Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Chantal Akerman's The Man with the Suitcase (1983) is free to watch below.Chantal Akerman’s The Man with the Suitcase (1983) departs from a seemingly nonsensical premise. After a trip, the unnamed protagonist (played by the director herself) comes back home and finds that Henri (Jeffrey Kime), the friend to whom she had lent the apartment during her absence, is still there. Despite craving solitude, she’s unable to ask him to leave. In cinema, a premise of this kind can give rise to very different generic approaches. Light comedies of complication often turn this type of situation into a springboard for a series of entanglements that keep piling on top of each other, tightening the knots of the plot. Dark comedies with a Kafkaesque touch also revel in such a premise as an absurdist device of entrapment: the more time passes,...
- 6/4/2018
- MUBI
My flight from New York to Vienna temporarily made a movie; it’s now a lost film, but what I saw of it was spectacular. The plane was equipped with two video cameras, one pointing straight down, activated after the flight took off, and one pointing straight forward, which is active the moment the flight is boarded. Both videos have an unnatural, nearly uncanny flatness to them—akin to the comment that Harun Farocki has made about certain kinds of industrial video recording, that some digital footage is specifically not produced for the human eye. These images must be—but more likely for a technical eye, before someone realized the casual viewer—a passenger—might be interested.
The forward-facing camera, of interest only during taxiing, indifferently smashed the industrial shapes and figures of the JFK and Vienna airports into flat, unspooling geometric arrangements. The compostion was always in motion, but a compressed kind of motion,...
The forward-facing camera, of interest only during taxiing, indifferently smashed the industrial shapes and figures of the JFK and Vienna airports into flat, unspooling geometric arrangements. The compostion was always in motion, but a compressed kind of motion,...
- 10/24/2011
- MUBI
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