GOODNIGHT, CHANTAL

CORINA COPP

Rules prevent us from living. I go out in my pajamas, I’ve dispensed with fashion. I filmed all of my last film in pajamas. Today, I’m in my pajamas. —

But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. — Clarice Lispector

Top: Chantal Akerman, still from Portrait d’une parasseuse (Sloth), 1986. Bottom: Charlie Chaplin, still from A Beautiful Sunday Morning, 1919.

65 In Portrait d’une parasseuse (Sloth), a short film made for a group commission to support independent women filmmakers in 1986, which resulted in the omnibusSeven Women, Seven Sins, Chantal Akerman’s digital clock—a radio alarm—reads: 12:12. Make a wish. Her second clock, a square analog set atop the digital, a mere insistence, reads: 12:25. What time is it? A classic move by us sloths, to keep more than one clock around the room we sleep in, all set a few minutes ahead or behind another, so as not to know. The camera is held on the clocks, then cuts to the bed. Here, the director sits up straight, under the covers, en face. It’s not unfamiliar, this image of Chantal in bed. Beds dot her films, appearing frequently as grounds zero for lived reality—fromLa Chambre, 1972, where she rests also under the covers, sometimes with apple; to the famous mattress in , 1974; to Sylvain’s sofa bed in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975 (not to mention Jeanne’s own, of course, host to the event of events); to the “beds, pajamas, and people complaining of the unbearable heat,”1 of Toute une nuit (All Night Long, 1982); all the way up (and back) to mother and daughter sharing a bed in both Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings With Anna, 1978) and Demain on déménage (, 2004), tonally dissimilar films that rely on a common, heartfelt thread to entwine them: the actress Aurore Clément, who plays, first, the role of the daughter; and, 26 years later, the mother.

“To make a film, you have to get up, and get dressed,” Chantal says inSloth . The punchline is that she’s already dressed in her clothes for the day, a fact revealed in a sweep of the lavender blanket. “But if you don’t undress, you need not get dressed.” Rather than wear her night-clothes beneath her day-clothes, as Chantal did for many of her middle and later years—if not simply outright pajamas—in Sloth, she flips the script she does not yet have, placing herself outside of linear time while remaining deeply affected by it. Encapsulating in a daytime outfit the flow of night entering day, the director-actor is better equipped—having both efficiency and closer proximity to dream on her side—to handle whatever conditions she may encounter when making the film we’re in. It’s tempting to involve more philosophical territory: Night and day contain each other, much as Akerman’s films do contain the Other and contain each other. “Night must pass into day,” writes Blanchot. “Night becoming day makes the

1 Mateus Araujo, “Chantal Akerman, Between the Mother and the World,” Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1, p. 37.

66 light richer and gives to clarity’s superficial sparkle a deep inner radiance. Then day is the whole of the day and the night…”2

Charlie Chaplin, who is being rushed out of bed throughout his short movie, A Beautiful Sunday Morning (1919), has the same moves as Chantal. Once he’s revealed that he’s already dressed, he turns over, away from the camera, to go back to sleep. His grumpy roommate’s clock reads: 3:55, so it’s true they’ve lost the day. Two instances of someone—if we can call Charlie Chaplin and Chantal Akerman “someones”— engaging in filmed self-portraiture, self-directed, self-motivated, barely. “Get up, lazy one,” Chantal sings to herself. “All by himself, he was the crowd,” wrote Marguerite Duras of Chaplin. “Drowned as in a bottomless pit. Nothing would stop his fall. The event would drop to the deepest part of him. It would be lost and Chaplin would let it be lost, he would let go.”3 “Charlie Chaplin, that’s me,” Akerman wrote to annotate Family Business (1984), for her infamous “Pajama Interview” with film scholar Nicole Brenez. I’d like to argue, or at least to say, that Akerman’s self-alignment with Chaplin—which occurred more than once throughout her life—might be a personal truth-telling, an identification with an attuned kind of clumsiness and a relationship to time that prioritizes transition over rule, that inevitably instructs a viewer to take heart. Put another way: Get up, whenever. This condition of whenever lies along a continuum where night and day belong to each other, where things are not fully resigned to darkness, but where light is not locatable either. I think of it as a temporal modification to Agamben’s whatever singularity:4 It is not affirmed by a strange openness, on one end, a void; neither is it reducible to any manner of societal expectations of the body’s rise and fall. Whenever, in this case, is particular. It could be whatever time it is when you have one clock atop another, reading differently, and are waking, supraliminal, calculating the minutes themselves. “To make a film, you have to get up,” Akerman asserts; the film you make will be made then. I’d like to call this whenever, this moment out of all other moments of waking, and subsequently, of and for making, a “never- night.” This time for art-making is the negation of nightmare. In no closing of the day, no contingent darkening for living by one’s wits. But if it is never night, then it is never,

