Central Library Friday Film Club: "Je, Tu, Il, Elle"

"Je, Tu, Il, Elle" was the first feature-length effort from avant-garde filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The story, simple in extreme, concerns a high-strung woman taking a lengthy journey through France. Her life up until now has been one huge question mark. By dwelling long and hard on every experience, she hopes to find answers during her cross-country odyssey.

By giving her films an extremely avant-garde artistic form and using her own original philosophy, Akerman deals with the issue of time, memory, trauma and (female) identity functioning in relation to the place, space and other people: close and completely alien. Akerman came from a family marked by the Holocaust; this difficult legacy permeates many of her works. The artist was inspired by the structural film and the work of the New York avant-garde, including the work of Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow or Yvonne Rainer. She patiently and affectionately documented and staged the lives of women, their stories, love adventures, struggles with the past and sexuality.