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Chantal Akerman: |
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López
Note: Chantal
Akerman died, at her own hand, on 5 October 2015. Only a few months before that
sad day, she sent us a note saying she had been looking for this article
(written and initially published before the release of No Home Movie in
2015), but could not find it anywhere online.
It’s a well-known fact, often rehearsed in interviews:
at the age of 15, Chantal Akerman saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) and decided that her vocation was to be a
filmmaker. Today, looking back over the career of this Belgian-born and also
France-based director, we can happily conclude – and this cannot be said of
everyone who makes such statements – that her own work has been worthy of the
film that inspired her cinephilic love.
From her early shorts of the late 1960s and immersion
in a New York avant-garde scene of the ‘70s, through bold, narrative features
such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du
commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) that made her a fixture of festivals and film studies programs around
the world, through intermittent sojourns into the field of documentary, and
eventually onto her diversification, since the ‘90s, into art gallery
installations that are sometimes ingenious “reassemblies” of her movies, or sketches
for imagined projects – Akerman has restlessly explored every variation on her
favourite audiovisual forms, and yet stayed true to certain, abiding concerns
and underlying drives.
The following Akerman Primer, coinciding with a comprehensive
retrospective presented by A Nos Amours at the ICA in London between 2013 and
2015 [later richly documented in the Chantal
Akerman Retrospective Handbook publication of 2019], annotates a few of
these recurring forms and themes in her work, while trying to respect the
fierce tension that underlies it: an audiovisual art (across all media) that
can be, on one level, so youthful, free, lyrical and romantic, is always
transforming itself, on another level, into an angry, probing, sometimes
melancholic reflection on the troubled state of things. And then it finds
renewed hope and energy, a reason to go on living and struggling, in that
selfsame lyricism …
Portrait(s)
Some of Akerman’s earliest works, like In the Mirror (1971, resurrected more
recently in installation form), or The
15/8 (1973) co-directed by Samy Szlingerbaum – in which a young, Finnish
woman is caught by the camera in long, fixed takes, while her voice drones on
the soundtrack – are experiments that can be classed in the tradition of the
cine-portrait as practised by filmmakers including Andy Warhol and Philippe Garrel. Many of her
subsequent films – from Jeanne Dielman to the touching Portrait of a Young Girl at
the End of the ‘60s in Brussels (1994) – are painstaking studies of women who
negotiate their daily lot.
As with many filmmakers, Akerman’s work can be taken
as autobiographical in nature – and hence a self-portrait. But, across her
oeuvre, this “presentation of self” takes multiple, indirect paths. We are
left, as spectators, to trace out the recurring obsessions and pick up hints of
her personality traits – and she herself has sketched such a guide, Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1996). In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, a director
(Aurore Clément) travels to Germany to present her latest film. Along the way,
she has various encounters with different people – some planned, some not. The
tone of these “meetings” (as the English title calls them) is often anguished –
as if some intangible but impermeable barrier separated her from the world.
This leads to relationships with others that can seem dry, barren, even violent
– as we see also in her early feature Je
tu il elle (1974). At other times, the heroine of Les Rendez-vous d’Anna appears to take refuge in a limp, passive
assent to whatever is surrounding her.
When Akerman acts in her own films, the self-portrait
effect is intensified – and complicated – still further, such as in Je tu il elle and the delightful,
too-little seen The Man with the Suitcase (1983 – see Cristina’s text.)
In this comedy with absurdist and Chaplinesque touches, Akerman’s panic over
having to share a living space with an unfamiliar man (Jeffrey Kime) transforms
itself, step by step, into a perverse, morbid obsession with spying and keeping
tabs on him … But, as her films often show, desire can be born in the
strangest, least rational ways. Akerman’s simultaneously awkward and beguiling
shot at making a “commercial” romantic comedy with Juliette Binoche and William
Hurt, A Couch in New York (1996), attests to this
strangeness: nothing really brings two souls together except serendipity,
coincidence, attraction to the absent traces and tantalising signs of each
other’s preoccupations.
Desire/Trauma
In many of her films, Akerman portrays unconventional
sexual relationships, highlighting the complexity of issues relating to gender
roles, sexual difference and erotic orientation. (In a 2011 interview, she
declared: “What are men and women?
For the woman, it has to happen as a fantasy, it’s not sex that makes her
orgasm; she can be more polymorphous, like a baby. She doesn’t need to
fetishise her own sex like men do.”) While her work can easily be read as a
feminist exploration of these themes, there is also a personal, idiosyncratic
charge – a polymorphousness – that is too rich to fit into a reductively
militant, ideological agenda.
In fact, some of the most
poetic and overwhelming moments in her work – like the final scene of Portrait of a Young Girl, the encounter
with the lover in Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, or most of Night and Day (1991), La
Captive (2000) and Almayer’s Folly (2011) – take up these concerns in order to chart a desire that forms complex
circuits of projection, substitution and transposition between people.
Ambiguity reigns when love walks in the door.
