City as Self-Portrait explores personal geography against the backdrop of the urban landscape, addressing how spaces can be both private and public. This project investigates this duality through a cinematic lens, with an analysis of four sequences from Chantal Akerman’s experimental film News from Home at its core. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) and Michel de Certeau’s Spatial Practices (1980), the project engages in a rich theoretical dialogue.
After five months of research and experimentation with filming, editing, and writing, the artwork faced the unknown and uncertainty many times—a necessity in experimental filmmaking. As Chantal Akerman states, “A film cannot be described in advance but is born little by little in the work itself.” From this process emerges a self-reflexive short film that tracks the filmmaker’s journey through various spaces in Vienna, attempting to draw her personal geography and confront the impossibility of mapping this terrain. The work and its documentation or staging overlap, embodying the “in-the-making” process that defines the artwork.
The cinematic techniques, such as long static shots that allow the camera’s gaze to be freed into its materiality, time, and space, rather than dictating what to look at, are drawn from an analysis of News from Home. In City as Self-Portrait, the camera is visible during the filmmaking process, showing how it films a scene to emphasize the material aspect of production, reflecting on notions of space and gaze in cinema.
More details about the film can be found here:
https://aaa.dieangewandte.at/abschlussarbeiten/sama-adhami-city-as-self-portrait/
This short film was showcased at the Angewandte Festival in Vienna in July 2024.