At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard’s Pierrot le fou and realized that
filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film
school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate
the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films
are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters’
identity.
During a self-administered apprenticeship in New York
(1972–73) shooting short films on very low budgets, Akerman notes that she
learned much from the work of innovators Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. She
was encouraged to explore organic techniques for her personal subject matter.
In her deliberately paced films there are long takes, scenes shot with
stationary camera, and a play of light in relation to subjects and their space.
(In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles, as Jeanne rides up or down in the elevator, diagonals of light
from each floor cut across her face in a regular rhythm.) Her films feature
vistas down long corridors, acting with characters’ backs to the camera, and
scenes concluded with several seconds of darkness. In Akerman films there are
hotels and journeys, little conversation. Windows are opened and sounds let in,
doors opened and closed; we hear a doorbell, a radio, voices on the telephone
answering machine, footsteps, city noises. Each frame is carefully composed,
each gesture the precise result of Akerman’s directions. A frequent
collaborator is her sensitive cameraperson, Babette Mangolte, who has worked
with Akerman on such works as Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, News from Home, and Toute une nuit. Mangolte has also worked
with avant guardists Yvonne Rainer, Marcel Hanoun, and Michael Snow.
Plotting is minimal or non-existent in Akerman films. Old
welfare clients come and go amid the impressive architecture of a once splendid
hotel on New York’s Upper West Side in Hotel
Monterey. New York City plays its busy, noisy self for the camera as
Akerman’s voice on the sound track reads concerned letters from her mother in
Belgium in News from Home. A young
filmmaker travels to Germany to appear at a screening of her latest film, meets
people who distress her, and her mother who delights her, and returns home in Les Rendezvous d’Anna. Jeanne Dielman,
super-efficient housewife, earns money as a prostitute to support herself and
her son. Her routine breaks down by chance, and she murders one of her
customers.
The films (some of which are semi-autobiographical) are not
dramatic in the conventional sense, nor are they glamorized or eroticized; the
excitement is inside the characters. In a film which Akerman has called a love
letter to her mother, Jeanne Dielman is seen facing the steady camera as
members of a cooking class might see her, and she prepares a meatloaf—in real
time. Later she gives herself a thorough scrubbing in the bathtub; only her
head and the motion of her arms are visible. Her straightening and arranging
and smoothing are seen as a child would see and remember them.
In Toute une nuit
Akerman displays her precision and control as she stages the separate,
audience-involving adventures of a huge cast of all ages that wanders out into
Brussels byways on a hot, stormy night. In this film, reminiscent of Wim
Wenders and his wanderers and Marguerite Duras’s inventive sound tracks,
choreography, and sense of place, Akerman continues to explore her medium using
no conventional plot, few spoken words, many sounds, people who leave the frame
to a lingering camera, and appealing images. A little girl asks a man to dance
with her, and he does. The filmmaker’s feeling for the child and the child’s
independence can’t be mistaken.
Akerman’s Moving In,
meanwhile, centers on a monologue delivered by a man who has just moved into a
modern apartment. A film of “memory and loss,” according to Film Comment, he has left behind “a
melancholy space of relations, relations dominated by his former neighbors, a
trio of female ‘social science students.’”
Deaths
of Cinema | La Ressasseuse: Chantal Akerman, 1950–2015 ... Kate Rennebohm from Cinema Scope, Winter/Spring 2016
“I was overcome by an
emotion I can’t quite define…but it was very, very strong, and had something to
do with happiness. [And after seeing more of her work,] there really have been
moments during which I felt I had to defend myself against what was being expressed,
moments in the performance when I had to close my eyes. And at the same time, I
can’t understand why.”
Toward the end of Un
jour Pina m’a demandé (1983), her made-for-television film about Pina
Bausch, Chantal Akerman sits on the floor underneath a window and recounts her
reactions upon first encountering Bausch’s choreography. That her description
above could apply just as well to her own films indicates an affinity between
these two women that goes beyond shared themes or sensibilities. Granted of
course that sharing is there, and far from secret: a rigorous presentism that
nonetheless speaks to a traumatic history, one inscribed in faces, bodies, and
landscapes; gender as a line to be probed rather than a division to be drawn;
repetition—of movements, gestures, words—as a phenomenological tool for showing
the very impossibility of repetition, the ineffaceable singularity of every
action or moment.
