“Farewell: an Homage to Chantal Akerman”Frieze
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
FAREWELL Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975, 35mm film still A N HOMAGE TO CHANTAL A KERMAN 1950— 2015 Akerman_frieze176 V2.indd 112 09/12/2015 12:42 Tributes by The great flmmaker Chantal Akerman James Benning died in October 2015; she was 65. She made Manon de Boer her frst short flm, Saute ma ville (Blow Up Jem Cohen My Town, 1968), when she was just 18. Her frst Tacita Dean feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, Chris Dercon 1080 Bruxelles (1975), established her reputation Joanna Hogg & Adam Roberts as a radical, feminist flmmaker. Over the next Sharon Lockhart four decades, in her native Belgium and the US — Rachael Rakes as well as in China, eastern Europe, Israel and Mexico, among other places — Akerman made over 40 documentary and feature flms; she also created installation and video art. The infuence her work has exerted is inestimable. Following her death, the director Todd Haynes dedicated the screening of his latest movie, Carol (2015), to Akerman at the New York Film Festival, stating that ‘as someone thinking about female subjects and how they’re depicted’ her work had changed the ways in which he thought about, and imagined, film. Over the following pages, nine filmmakers, curators and artists refect on what Akerman’s work meant to them. Akerman_frieze176 V2.indd 113 09/12/2015 12:42 M ANON DE B OER JAMES B ENNING An artist based in Brussels, Belgium. A flmmaker living in Val Verde, California, USA. In the week following Akerman’s death, as Chantal Akerman. When she ate a bowl of an act of homage and as an attempt to hand sugar in Je, tu, il, elle (I, You, He, She, 1974), down her work to the next generation, I started I was hers. A few years later, I met her in an my flm class with her flm Hotel Monterey elevator in Milwaukee. She was a giant. Later, (1972). Sixty-fve minutes of silence, just D’est in Berlin. She was my hero. And then observing and tracing the hotel’s corridors the news. I was saddened. She lived her life. and spaces: a glimpse of a person behind a half-open door, the refection of light on the walls, a blinking elevator button in the dark. To me, it is one of her most radical flms JEM COHEN in terms of the experience of time and of a wide-embracing concentration. Watching this early flm anew with my A flmmaker based in New York, USA. students, I was more deeply aware of its silence CHRIS D ERC ON than previously. I remembered Akerman’s We’ve lost control of time. Distraction and voice. Her beautiful voice, so present in many acceleration count amongst the world’s of her other flms. It was a deep but still-young Director of Tate Modern, London, UK. primary business schemes. The determina- voice in News from Home, where, in a voice- tion to steal our time is now largely focused over, she’s reading her mother’s letters to In 1995, I conducted an interview with online, but it was pioneered by the entertain- her. It had become a more broken voice the Akerman in Paris for my television docu- ment factories of TV and cinema. In 1975, only time I saw her in person, in May 2013 in mentary Still/A Novel (VPRO, Hilversum, Akerman threw a mighty wrench into that Brussels. She was reading aloud her own 1996), about the question: ‘Did the cinema machinery. It was called Jeanne Dielman, letters to her mother in a four-hour reading die too early or too late?’ I had worked with 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. session. She was sitting alone, not looking at Akerman before. I showed, amongst other I once witnessed Akerman introduce the the audience, almost physically absent, but her works, her Les années 80 (The Eighties, 1983) flm with the insistence that, unlike other voice was fully there. It was flling the space, and La paresse (Laziness, 1986) in the exhibi- movies, ‘it did not take your time, but gave it’. making you listen and inviting you to be with tion ‘Au Coeur du Maelström’ at the Palais des This function was inseparable from its form. her, for a long time. There, as in all her work, Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1986. I had also- It set us across from a woman we’d otherwise she generously gave (her) time. loved her flm on choreographer Pina Bausch, never know. Her daily labour was bland and, Un jour Pina a demandé ... ultimately, terrifying. The film kept us with These and other flms by Akerman – her without escape until we had no choice as well as the bewildering, unreleased flm but to feel time as she lived it: dispassionately, auditions for Les années 80, which she had radically, unforgettably. The flm has become S HARON L O C KHART ‘smuggled’ into my hands – I kept showing a revenge and an antidote for all of the in the early 1980s to my flm students in viewings where we end up feeling we’ve lost Brussels, Paris and Pasadena (among them, a couple of hours that we’ll never get back. An artist living and working in Los Angeles, USA. Sharon Lockhart). Nearly 20 years later, We can’t get Akerman back, but the conversation I flmed with Akerman in I am so thankful for what she gave us. After I met Akerman only once, as a young artist, 1995 about the ‘death’ of cinema is still Jeanne Dielman, her generous and resolute after her opening at the Jeu De Paume in valid. Her words say a lot about how she granting of time continued in News from Home, Paris in the autumn of 1995. Her installation felt about her beloved medium and her D’est and many other projects predicated there of D’est was conceptually revelatory excursions into the feld of art: on deep, patient observation and a tough, for me. By juxtaposing a formal cinematic ver- curious, intelligence unlike any other. sion of the 107-minute work with a room of C HRIS DERCON 24 fragments looping on monitors, Akerman Is cinema slowly coming to an end? acknowledged the curious relationship flm has with the gallery space. Owning the dura- C HANT AL A KERM AN tional nature of her flm and its minimalist I don’t think so. Look at the flms of oldies structure, she efortlessly recognized that it such as Manoel de Oliveira, Jean-Luc Godard was a composition of individual and flmic or Éric Rohmer. They seem younger than gestures – a symphony of parts. The disap- most flms made by young ones. The excur- pearing social space that was so important sions that I make are just like children’s in the flm was mirrored in her installation: games: if you lose, you don’t get punished, individuals and groups congregated and and if you win, it’s like a party. And even fowed through the various screens. I’ve only though it makes little or no money, it still 1 & 2 seen such a deft negotiation of cinematic doesn’t do any harm. On the contrary: you No Home Movie, 2015, film stills and gallery spaces a few times since, and don’t have to bother with major production I’ve always thought of that installation as costs or poor ticket sales. In the world Courtesy Paradise Films, Brussels, and a compass. of cinema, money is all that matters. In Marian Goodman Gallery, It was with profound regret that I read a museum or when you are writing, you New York of her death. For a woman of such insight don’t have to constantly think about money and clarity of vision to fnd this world unin- […] These installations in museums and habitable is devastating. To me, she was the exhibitions don’t immediately have to raise real deal. money. I can always do diferent things. When I receive an invitation to do some- thing, I can say yes or no. And we’ll see what happens, or when. And of course there is the intense pleasure of ‘the frst time’. FRIEZE NO. 1 7 6 JANUAR Y • FEB R UAR Y 2016 119 Akerman_frieze176 V2.indd 119 09/12/2015 12:42.