2 Maurice Blanchot, “Sleep, Night,” The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 3 Marguerite Duras, “Chaplin, Yes,” Green Eyes, translated by Carol Barko, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 65. 4 A good explanation of the “whatever singularity” can be found in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life, eds. Mat- thew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 73–74.

67 also, day. “And without a day, there won’t be a night either. In that,” as Etel Adnan reminds me, “Revelation will have perfected itself.”5 If we wish to find the realm of the self-motivated Chaplin and Akerman, it’s here. “When the event would come back to him, after some time in him, in forgetfulness, especially in the unintelligible, it’s then that Chaplin would recognize it and would make it concrete.”6

In Nuit et jour (Night and Day, 1991), Julie (Guilaine Londez) refuses to sleep, “in an attempt to balance night and day” and “reject the notion of a natural cycle.”7 The camera follows her along the streets of a summer night, and she sings to herself as she passes through the cityscape: “We don’t have a child; it isn’t the right time. At night, he drives his taxi … at night, I wander around Paris … I always get home before him. I wait for the day, I erase the night.” In one wistful moment of multiplicity, Julie stops briefly in front of a black-and-white poster presumably advertising a concert for cellist Sonia Wieder Atherton, Chantal’s life partner.

Chantal Akerman, still from Nuit et jour (Night and Day), 1991.

5 Etel Adnan, Night, Nightboat Books, 2016, p. 36. 6 Duras. 7 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996, p. 182.

68

Chantal Akerman, still from Nuit et jour (Night and Day), 1991.

Barbara McBane wrote recently, quoting Ivone Margulies: “Songs and humming are conjured […] ‘against the dread of stasis that haunts’ such films asSaute ma ville and Jeanne Dielman.” 8 It might be simple enough then to reiterate (as many have noted) that Akerman’s musical and comedic gestures rely on a system of opposites; nourishing with one hand what is always-already the subject, emotionally punctuating with sing-song, lightness, absurdity, and transference, if I can gather that term here. Akerman herself said to Brenez: “I want to get away from anything concerning the camps, I’ve been so caged in by it that I need to breathe. I’d rather sing.”9 This “caging” of the metaphorical bird began in childhood, despite her mother’s silence around her memories of the war; or rather, Chantal was “born into trauma,” as she herself stated, and suffered recurring nightmares of what she had surmised had happened to her mother in the camps—nightmares of unknown, inherited trauma, events about which her mother, again, never spoke. Importantly, she recalled: “I was so scared to go to sleep, I asked my mom to repeat ‘Bonne nuit, Chantal,’ ‘Goodnight, Chantal,’ until she had found the right tone for it.”10

8 Barbara McBane, “Walking, Talking, Singing, Exploding … And Silence: Chantal Akerman’s Soundtracks,” Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1, p. 42. 9 “Chantal Akerman: The Pajama Interview,” Interview with Nicole Brenez,Lola Journal, Issue 2, 2011. http://www. lolajournal.com/2/pajama.html 10 Ibid.