But in Un jour Pina
m’a demandé we see more than just likeness. Just as Bausch’s choreographies
rivet the spectator to an ever-expanding collection of mundane movements on
stage, movements that blur the traditional division between “dance” and
“not-dance,” so Akerman extends that idea via her camera, cutting from the
performance onstage to tightly framed shots of the action backstage, where
dancers and crew carry on a separate but intrinsically related choreography:
arms and hands removing clothing, patting faces, caressing skin. If they ever
were, dance and the not-dance of ordinary life are no longer discrete realms,
and “ordinary life” is indeed not ordinary at all; and in the action of her
camera, Akerman does not record or mimic, she extends the implications of Bausch’s practice, and her own at the
same time.
This brings us to the cardinal point, and one in which the
past tense can sadly no longer be avoided. Rather than the “or” or the “is,”
Akerman was (tragically, was) a filmmaker of the “and.” Un jour Pina m’a demandé is not Akerman on Bausch, it is Akerman
and Bausch, cinema and dance (or dance-theatre, in Bausch’s naming). And these
“ands” are everywhere in Akerman’s work. As with her use of the serial and the
additional in her formal structures, her avowed linkages with other
artists—whether choreographers (Bausch, Yvonne Rainer), filmmakers (Godard,
Snow), or the canonical authors whose works she adapted (Proust, Conrad)—were a
way out of essentializing categories. The difficulty in explaining what “kind”
of filmmaker Akerman was, of finding a single descriptor for her, is crucial to
her work: she made a career-long habit of rejecting labels, whether they be
“documentary” or “fiction,” “feminist” or “queer” filmmaker. Rather than the
label, Akerman was an artist of the list—the very home of the “and,” capable
not only of containing contradictory terms without issue, but containing them
absent any necessary hierarchies. So Akerman was, simultaneously, a
documentarian and a narrative
filmmaker; a maker of comedies and
films of existential horror; a dry, minimalist filmmaker and one who made films full of song, laughter, and joy.
The “and” is, implicitly and unavoidably, a term of
continuation. It is the linguistic equivalent of Akerman’s long takes, which
remind us that the cut is something essentially arbitrary: a momentary
disruption in time’s fragile but ceaseless flow, its palimpsestic accumulation
and inevitable losing of words, actions, faces, bodies, lives. And so, even
beyond the standard compressions, distortions, and fictionalizations involved
in describing a life and a body of work in a few thousand words, the idea of
now needing to end Akerman’s list—and of potentially subsuming that life and
work within whichever term happens to be last—is anathema. So if we must try
and define Akerman, let’s use a definition that she applied to herself. In Autoportrait en cineaste, a 2004 text
she wrote to accompany the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of her work, Akerman
writes
Je suis une
ressasseuse…. Ma vie est long, un long ressassement.
In naming herself a ressasseuse, Akerman defines herself as
one who repeats without ceasing; she is always returning, but also always
turning over, finding something new. It is a single term, yet one which refuses
containment, refuses stasis, refuses to let go of the “and.” There is already
so much death, too much death, for us to allow Akerman’s death to end that long
ressassement that was her work.
And so, we focus on the “and.”
***
While Akerman rejected labels, however, that doesn’t mean
she didn’t think that they were sometimes right—it’s just that, as she said in
an interview with Dennis Lim, they are never right enough. The question of
feminism has always been particularly fraught when it comes to Akerman, as her
masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) became a central text for that historical
moment’s newly minted meeting of feminist thought and film theory. While
Akerman conceded that what Jeanne Dielman
showed (the domestic space, a housewife’s tasks, the isolation, the repetition,
the desperate ordering of time) and how it showed it (static camera, medium and
long shots only, no reverse shots, overtly composed and frontal framing) did
indeed make it a feminist film, it was arguably just as important for its
demonstration of the rich potential of Akerman’s conjunctive approach. This is
most evident in the film’s consummate mixing of the concerns of two seemingly
divergent avant-gardes: the North American fascination with stripping film down
to the material essence of the medium, and the continental interest in cinema’s
role in social and representational codes and norms.
Several commentators have linked the obsessive, regimented
movements of Delphine Seyrig’s Dielman to the work of dancer and filmmaker
Yvonne Rainer (which Akerman first encountered upon moving to New York in the
early ’70s) and her concept of choreographing via “task-oriented” movements.
