Walker Art Center Celebrates More Than Four Decades of Claire Atherton’s Influential Work in Film Editing
Claire Atherton: Growing the Image celebrates the acclaimed editor’s approach to filmmaking, tracing her landmark collaborations through a series of screenings and in-person conversations.
This fall, the Walker Art Center presents Claire Atherton: Growing the Image, a film series celebrating more than 40 years of acclaimed editor Claire Atherton’s singular career and her enduring influence on contemporary moving-image practice.
For more than four decades, Atherton has approached editing not simply as the technical assembly of images, but as a deeply creative form of collaboration. Drawing on her study of Taoism, as well as the political feminism of the 1980s, Atherton understands montage as an intuitive and living process: one that allows images to reveal their own rhythms and relationships rather than imposing a predetermined structure upon them. Her work creates open-ended spaces in which viewers are invited to make connections of their own.
The Walker retrospective brings together key works from across Atherton’s career, foregrounding her landmark creative partnership with filmmaker Chantal Akerman while also highlighting collaborations with directors Éric Baudelaire, Luc Decaster, Bani Khoshnoudi, and Maria Kourkouta.
During the series’ opening weekend, Atherton will appear in person at the Walker to introduce select screenings, offering audiences a rare opportunity to hear directly from one of contemporary cinema’s most influential editors about her practice and collaborations. Opening weekend programs include a screening of Akerman’s D’Est (From the East) (1993), presented from the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
Claire Atherton: Growing the Image offers audiences the opportunity to encounter that practice across an expansive selection of films, tracing both the continuities and transformations of Atherton’s work over more than 40 years.
D’Est (From the East) by Chantal Akerman
October 1, 7 pm
$8 ($6 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Walker Cinema
A conversation with Claire Atherton follows the screening of this landmark of Akerman and Atherton’s multi-decade collaborative partnership.
When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories by Éric Baudelaire
October 2, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors; Free for students)
Walker Cinema
Filmmaker Éric Baudelaire joins editor Claire Atherton following the screening of this experimental evocation of the radical work and tumultuous times of avant-garde composer Alvin Curran.
The Vanishing Point by Bani Khoshnoudi
October 3, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Walker Cinema
Both an urgent elegy for her lost cousin and a projection of hope for the future, Bani Khoshnoudi’s new film draws on an extensive library of material rooted in the personal and the collective.
Le chant des oubliés (The Song of the Forgotten) by Luc Decaster
October 8, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members, seniors and students)
Walker Cinema
Two portraits of labor and industry: Luc Decaster’s chronicle of a closing rubber factory in France and Maria Kourkouta’s Intermède, a portrayal of a small Greek shipyard.
De l’autre côté (From the Other Side) by Chantal Akerman
October 9, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors; Free for students)
Walker Cinema
A chilling reflection on migration from Mexico to the US that provides an insightful rumination on the borders that divide us.
Demain on déménage (Tomorrow We Move) by Chantal Akerman
October 10, 7 pm
$15 ($12 Walker members and seniors; Free for students)
Walker Cinema
This semiautobiographical screwball comedy follows a widowed mother moving into her daughter’s apartment.
About Claire Atherton
Claire Atherton is a film editor. She was born in 1963 in San Francisco and grew up in Paris. Attracted by Taoist philosophy and the visual aspect of ideograms, she first turned to studies of Chinese language, culture, and civilization. In 1981, she began to work as a video technician with the Centre aAudiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, in collaboration with Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig. She was interested in sound and worked as a cinematographer, but it is in editing that she found her way. Atherton often says that it is her interest in Chinese writing and poetry that led her to be an editor.
She met Chantal Akerman in 1984 during a video recording of Letters Home, a theater play with Delphine and Coralie Seyrig. This work revealed Atherton and Akerman’s shared sensibility and was the starting point of their 30-year-long collaboration. Atherton edited many of Akerman’s documentaries and fictions, including her last film No Home Movie (2015). The two also co-conceived all Akerman’s installations, from 1995’s Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est” to 2015’s Now. Atherton is now responsible for the conception and the spatialization of Akerman’s installations all over the world. She was the curator of Facing the Image, an exhibition dedicated to Akerman’s work at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona and Artium Museoa.
In 2017, Atherton worked for the first time with Éric Baudelaire on the editing of his film Also Known as Jihadi and has since continued collaborating with him. Atherton works as an editor with many other filmmakers and artists, such as Andreas Bolm, Emmanuelle Demoris, Luc Decaster, Maria Kourkouta, and Noëlle Pujol. She has recently edited with André Gil Mata, Bani Khoshnoudi, and Wang Bing.
About Éric Baudelaire
Éric Baudelaire is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris, France. Trained as a political scientist, he developed a research-based artistic practice that spans photography, moving image, installation, and performance. His work explores how political, judicial, economic, and informational systems shape our understanding of reality and its representations. His feature films have been presented at major film festivals such as the Berlinale, Locarno, and the New York Film Festival, and within exhibitions where they appear as part of larger installations combining other works, archival materials, and extensive public programmes. In recent years, his work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, MMK Frankfurt, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Museo Reina Sofía, Bergen Kunsthall, Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly Witte de With), Fridericianum, Beirut Art Center, and Gasworks, as well as in the São Paulo Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Taipei Biennial, and currently in the Venice Biennale.
About the Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a renowned multidisciplinary arts institution that presents, collects, and supports the creation of groundbreaking work across the visual and performing arts, moving image, and design. Guided by the belief that art has the power to bring joy and solace and the ability to unite people through dialogue and shared experiences, the Walker engages communities through a dynamic array of exhibitions, performances, events, and initiatives. Its multiacre campus includes 65,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the state-of-the-art McGuire Theater and Walker Cinema, and ample green space that connects with the adjoining Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The Garden, a partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, is one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States and home to the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Recognized for its ambitious program and growing collection of more than 16,000 works, the Walker embraces emerging art forms and amplifies the work of artists from the Twin Cities and from across the country and the globe. Its broad spectrum of offerings makes it a lively and welcoming hub for artistic expression, creative innovation, and community connection.
Acknowledgments
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Thank you, Walker members, for your generous support.