An interstitial political gesture and a palimpsestic record: writing per se in D’est and Là-bas

Abstract

Where are history and politics when a filmmaker refuses procedures of documental recollection such as archives, off-screen narration, and playacting, and instead contemplates spaces of conflict in Eastern Europe 1993 and in Israel 2006 without getting involved in them? In order to answer this question, we argue that, by means of a self-writing style (an autobiography built in the memory gaps of the Holocaust), Chantal Akerman’s films D’est and Là-bas reach the political through a crannied route (of affects and cracks) that constructs a palimpsestic picture of history in which past and present are not sequential.

Keywords Chantal Akerman; cinema; politics; memory; Holocaust; affections