69 I am compelled by this concept of “the right tone,” this accuracy at nighttime; the shift from the mother’s voice to the daughter’s that occurred as Chantal went on to make films; how this voice “itself” is exchanged and replayed in her work through use of voiceover and dislocation; and the responses of insomnia and sleep, the latter a site, for Blanchot, that recalls the “ignorant bliss of early childhood,” where one can “[concentrate] in the narrowness of this place where the world recollects itself,” and where one affirms the world, and is affirmed by it. Certainly Chantal sought after the “goodnight” as a lullaby—a consolation before the fact, a lulling into sleep, a positive sounding to serve as preemptive backdrop for dream, a charging the nightmare with a maternal guard. Isn’t that why we say goodnight, to wish each other well? But what interests me is the determination read here in her wanting to get the “right” farewell.

It is a bit like Akerman’s use of footsteps, in her films.11 It’s less that she is interested in footsteps in general, but seeks to record a particular sort of sound, a determined step that tends to click or pound almost “truer” than the sounds layered beneath it— train stations, ambient noise, music, talking, weather, silence. Chantal often said in interviews that she would decide on one cut over another, or shot, or line, or even project, simply because it “felt right.” Speaking of her editing process, she said in 2001: “You go to the screening, and you realize that what you have taken out was the wrong moment. But then you understand that maybe, because it was the wrong moment, that this moment is the right moment.”12 It is this intuition transported sonically that we hear to be “true” and thus “right.” Once intuition is conveyed, and attention cultivated, sound’s importance is magnified in whatever hierarchy of story elements. Cinematographer and director Babette Mangolte, who collaborated with Akerman to create the signature formalist mise-en-scène of her 1970s films—most famously expressed in Jeanne Dielman—once said as much in discussing their work on Hôtel Monterey (1972): “We had recorded some sound and she recorded more sound afterwards, coming back with a tape recorder.Hôtel Monterey was an important experience for me because the sound of the elevator, the door opening and closing, were actually the events, understand? The people were mostly there as static figures, basically.”13

11 For more on Akerman’s use of footsteps, see the McBane article; as well as Bérénice Reynaud, “These Shoes Are Made for Walking,” Senses of Cinema, “Chantal Akerman: La Passion de L’Intime / An Intimate Passion,” Issue 77, Dec. 2015. 12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6LdyutA-rk 13 Babette Mangolte to Colleen Kelsey, “The Education of Babette Mangolte,”Interview Magazine, March 30, 2016. http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/babette-mangolte/

70 I also imagine that this bedtime scene thematizes repetition itself. The tone of her mother’s voice might not have been particularly sonorous—as in a ringing, or a resonating—but a tone she simply preferred out of all the tones her mother could have offered,to her, for her. Looking for a way she prefers her mother to talk to her— directing her mother to soothe her, of course. If “Bonne nuit, Chantal,” is repeated on command, and offered, eventually, in “the right tone(s),” the phrase would also reach an end-point of most intimate consolation. What I mean is that this sort of spoken refrain seems to occur most often when one is speaking to oneself. “I am so sorry, I am so sorry, I am so sorry, I am so sorry,” I have said to myself, in a sort of dangerously “schizoid” manner of self-accompaniment. Or in chant (song) and in meditation, the refrain acts as a simultaneous self-centering and an opening outward. For where much of Akerman’s dialogue can be said to convey redundance—with its exchanges often repeats of what another has just said, or its emphasis on recitation and rhythm—the repetition in the “right tone,” instead of losing meaning, begins to illuminate something beyond its particular, original referent. This sort of repetition makes a space for a new imaginary, what I’d expect filmmaker Raúl Ruiz would be tempted to connect with his concept of “shamanic cinema.” It is my belief that Ruiz could be describing Akerman’s work when he calls for a cinema to “become the perfect instrument for the revelation of possible worlds which coexist right alongside our own.” “But what is the beyond?” he asks. “Let’s put ourselves in the audience’s shoes.” To quote further:

Everyone associates bits of memory, so that incidents which did not actually happen in succession are juxtaposed in our memory. We all possess a huge number of potential film sequences that coexist in a compact space and time. These sequences are interchangeable and superimposed one on the other. All these films are sleeping within us. An ordinary narrative movie provides a vast environment in which these potential film sequences disperse and vanish. A shamanic film, on the other hand, would be more like a land mine: it explodes among these potential films and sometimes provokes chain reactions, allowing other events to come into being.14

14 Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, translated by Brian Holmes. Editions dis voir, Paris, 2005, p. 79–80.