Yet if there is one thing
that has left an indelible and unambiguous mark on Akerman’s work, it is the
Holocaust. She comes from a Jewish-Polish family; her maternal grandparents perished
in Auschwitz. Her mother – a crucial figure in her life as well as in her filmography
– survived the camps, but was deeply affected by the experience. (Tomorrow We Move in 2004 dramatises
this, amidst the general context of a light comedy.) Akerman carries within
herself traces of the trauma suffered by these previous generations; her family
history has come to shape the style, tone and preoccupations of her cinema, as
she testifies in her 2013 book Ma mère
rit (“my mother laughs”). The vexed question of Jewish identity in the
contemporary world is at the heart of such projects as Dis-moi (1980), American
Stories (1989) and Là-bas (2006).
The feature-length documentaries South (1999) and From the Other Side (2002)
have no direct relation to Jewish issues, but in these tormented tales of
racial lynching and mass immigration, it is not hard to detect a deep link to
Akerman’s perennial themes of Holocaust and disapora.
In some of her European
projects, such as the experimental documentary From the East (1993) and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, this troubled history returns in the form of
a ghostly presence. In the former, Akerman travels with her cinematographers
(Rémon Fremont and Bernard Delville) to various sites in Eastern Europe after
the fall of the Berlin Wall. As she has acknowledged, many of the extended
tracking shots of the film – exterior spaces populated by long queues of people
waiting in the freezing cold – remind her, inescapably, of Holocaust images of
Jews in line, waiting to die. In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Europe’s complicated past intermittently pops
up as a topic during the characters’ conversations; while the streets, the
train stations, the people themselves seem fixed in the landscape of an eternal
war.
Minimalism
Much of Akerman’s output, across all media, is based
on strict, elementary formal decisions about how to shoot and structure what is
arranged or observed before the camera. Whether it is the repetition of In the Mirror, the fixed shot with a
slow zoom of Moving In (1992), or the
steady, omnipresent, lateral tracking shots that formally unite a doco like From the East with a fiction such as La Captive – the form is always insisted
upon, and it builds both a system for each individual work, and an overall
ethics of her very frontal gaze. “When you avoid low angles and subjective shots,” she
has remarked, “you avoid fetishism. When you film frontally, you put two souls
face to face equally, you carve out a real place for the viewer.”
This systematic,
rule-bound, dispositif side of some
Akerman pieces can, at first glance, seem severe. La Chambre (1972), an early short made the day after completing the
no-less minimalistic Hotel Monterey (1972), is based on a slow pan around the director’s own domestic space while
she stays in bed – bed being a privileged site for many sorts of experiences
and exchanges in her art. At an almost comical highpoint of La Chambre, the pan suddenly changes
direction – as if the appearance of the auteur within the frame somehow
impelled this reversal.
At the age of 24, Akerman
made what remains (fairly or not) her canonical masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman. 200 minutes to record
three days in the life of a Brussels housewife, played with unforgettable
precision by Delphine Seyrig. A unique film of surprising maturity, Jeanne Dielman is comprised exclusively
of long takes (each of which charts the spatial and temporal dimensions of
small, everyday actions such as cooking and cleaning) in repeated settings: a
kind of score that charts the mundane routine presiding over this woman’s very ordinary,
typical life. All remains unchanged until a series of small but calamitous
incidents announce to us that the precarious balance of this life has begun to
shatter. The camera angles remain the same, in their framing, position and
distance, but the substance of the images is now utterly different: some
malaise has crept in to destabilise them.
Jeanne Dielman is the greatest film ever made about domestic
alienation, but its greatness is sui
generis. It immediately divided cinema history into periods Before and
After itself. Many have subsequently tried to build a film of this type
(Masahiro Kobayashi’s The Rebirth [2006] was one such imitation-homage that the auteur of Jeanne Dielman did not much appreciate), but no one has managed to grasp
daily human behaviour with the same authenticity, intensity and strange beauty
as Akerman does here. And this is because her minimalism is not some mere
stylistic cloak draped over a storyline, but the beating heart of her film.
The minimalism tag can be a little dry when attributed,
over and again, to Akerman, because it misses the special, minute kinds of
narrative and pictorial tension she creates in her interplay of sounds, images,
situations and stories. Above all, the minimalism description can short-change
the crisp, tangy sensuality of her
style. Bodily sensations, the expansions and contractions of time, energies of
all sorts, human or non-human – all are palpable in her films and in her multi-screen installation
pieces, such as Women from Antwerp in
November (2008) with its celebration of the joys of smoking, or Maniac Shadows (2013).
Day and Night
One of the most precious aesthetic experiences that
Akerman’s cinema offers us is the passage from day to night (and vice versa).
