like thatās the work of someone who has a lot to say and knows how to say it.
Jeanne Dielman is an invitation to a deeply feminist critique of everyday life that has honestly changed how I see my place in the world as a woman in contemporary society and also how I understand the lives of women around me. I feel like Jeanne Dielman goes hand in hand with the photographic performances of Cindy Sherman in terms of timeless relevance. Itās not an overstatement to say that Jeanne Dielman is one of the most thoughtful films Iāve ever seen and truly a piece capable of starting a rich debate on gender roles in modern society.
A few months after watching Jeanne Dielman I decided to watch Chantal Akermanās experimental documentary DāEst. The premise sounded super interesting to me because, as some of you may know, Iām obsessed with the communist mindset.
My perception of economic systems is that they are also systems from with we perceive and understand reality through, and I think itās fascinating to dive into the reality through the eyes of people who live a different economic experience, it means those people understand the material relationships that occur in our world in a fundamentally different way than us from the sad capitalist reality 2022 Post-Trump Era timeline.
DāEst is a beautiful documentary that leaves a lot of space for the audience to think and elaborate connections between the lives of the people weāre looking at and our own. I feel like right now, in the ruins of Capitalism, this documentary is even more powerful, because we can look at those people in the aftermath of the end of the USSR from a parallel perspective and develop a deep sense of empathy with them. I think that, by freezing such a specific moment in time, Chantal Akerman has elaborated an extremely powerful piece that serves at a Time Capsule and gets stronger as time goes by because it becomes like an anthropological gem, fossilized and perfectly preserved.
After watching Dā Est, I consciously decided that I needed to know more about Chantal Akerman and her work, since then Iāve watched numerous interviews where she always seems to be confident, assertive, and obviously, extremely cool. But the moment when I realized that Chantal Akerman was the most relevant filmmaker that has ever breathed on the face of this earth was after I watched her first film, News From Home.
I personally feel spiritually connected to News From Home for many reasons. I went through the very same experience as Chantal Akerman of moving to the USA to study and, as an only child, I struggled to convey to my family how overwhelming all that change was for me. I felt that gap between me, living in a new world, and my aunt and mother, who continued on living the same familiar routine I had left behind. Even if I wanted to sit all day and tell them everything about my life in California I wouldnāt be able to, because it was too much even for me to consciously take in. So the unique genius Chantal Akerman made a film around this complex feeling, that is familiar to many people who have left their families to move abroad.
I just feel likeā¦ you have to be such a sensitive person and with such a clear connection between your feelings and your creative outcome to be able to elaborate such a simple movie about a complex and emotionally charged experience like that. This was Chantal Akermanās first film, that she did while she was a film student, and its such a deeply thoughtful reflection of her experience that anyone who has been on a similar situation will fully understand the theme sheās discussing and, like me, be able to understand their own experiences from a richer perspective.
Chantal Akermanās films are extremely powerful in their technical simplicity, I see them as an invitation to creative expression: if you have something to say, you donāt need too many resources to do so, as long as you know how you want to communicate your message. I feel deeply inspired when watching her films, and I feel like the creative exercise is something we can practice on the most different aspects of our lives.
Chantal Akerman also has this film called Je Tu Il Elle that's about this girl having a breakdown after a breakup that hits too close to home.
From my perspective, Akermanās works can be considered a visual anthropological research on the critique of everyday life, an extremely thoughtful and rich collection of explorations on feelings and dispositions found in modern life. I truly believe she is one of the most important (if not THE most important, after Iāve had a few glasses of wine) filmmaker of the last Century and her works will only grow richer and deeper as weāre able to analyse them through the coming of the years.
not carefully reviewed, but always With love š±š«,
Ana Luisa