71 Ruiz even taps into Akerman’s vocabulary. Our memory is invented, dreamt, not always experienced, made up of disparate, seen, or felt sequences; films aresleeping within us; and an explosion (such as Saute ma ville’s final moment, an instance of self-destruction often construed to express the political turmoil of Western Europe in 1968) can make way for other events to come into being—it is here that experimentation, installation, performance, and literary texts would or could come to the fore, both for Akerman the artist, and for other art practitioners influenced by her. Ivone Margulies calls this beyond, created by “[Akerman’s] reliance on recitation and clichés,” a “parallel register for verbal reception.” This too can be reversed, so that the imaginary leads one to talk about one’s life: Where the lullabye acts as nightmare corrective, an art practice itself can operate as a balm, must treat the real—though I am fairly sure Chantal would find this too simplistic.

Nicole Brenez: If you go back to your life, your freedom, your creativity—don’t you have the feeling of a kind of reparation?

Chantal Akerman: No, definitely not. What reparation? At first, I thought I was speaking out, since my mother never had been able to—but now I know that’s not it. That I never had a choice. Not really. Well, I don’t know.

Chantal felt called “to speak” (to create) or was “born into” that necessity to speak, and for what, or whom, if not her mother, who was the sole survivor in her family of Auschwitz? In the fragile light of motivation, it’s hard not to see Chantal taking on the means of production of meaning itself, even while, as she intimates to Brenez, reparation is impossible. It is worth emphasizing—so much has been beautifully written about this elsewhere15—that a dialogue with her mother “haunts all of Akerman’s work, a fact she has never tried to hide, and which she was able to admit in a direct way to

15 For more on Akerman’s identification with her mother, see Alisa Lebow, “Identity Slips: The Autobiographical Register in Chantal Akerman’s Work,” Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1. Lebow also points to writing about Ak- erman by Brenda Longfellow, particularly “Letters to the Mother: The Work of Chantal Akerman,”Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13, nos. 1–2, 1989, pp. 73–90. This essay is also cited by scholar Adriana Cerne, who wrote of as a “mother-daughter tale of two cities” in Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Blackwell Pub., 2006, edited by Griselda Pollock. See also Tijana Mamula, “Matricide, Indexicality and Abstraction in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home and Là–bas,” Studies in French Cinema 8, no. 3, 2008, pp. 265–75.

72 [Mateus Araujo] in a discussion at the Pompidou Center: ‘the only subject of my films is my mother.’”16 So what is always-already the subject perhaps need not be given a voice even if it’s determined to be silent (about the past). Their voices were enmeshed from the very start of a trajectory together, with Natalia (Nelly) Akerman’s plight being that it mattered that her voice was for her daughter, not that it did not exist without her. Voice in Akerman’s films struggles and exhausts itself of a reparative function through formal maneuvers: Her mother’s voice flows from personal letters, read by Chantal as a form of response in News From Home (1976); or is itself heard between interviews with Jewish grandmothers in Dis-moi (Tell Me, 1980); and often it is unspoken, displaced in another’s, or dislocated, resulting in a use of voice as elemental in a theater of visibility. “The acousmatic [off-screen] voice is so powerful because it cannot be neutralised within the framework of the visible,” writes Slovene philosopher Mladen Dolar, “and it makes the visible itself redoubled and enigmatic.”17

In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), a man’s voice is heard from behind Anna’s head as she watches out the window of the train from Cologne. (“Habet acht,” “Watch out,” wrote Ingeborg Bachmann in an invocation of Isolde’s handmaiden Brangäne, who warns the two lovers that a new day is coming.) They stand side by side in the corridor, strangers, as Hans, played by Hanns Zischler, asks Anna questions about herself, talks of France, Germany, home, language, and freedom. What’s amusing, for me, about this relatively somber fixed shot of about a minute, is that Anna eventually employs, in her quiet conversing with Hans, the instructions given to Juliette Binoche’s character Beatrice by her friend Anne in Akerman’s romantic comedy A Couch in New York (1996). The camera frames perfectly the head of Aurore Clément as Anna, and Clément’s verbal responses to Hans’s voice effectively illustrate a syntactic symmetry that Akerman would almost joyfully explain, 18 years later, through Beatrice and Anne’s echoic exchange. The instructions surround the question, for Beatrice, of how she might try on the identity of a psychoanalyst. Anne recounts how her own analyst used to conduct himself linguistically:

Anne: Sometimes, he would just repeat a word, one single word, from my last sentence. What an effect that had, I’d mull it over night and day.