In the Chris Marker-styled short Night Falls
on Shanghai (2007), the encroaching night completely transforms a
cityscape: neon lights invade the darkness and two buildings that occupy the
centre of the frame turn into screens trumpeting images of a globalised world. In All One Night (1982), Akerman follows
several characters during a summer evening in Brussels. The final sequence of La Captive explores all the
possibilities of night as something that can be veritably “painted” on film:
two lovers struggle in a sea devoured by inky blackness, and the situation becomes
a dance of reflected light on water. Almayer’s
Folly returns to the celebration of night as a realm of mystery, the place
where dreams burn (“In the night, he waits for you”), and narrative conflicts
bring death.
For Akerman, day and night are two separate universes
powered by different energy sources. The entire poetry of Night and Day is built upon this idea. During the day, Julie (Guilaine
Londez) makes love with her boyfriend, Jack (Thomas Langmann), in an
as-yet-unfurnished Paris apartment. In the evening, while this guy goes to work
driving a taxi, Julie wanders about with a book under her arm. She soon meets
another man, Joseph (François Négret), and spends time with him at night, while
she continues to see her boyfriend during the day. In this film, day and night
each accrue distinct locations: the city, with its cafés, lit streets, cars,
fountains and hotels, comes to life with the darkness; while, each dawn, Julie
races back to her apartment like a troubled Cinderella.
But then, as always in Akerman, there is also the
reversal of any classic system of day/night poetic symbolism. In her jaunty but
bittersweet musical Golden Eighties (1986),
we are confined, for most of the time, inside a shopping mall where both day
and night are artificially induced and controlled, and no stray window lets in
a trace of the world outside. Akerman preserves the shock of the elements – daylight
and street noise – for the final, disconcerting tableau just beyond the mall’s
doors.
Walking
Next to Mikio Naruse, Akerman is the cinema’s greatest poet of the act of walking. Her
characters cover the gamut of all possible variations on this gesture. They
march in straight lines and wander in circles. Their humble two-steps can suddenly become performance art, or song-and-dance.
Sometimes they are like the celebrated flâneurs of big cities who found the hidden wonders tucked
away in anonymous coves and
corners; at other times, they drudge along like automatons, at the bidding of
the daily grind. Occasionally they are accompanied by tension, even menace.
Akerman’s integral, non-fragmented way of filming these walking figures – whether leading the way in front, following along on a lateral path, or standing stock still as they disappear into the distance or darkness – always stresses the steps made, one by one. Her distinctive walking shots emphasise, equally, the time it takes to traverse even a small distance – because the shortest path can be decisive in films including Night and Day and La Captive (see our 2015 text “Small Moves”).
For Akerman, walking provides a precious physical
continuum, an unhurried bridging between realms: her characters literally cross
the space that separates the factuality of everyday life from the fantasy and
intrigue of fiction. Story is often synonymous with catastrophe in Akerman –
cued by an unforeseen glitch in routine (as for Jeanne Dielman), or a high heel
that slips on the pavement. So walking provides a safe way back for her characters, an Ariadne’s
thread back to an ever-precarious state of stability. By means of this stepping
in and out, Akerman provides a mirror for our own activity as spectators,
negotiating the illusions and lures of narrative.
The Two Endings
Akerman’s final fiction feature, Almayer’s Folly, is loosely adapted from a Joseph Conrad novel.
Re-set in the 1950s, and focusing on a protagonist (Stanislas Merhar as
Almayer) who watches his dreams take flight and die in the Malayan jungle, Almayer’s Folly grows like a river
stream impacted by a tropical storm. On its surface, Almayer’s Folly displays the old, familiar rigour and severity:
fixed takes, carefully choreographed moves, and a narrative of gender division
(this time involving a father and daughter) that might well reinforce all our most
pessimistic assumptions about the abyss between men and women in the modern
world.
But surprisingly, introducing the film at festivals
around the world, Akerman described its process of making as a personal
liberation – “I told everyone in the cast and crew, let’s breathe, let’s live a
little!” And when quizzed by an audience member as to the bleakness of its
ending – a long take of the abandoned Almayer slowly receding into himself, a
grim, apocalyptic note – Akerman retorted: “Ah, you mean the second ending!”
The first ending, in terms of the strict, chronological unfolding of the story,
came much earlier, in fact at the very start of the film. There, Almayer’s
daughter, Nina (Aurora Marion), witnesses what also appears to be a terrible
event – the murder of the lover who has whisked her away to a new life. But her
reaction is unexpected: Akerman has her approach the camera, look directly into
the lens, and sing, a capella, Mozart’s
aria “Ave Verum Corpus”. All the violence, murder, death, guilt and remorse of this
tale is – for the length of the song – magically dissolved in the off-screen
space.
This is a musical moment of the kind often seen in
Akerman’s career (in The Eighties,
1983, it is even she herself doing the singing) – where the liberation of voice
and body is frequently accompanied by an ethereal disconnection from the
narrative itself, and an implacable drifting away from its conventional code of
weighty morality. A Utopian moment of release, set
against all the disasters of history that weigh upon the memory of individuals.
MORE Akerman: Saute ma ville
© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin November 2014 |
