Le jour où… (The Day When). 1997. Switzerland. Directed by Chantal Akerman. 2K restoration by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman; courtesy Waka Films. In French; English subtitles. 7 min.
Sud (South). 1999. Belgium/France. Directed by Chantal Akerman. DCP courtesy Icarus Films. 70 min.
Chantal Akerman, drawn to the American South by William Faulkner and James Baldwin, arrived in Jasper, Texas, on the one-year anniversary of the gruesome lynching of James Byrd Jr. by white supremacists. With imagery from what was meant to be a location-scouting trip, Sud interweaves interviews, footage of Byrd’s funeral, and prolonged tracking shots retracing the road on which Byrd, chained to a pickup truck, met his senseless and brutal death. “Chantal and I often listened to Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ during the editing process,” Claire Atherton recalls. “We even considered putting the song in the film. Ultimately, we didn’t even try…. What guided me during the construction of Sud was Chantal’s extreme attention to the present. We never show or describe the past, but it is dredged up by the present…. It’s about the violence of the world and the way history haunts landscapes to become a part of our gaze.”
Sud is preceded by The Day When, produced for an omnibus project on the occasion of the Locarno Film Festival’s 50th anniversary in 1997. In a comical interlude, Akerman makes herself dizzy with the circular movement of her camera and the sound of her own voice. “The day I decided to think about the future of cinema, I told myself I wouldn’t live to see it,” she says. “I asked myself if the future is always in front of us. So I looked ahead; then I turned around.”