Collier Schorr presents Je tu il elle

Director: Chantal Akerman

1975 / 89min / DCP

Author and photographer Collier Schorr joins Metrograph for a special screening to accompany the publication of her Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1, a document of Schorr’s work on a ballet inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle, which will be on sale in the lobby along with Akerman’s rapturously received, newly reprinted memoir, My Mother Laughs, also published by The Song Cave. The screening of Je tu il elle will be preceeded by Schorr’s short film Scene 25, Heads to Camera Kissing (2022).

Akerman’s boldly minimalistic first feature stars the 24-year-old writer-director herself as a young woman who we see emerging from an existence of isolation. She hitches a ride with a truck driver with whom she has a sexual dalliance, before finally arriving at the home of a former lover, falling into her bed in a bout of joyous lovemaking which, depicted in real-time, is regarded as a landmark depiction of lesbian sex in cinema. “Filmed in an uncomfortably direct yet distanced manner,” Janet Bergstrom wrote in Sight & Sound, the boudoir scene “provided a startling new perspective on voyeurism, exhibitionism, and the woman’s image on screen."

Scene 25, Heads to Camera Kissing (Collier Schorr, 2022, 3 mins)

Je tu il elle (Chantal Akerman, 1975, 86 mins)

Distributor: Janus Films

Introduction and Q&A with Collier Schorr moderated by filmmaker Matt Wolf on Sunday, July 19th