This concern with the body and its disposition in space was intrinsic to
Akerman’s work from the outset. Her first feature, Je tu il elle (1974), traverses the poles of Jeanne Dielman’s regimentation and Un jour Pina m’a demandé’s ecstatic release as it follows a young
woman (performed by Akerman herself) who departs from a space of repetitive
actions and opaque investigations—how many different positions can a body and a
mattress occupy in a room?—for a space of uncontainable dynamism (a percussive
pas de deux between two women’s bodies) before moving on to yet more spaces.
(This latter sequence, with its series of passionate interconnections, already
gives evidence of what Akerman would respond to in Bausch’s choreography. Toute une nuit [1982], made shortly
after her introduction to Bausch, offers fragmented scenes of lovers coming
together and apart, with the characters hurling themselves at each other as
Pina’s dancers do, as if they could break through the skin separating them
could they but gather enough velocity.)
The long-take/fixed-camera strategy Akerman employed so
memorably in Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman is almost certainly her
most influential contribution to the stylistic vocabulary of art cinema, though
her use of it has a philosophical weight rarely found in those of its
latter-day practitioners. (Moreso than the oft-cited Todd Haynes and Gus Van
Sant, Julia Loktev is one of the most provocative present-day heirs of not only
the style but the structures and concerns of Akerman’s ’70s work.) In Nothing Happens, her seminal book on
Akerman’s work, Ivone Margulies dubs Akerman’s cinema “hyperrealist,” a term
that houses a complex set of meanings. One iteration aligns Akerman with Andy
Warhol and the mid-century purveyors of the nouveau
roman: an attitude that approaches the image and the word not as
representations or mirrors of reality, but as equivalent to that reality. To
echo the title of an essay in which Stanley Cavell discusses her work, for
Akerman the world is a collection of things, within which the image (moving and
not) is also a thing in itself.
Margulies also discusses how the images in Akerman’s films,
by virtue of their length and flirtation with stasis, waver between the
registers of abstraction and figuration. As the shots stretch on, often with
little change or variation, we shift between immersion in the image’s
illusion—a self-contained fictional world composed of bodies, movements, and
voices—and awareness of the image’s presence: a block of light and shadow on a
wall, hovering in front of us, a potent reminder of (our) time, passing. In
this, Margulies connects Akerman to the move towards minimalism in the art
world, aligning her work with those artists’ efforts to activate the
spectator’s experience of the piece as part of the piece itself.
Margulies’ astute analysis of the artist’s intensely engaged
materialism cuts to the ethical heart of Akerman’s cinema. While many have been
apprehensive about, if not downright hostile towards, the presumed denuding of
truth and responsibility in the poststructuralist/postmodern contention that
reality is “just” words and images, in Akerman’s films the image shares all of
the same ethical problems and existential possibilities of the world outside
the theatre. In Sud (1999), Akerman’s
camera travels through nondescript landscapes in the American South to
eventually arrive at the town of Jasper, Texas, where an African-American man
named James Byrd, Jr. was recently murdered by white supremacists. As is
characteristic of Akerman’s “documentary” films, Sud gives very little information about any of its subjects, apart
from the brutal details of how Byrd died. Landscapes and towns go unnamed and
unspecified; interviews with locals contribute only a sense of the partiality
of the views involved, never an authoritative explanation; a lengthy sequence
of Byrd’s funeral gives images and sounds of his community, but few details of
his life. And then, the final shot of the film: a seven-minute take, the camera
secured to the back of a moving vehicle as it rumbles along the three-mile
stretch of road where Byrd was dragged to death.
The horror of this and other “empty” images resonates across
Akerman’s films. She had a longstanding concern with the imagining (and the
imaging) of suffering—those traumas whose magnitude challenges the very notion
of representation. Akerman’s status as an Ashkenazi Jew—and as the daughter of
a woman who lost her entire family in Auschwitz—were vitally important to her
work, and she spoke regularly of the bilderverbot,
the Jewish ban on making graven images. Denying herself the act of
representation, Akerman instead sought to create what she called “distilled
images,” evoking the presence of a traumatic history through its seeming
absence. In D’Est (1993), Akerman
traverses the former East Germany, Poland, and Russia shortly after the fall of
the Iron Curtain, her images of unnamed people standing around or engaging in
mundane, everyday activities reverberating with echoes of the supposedly
vanished past, postwar and wartime (and Soviet and Nazi) both. Akerman’s
“emptied-out” formalism speaks to greater, sometimes monstrous emptyings: in
these idling, obscurely waiting crowds, we see not only the endless lines that
waited outside the perpetually understocked government shops, but the lines for
the trains bound for deportation and death.
