ABSTRACT
Chantal Akerman’s film, D’Est, makes a journey from eastern Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow, from the end of summer to an ice cold winter. Presenting scenes from everyday life in the former Eastern Bloc in 1993 in a neutral style, without comment, narration or dialogue, the film shows the “real” Eastern Europe; yet in a way, that is somehow disturbing. The title, together with the journey of the camera, quickly brings into play the familiar image of the hierarchical relation in which the positive West assumes the role of a model for the negative East, the latter taking the position of the good student: the developing economy or the democratizing mentality. However, the journey that Akerman’s film retraces does not slide toward barbarism. With their lightness of touch, the film’s visual representations, pictures of city streets, apartment interiors or faces of people waiting in a bus terminal, jar with the popular image of “the East”. Immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the viewers are left alone with the troubling pictures of a journey eastwards, pictures which are not stable and given, but uncertain and mobile just like the tracking shots in the film, when the camera effectively never stops moving.