16 Araujo, p. 32. 17 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, p. 79.

73 Beatrice: He would repeat a word.

Anne: He’d say it very quietly. Very neutrally, very softly, so as not to interrupt my flow of thought.

Beatrice: A word … what word?

Anne: Just a word.

Beatrice: Mmhmm. Just a word. And that’s all.

Anne: No. That’s not all.

Beatrice: What else?

Anne: Well sometimes, he would also say: “Yes.”

Beatrice: Yes.

Clément’s Anna, however, is composed quite differently from Binoche’s inquisitive Beatrice. Her gaze registers a stage direction: It is as if it’s been suggested she look through him. The young Sophie, in Akerman’s playHall de nuit (Night Lobby, L’Arche, 1992), “looks at the bellhop, but absentmindedly. She no longer sees him.” Teufik, the bellhop, in reaction: “I am see-through. I managed to be see-through. It’s what I always wanted. I’m not here.”18 In Rendez-vous…, what Hans wants is of little concern, but his talk of home and destination, spoken as the train rolls along in a comforting thrum, confirms a nomadic poetics that is essential to Akerman’s cinema, and here, already in process for the transitory Anna; by the time she utters “yes,” she seems taken in enough by the traveler.

Hans: They say Belgium’s the land of plenty.

Anna: So they say.

Hans: Where do you live?

18 Chantal Akerman, Hall de nuit, L’Arche, Paris, 1992, p. 12. Translation mine.

74 Anna: Paris.

Hans: I’m going to Paris too. I’m going to live there because they say France is the land of freedom.

Anna: So they say.

Hans: Maybe I’ll be happy there.

Anna: Maybe.

Hans: Anyway, you’ve got to live somewhere.

Anna: Yes, that’s true.

Chantal Akerman, still from Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings With Anna), 1978.

The camera moves then to Hans, as if let free, and the new view clears up his position— our figures are no longer next to each other nor directly across, but Hans stands on the x-axis just a little to her right. He is also talking downward. So the focal point for Anna’s gaze was middle distance—he truly wasn’t there. “Akerman’s work consistently places deceptively similar realities in apposition to suggest that they are not quite the same. Or an accretion of indexical references somehow suggests something not quite

75 then and there.”19 This unique pressurizing of space and time also pretty plainly offers an image—a close-up of an actress who lends herself both in body and voice to the roles of daughter, here, and mother, later—as a possible zone of inhabitation.

More than having a singular image do all of the work, it’s the combination of language with the visual, spatial, and sonic effects that comprise this shot—Akerman’s framing of Clément while the voice of an unseen male interlocuter numbly speaks off-screen, of home, of freedom, of societal expectations and prohibitions in relation to the wanderer, layered over the rumblings of the train passing through the night—that makes a form of lyric projection possible, “a presence a constant reminder of an absence.”20 “Dear soul, am I only because I have been?”21 Ultimately, it is one of the most gorgeous renderings of a person’s internal focusing that I have ever seen in cinema. This use of image also calls to mind the photographs set lovingly in Akerman’s memoir, Ma mère rit (My Mother Laughs, Mercure de France, 2013). In her eulogy at Père Lachaise cemetery in October 2015, Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur recalled the book when talking of Chantal’s life’s work too as if it were an extended gesture of repair—though these energies of reparation are shaping up more like burdens of causality, wrung with sound. “On the silence of her mother, Chantal placed images, thousands of images, what she calls ‘noise on the silence’ in her autobiographical book.”22