From the ’80s through to her final film, Akerman began to
engage more overtly with questions of Jewish identity and experience. Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and
Philosophy (1988) consists of a series of monologues, delivered straight to
the camera by actors dressed in period clothing but obviously standing in
contemporary Brooklyn, that relate stories of Jewish persecution and migration
to America in the early 20th century. While the stories are fictional (Akerman
wrote them, drawing from actual testimonials and diary entries) and their
recounting patently artificial, Akerman’s foregrounding of theatricality
ultimately serves to heighten the film’s haunting evocation of a traumatic
history. Là-bas (2006) documents a
trip to Tel Aviv by Akerman, a visit in which her literal immobilization
(resulting from depression and fear of recent bombings) mirrors her figurative
paralysis; largely comprised of static shots of covered windows, the film
unfolds through her verbose (and acousmatic) recounting of the impossibility of
saying anything at all about the “Israel question.” In her final film, No Home Movie (which Andréa Picard
discussed in Cinema Scope 64),
Akerman chronicles the last year of her mother Nelly’s life, the elderly
woman’s imminent passing threatening another loss as well: a loss of history,
of an entire generation’s cataclysmic experience with the Shoah.
Many of Akerman’s films revolve around the filmmaker’s
efforts, and perceived failure, to connect with her mother: in News From Home (1976), Akerman reads her
mother’s letters over images of New York City, highlighting Nelly’s presence in
her thoughts but also the radical separation between mother and daughter due to
the distance between them and the profound differences in their daily lives.
(In a far lighter vein, Akerman further reflected on her relationship with
Nelly—and on the horrors of history that drive a wedge between those
generations that experienced them and those that did not—in her underrated 2004
comedy Demain on déménage.)
That sense of failure is not just personal for Akerman, but
is intrinsic to both her ethics and her aesthetics. “I’d rather touch on the
faces I wish to film,” Akerman said at the time of D’Est, and her films are shot through with the painful sense of
only being able to touch on—of not being able to be on the other side of these
images, within these images. The distance between viewer and image mirrors the
distance that exists all too often between people; no less than our proximity
to images, our proximity to others carries with it no guarantee of real
understanding or connection. In a striking early sequence from Akerman’s Proust
adaptation La captive (2000), Simon
(Stanislas Merhar), deeply and jealously in love with Ariane (Sylvie Testud),
projects her image onto a wall. Unable to stay away, Simon moves into the
projector’s light, altering Ariane’s image even as he seeks to merge with it;
he traces Ariane’s light-skin with his hand, but, as in his actual physical
encounters with her, contact only makes him more aware of the barrier between
them. Akerman always reminds us that we are sharing our time and space with her
images; whether they be of an empty road where a man died, a crowd of obscurely
waiting East Germans, or a woman sitting at a dining-room table after
committing a murder, she compels us to think both about the distance between us
and them, and about whether we can or should connect to them. Time spent in the
company of an image, or a person, may be no guarantee that we will understand
them, but sometimes it is all we can do.
It would be an injustice, however, to interpret Akerman’s
cinema as only a cinema of loneliness, of the impossibility of connection. In No Home Movie, Akerman reworks the image
from La captive in a sequence
depicting a Skype conversation between Akerman and Nelly, who are at that
moment separated by an ocean. As the women exchange words of endearment and
chit-chat, Akerman’s camera slowly zooms in on the computer screen. As Nelly’s
face starts to blur, the image begins to slip between layers: Nelly’s face
transforms from skin to a vacillating moiré pattern of beiges, blacks, and reds
and back again, while Akerman’s own face, reflected on the computer screen and
merging with her mother’s, floats in and out of view, each appearance somehow
more shocking and wonderful than the last. A solution through dissolution, this
image is rapturous—a shimmering giggle of a stolen moment.
So here, then, is a last “and.” Never one to prescribe or
dictate, Akerman instead leaves us with a feeling: sometimes, this world of
concrete things, bodies, and images is enough, and there is joy to be found
there. And sometimes, heartbreakingly, there is not.
Akerman films
reviewed:
Saute
Ma Ville (1968)
D'Est (1993)
No Home
Movie (2015)
No comments:
Post a Comment