D'Est (From the East)

Presented by Mount Analogue ◦ Art + Cinema with Seattle Documentary Association

From director Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman), D’Est (From the East) retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and Ukraine, to Moscow. It is a voyage Akerman wanted to make shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc "before it was too late," reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction.
By filming "everything that touched me," Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of this subjective crossing. Without dialogue or commentary, From the East is a cinematographic elegy.

One of Akerman’s most formidable documentaries, D’Est charts the filmmaker’s personal odyssey across Western Europe shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. As a travelogue conducted without commentary, it is one of Akerman’s most visually arresting films, communicating conflicting, ambivalent ideas about the collision between tradition and modernity entirely through layered tableaux. There’s an aleatory choreography of people, vehicles and environments in these shots—some static, some moving— that could almost be mistaken for Jacques Tati’s were it not for the sobering tone. Over the course of her trip, which passes from East Germany all the way to the heart of Moscow, Akerman photographs sleepy rural scenes, overcrowded urban spaces, sedate domestic interiors and a seemingly endless procession of train station and bus queues where uprooted civilians, draped in heavy winter attire and luggage, await whatever comes next. Beginning in sunny quietude and ending in fierce snow squalls, the film seems to anticipate hardship for the future, but is nonetheless possessed of an unstoppable life force—one written on the weathered faces of the subjects and in the restless lateral movement of Akerman’s dollying camera. — Harvard Film Archive

2K restoration by CINEMATEK - Royal Film Archive of Belgium.