In Toute une nuit (All Night Long), dislocation of voice interrupts the flow of time, but briefly. Chantal’s mother is, for the first time in Chantal’s movies, utilized as an actor. Nelly leans against a wall, at night, smoking as if on a break from work, while Chantal’s voice-off calls “Maman! Maman…” Here we have reason for “Goodnight, Chantal”—the daughter’s acousmatic call to bring her in. It’s what Dolar would call an “effective interpellation”; and what Blanchot might see as an ecstatic union of presence and absence, much like sleep. “Thanks to this shot,” writes Araujo, “the imaginary confrontation between mother and daughter finds the most literal representation it had ever attained in Akerman’s work, in the consistence of the body of the one with the voice of the other.”23

19 Margulies, p. 206. 20 Delphine Horvilleur, “Homage to Chantal Akerman,” translated by Mark Cohen. Film Quarterly, Winter 2015, Volume 69, Number 2. 21 Adnan, p. 47. 22 Horvilleur, p. 101. 23 Araujo, p. 37.

76

Chantal Akerman, still from Toute une nuit (All Night Long), 1982.

“The acousmatic voice in cinema is not simply the voice whose source is outside the field of vision … [it is] the one which we cannot locate,” writes Dolar. The mother, saying “goodnight,” is one half of what must occur (sleep, dream). Her voice has an identifiable source, her body. The mother’s voice is paradigmatic, says Dolar: “[It is] the voice whose source the infant cannot see.”24 This distinctive dynamic, intimate and tense as any, is best replicated in cinema through the power of the telephone, a fixture for Akerman. It is the telephone, I’d like to imagine, that sutures the voice to comedy, that effects distance enough to bring daytime into night, and night into day, as Akerman does not tend to use it as other directors, say to charge a scene with meaning or suspense. Instead, it can be a place to make up one’s story. “It’s said that Chaplin’s greatest stroke of luck was to have arrived on the scene in the period of silent movies,” said Duras. “I say that this dimension of the silent movies has never been reached in the talkies.” Yet in Akerman’s TV short Family Business, a Belgian daughter (played by the director) is on a hunt to find her rich uncle in Los Angeles; and the choreographed, slapstick movements, jerking responses to sound-effects, rapid speech rhythms, the use of an extravagant amount of quarters to perform a long-distance phone call to her mother, and her jaunty cris-crossing of an expansive parking lot are an homage to pantomime and silent cinema.

24 Dolar, p. 65-66.

77 More functionally, the telephone for Akerman is interruptive, its ring a reverberative wand that conducts a shift in interiority made explicit through whatever response. In Margulies’s analysis of Toute une nuit, she finds in Aurore Clément’s answering of the telephone in the final scene of the film—at which point the music stops, and she says to the other end of the line only “yes,” eight times in a row—a reckoning with the excess and intermingling of dialogue, text, and speech, and heavy signifiying of the absence of passion between two lovers therewith, that precede her picking up the phone. “As the telephone rings, [the] suggestion of an impossible or oblique dialogue is bluntly laid aside along with the corny romantic song,” writes Margulies. “The remnants of romantic modernist transcendality [...] are swiftly traded for an alternative positing of passion: instead of a suggestive (and romantic) suspension, Akerman has Clément say ‘oui.’ The sound from the street is very loud; laying over it a single syncopated word, Akerman composes a concretist score that finally moves the night’s intensity into the morning.”25

“Oui. Oui. Oui. Oui. Oui. Oui. Oui. Oui.” Chantal Akerman, still from Toute une nuit, 1982.

