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An intensely personal and achingly conceived work by one of cinema's leading female filmmakers, LÀ-BAS reveals a stripped down, vulnerable Chantal Akerman tackling a subject that has arguably haunted her entire oeuvre. In the Q&A for the Toronto International Film Festival's 2004 screening of her latest feature, DEMAIN ON DÉMÉNAGE, Akerman, with some prodding, shared a poignant anecdote about carrying with her the diary of her grandmother, who had been in the Polish camps. The diary had made its way into the film. Well it's as if all of Akerman's history, her identity, her rootlessness, and her questioning of the entire Jewish diaspora and of the nature of post-Holocaust art and images, has made it into LÀ-BAS, a sort of Tel Aviv diary film reminiscent of Jonas Mekas's first person cinema, which had so influenced her early work. Most of the film unfolds in an apartment with Akerman cooped up and unable to cope; the camera, like the filmmaker's gaze, is fixed upon the window frame, spying on her neighbours across the way, going about their day, a day like any other. She thinks of Jeanne Dielman. Paralyzed by the pressures of life, Akerman has made a film with a deceptively naïeve structure and static, swimmy digital images that belie the gravity and resonance of their being. Avant-garde, experimental, rigorously minimal, or simply an aesthetics of apoplexy? Winner of The Grand Prize at the Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille. AP
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