Blow Up My Town

MOVIE #1,375 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 02.15.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM Is it strange that the debut work of Chantal Akerman ends with “the girl” (portrayed by Chantal Akerman) seemingly ending her own life? Knowing what we know now… A manic young woman takes the elevator up to her apartment and makes pasta in the kitchen. She rather suspiciously tapes over the cracks of the doorway. There is a poster of a Smurf on the door. She eats the pasta quickly, drinks red wine and then puts on a tea kettle and wrangles her cat. It's all soundtracked by some really unsettling humming/singing. She puts on a leather jacket and kerchief and starts futilely mopping the floor which is covered in pots and pans. She polished her shoes among the debris. She polishes her lower leg as well.

Jump-cut and the floor is clean. The sound cuts out. She looks at a newspaper as the horrible hum-voice returns even louder. She puts some kind of cream on her face and dances as the singing voice laughs. Not at her, per say. It's her voice as much as ours. The short ends as she turns on the gas stove and sucks in the air, sloped over the oven. It fades to black with the sound of crashing lightning as a voiceover speaks the credits in French as we linger on a black screen.

The soundtrack, the interior voice, the manner of humming, the noises of the kitchen and the jerky acting style all lead us towards farce and absurdity, yet they quickly bring us back to tragicomedy. Everything here points the spectator toward a fatal end. —Nicole Fernandez Ferrer

Reclamation is integral to understanding how Saute ma ville not only perfectly reflects our current state, but can also inspire the productivity necessary within it. While indicting the kitchen as an oppressive space, Akerman also shows how one can mobilize within that confined arena to subvert its restrictions outright. Particularly, her choice to flood the linoleum floor with soap and water, blacken her bare legs with shoe polish, smear condiments on her face, dance around the room, and fill the airwaves with non-synchronous foley and her voice as a soundtrack. Her laughing, singing, shrieking displays a “redefinition” of the spatial and behavioral rules of the home, and what is and is not allowed to function socially, “logically”, within that space. She redefines and reclaims all of these elements, turning that infinitesimal realm into an open field of expression and imbuing every bit of herself into its core. —Matt McKinzie

I "remixed" the audio track from this film: reversed + double speed with text-to-mp3 accompaniment of the featured IMDb review, which...

A poster on a door with an angry looking smurf upon it standing under the caption ‘Go home!’ The smurf is actually Judge Smurf, a minor character from the cartoon series that barely appeared at all and which, when searching online, can only be found in the form of a physical toy rather than an image. Judge Smurf may be fond of boarders and may possibly hold resentment, even xenophobia, to those who live outside of the smurf communities (hence ‘Go home!,’ as well as the fact that Father Abrahams, the Dutch songwriter who brought musical fame to The Smurfs with a variety of novelty hits, was a supporter of Hendrik Koekoek’s populist Farmer’s Party and recorded a single with the politician blaming Arabs for the 1973 oil crisis). —Adam Scovell

I ordered this book on Akerman thinking that it would be nice to have some reference to look at it as I moved through her filmography, but there is a seemingly endless supply of posts out there. Even this first short, which she completed at age 18, has dozens of articles and reviews. You want more context for the Smurf poster? Well, here ya go (complete with baseless accusations on the political leanings of Judge Smurf!). This guy is right to say that this Smurf character is a mystery. There isn't even an entry for him at the Smurfs fandom wiki. There is, however, a full article on the Smurfs judiciary system.

Rarely, if ever, were there cases amongst the Smurfs that resulted in an execution of any kind on the part of the guilty party. —smurfs.fandom.com

You can buy a Judge Smurf figurine on eBay for about $10-12, in case you were wondering. It would be nice to buy one and create a little "Go Home" speech bubble for it. Perhaps I will (I just sent a seller a "best offer" of $3 + shipping cost).

The question of Smurfs aside, what I know about Akerman, thematically/broadly, seems to be embodied in this original work. Domesticity as this great bear trap from which there is no escape for the female entity. She would live another 47 years before submitting to the same fate as the protagonist she portrayed here.

---

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,374 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,376 ⫸

---

A young girl shuts herself away in her apartment and goes about her business in a strange way, as she wastes the night in her apartment. It was released on September 4, 1971.