Passion exhibited by the accumulating “oui”/“yes,” as Margulies reads it, shares the humid move to dawn with the positing of another affect, a daughterly compliance. Clément is still 22 years from playing Catherine, the mother in Tomorrow We Move,

25 Margulies, p. 182.

78 and in this scene she is being called upon to effect a particular whatever response: to double down on feminized answerability itself. Her “yes” constructs a fantasy, a “parallel register for verbal reception,” in which all that is needed to support the one who calls (all the better to misdirect the lover who waits) is sheer willingness. Or would this affirmation, so like the “yes” that sutures shut the dialogues in Les Rendez- vous... and A Couch in New York, fall more along the lines of what artist Frances Stark puts forth in Called upon (Same thing over and over), 2007? In this print, identical graphite figures overwhelmed by kimono-like, rotary-telephone-shaped “performance dresses” are sorted into a pyramid; and against a grey background, a reader may discern the text between them: “The desolation of acting a part, the desperation of imitation, the brutalizing torment of brutalization and of saying the same thing over and over again.” Could “oui,” repeated eight times, be a form of willing in some seductive imaginary that also enacts its own refusal (to act)? Yes: What is left over, or quite gently yielded, is a tone of voice.

My final example of the dislocated voice is inLa Chambre (1972), Akerman’s approximately 10-minute “moving still life,” one that appears to be her own. In “The Pajama Interview,” she noted of this film: “I can breathe but stay in bed. It was done the day after I finished Monterey.” It is a film without aural accompaniment, as it is silent. And its time feels particularly, to me, exemplary of what I’m calling a “never- night,” not only because it is daytime, but because it does not seem to belong to time’s rules: Its turning, returning camera, a revolving eye, captures as any film does the day (or night) when you’re watching the film, but also the particular moment when the film was made, of course (in this case, downtown New York in the 1970s). More intensely, the negotiation of the desire on the part of the director to film the feeling of being watched (and being watched as a desiring subject) and to more simply be the agent that allows a viewer to experience time passing, is deeply, well, felt. It makes of Akerman, who has cast herself as herself, collective, social: she who has the potential to disrupt linear conceptions of time in her doubleness. Lauren Berlant’s consideration of the split subject/object: “The centrality of repetition to pleasure and deferral of desire indeed places the desiring subject in her story, and well makes her a reader of her story. These two forms, acting and interpretation, enable the desiring subject to reinhabit her own plot from a number of different vantage points, simultaneously.”26 Babette

26 Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love, Punctum Books, Brooklyn, 2012.

79 Mangolte’s camera, then, as it interacts in close proximity with the objects external to it—Chantal in bed, the loom, the writing desk, the teapot, the stockings hanging, the mirror, the sink, the window, the table, and back to Chantal in bed, her position prone now, her body moving, masturbating, her gaze locked on the lens, the apples next to her, and the ashtray, the coffee cups, the oranges, the dishes, the armoire, and then again around the room, and then again—is an eye whose inarguable technicity maintains a sense both strangely intimate and voyeuristic, with its repetitive cycling having the effect of a surveillance camera circling in place to record the minutest of change in motion. It seems to be peeking on someone out of this world, a watcher, a listener, what Margulies calls a “sympathetic presence.”27

Assisting my thinking on this is the revelation that a never-used monologue written for La Chambre was discovered in 2016, and subsequently translated into English by Mark Cohen for Film Quarterly’s Akerman dossier, edited by Margulies. This brings me back to my subject, not split. The voiceover text is in the uninterrupted voice of a singular woman, less troubled by memory and distance than usual, and very much preoccupied by living in and navigating (and checking the time in) New York City. “There was only him and me in the train, I got out a long way from my house and I walked I climbed up slowly and threw myself on the bed, I got up to check the two clocks, they both said the same time 10:30, they must surely have been an hour slow. I went back to bed, I slept on my stomach, my head in my arms, I could not see if you weren’t there.”28

It’s interesting to ponder why Akerman chose to exclude herself voicing the text in the film. It is possible she felt, as she might have of her mother’s refrain of “Bonne nuit, Chantal,” that the text was something made for her, also by her, to keep for herself. Duras’s observation that Chaplin, all by himself, was the crowd, lies in parallel to this (albeit speculative) sentiment; and moreover, it amplifies Akerman’s connection to the physical comedian if we read the voiceover as a melody for oneself, understood particularly—but not just as well—if never heard at all.

27 Ivone Margulies, “Echo and Voice in Meetings with Anna,” Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, ed. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Flicks Books, 1999. 28 Chantal Akerman, “VOICE-OVER La Chambre 2,” translated by Mark Cohen. Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1.

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