D’Est (From the East) by Chantal Akerman

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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.