Passages Through Time and Space: in Memory of Chantal Akerman

Home , Chantal Akerman, Je Tu Il Elle, News From Home

Chantal Akerman. Saute ma ville . 1968. Courtesy of the Chantal Akerman Estate and Marian Goodman Gallery. © The Chantal Akerman Estate.

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GIULIANA BRUNO

What viewer of Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has not been affected or even changed by the experience of watching this film? With the minimal simplicity of precisely framed “long takes,” Chantal Akerman’s break - through film, made in 1975, when she was only twenty-five, exposed the strictures of women’s time and space while creating a new cinematic language of observa - tion and a filmic longue durée . At age eighteen, Akerman had already made an explosive start with Saute ma ville (1968), directing herself, shut away and alone in her apartment, blowing up rituals of domesticity and, in the end, blowing herself up, together with her home. Personally full of life and energy but haunted by the dark specter of severe psychic pain, Akerman began her fictional journey with a defiant act of self-destruction that would come to be realized years later, when her life ended suddenly at age sixty-five. Akerman enriched our world through an extraordinarily ordinary journey com - posed of images, of places, perceptively explored and executed within a formally rig - orous aesthetic. Cities, lands, and homes are intimately portrayed in her frontal long takes, which capture the passing of everyday life—especially that of women—as they intensify our sense of time, memory, and space. Passing through doors, staring through windows, lingering in corridors, we are led to explore sites of transit and sep - aration, instances of cultural movement. The result is our own reflection on processes of displacement, transmigration, and diaspora, as both exterior and interior passages. Akerman’s reflections on the space of interiority are particularly affecting—so much so, in fact, that they can be internalized by the viewer. Her work is not just part of our cultural fabric; it is part of our intimate fabric. Akerman continued to experiment with moving images much beyond Jeanne Dielman . The new filmic form she pioneered in the 1970s was inflected by European modernist cinema and by her encounter with the “structuralist” para - digms of North American avant-garde artists such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton. An encounter with live performance is documented in her 1983 por - trait of Pina Bausch’s work in One Day Pina Asked . Most important, she moved easi - ly between fiction, documentary, and exhibiting in galleries. In the mid-1990s Akerman began to engage in an expanded field of film-based installation art, in an

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early stage of the cultural movement that drives today’s filmmakers and artists to exchange roles and work increasingly between media. The position Akerman holds in this expanded field of imaging is unique, for she was able not only to move back and forth between different kinds of cinema and moving-image installation but to interchange these modes of presentation. While she made work specifically for gallery exhibition, she also showed or “installed” her theatrical films in gallery spaces, generating a dialogue between artistic languages and modes of presentation. Her style of long-durational filming punctuated with minimal or casual action transferred well from the film theater to the art gallery. It resonates with the performative, subjective, roaming style of imaging that has come to inhabit our digital screens today. Her itinerant way of filming was especially suited to the peripatetic mode of reception experienced in the art gallery, where visitors interact with screens that can enhance displacement as well as forms of encounter and liminality. Akerman thus worked with multiple screens in Now , a resounding five-screen projection of traveling shots through desert landscapes that was shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale. She also experimented with the scale of the screen when conjur - ing the large, futuristic, Turner-like canvas in Nightfall on Shanghai (2007). Scrims were interestingly featured in To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004), a two-part installation in which the pages of a diary with inscriptions by the artist’s grandmother and mother were transformed into a diaphanous screen fab - ric. Through such experiments in the art gallery, Akerman thus created close encounters with the fabric of time and space. Presenting her feature-length film D’Est (1993) on twenty-four separate video monitors, she arranged sequences of interiors and exteriors in triptychs, as if installing paintings of still lifes and land - scapes in the space of the gallery. Here, as elsewhere in Akerman’s work, screens ultimately become the storage space for a mnemonic itinerary, transformed into a moving cultural archive. Akerman’s screen is a porous material that mediates an intensive sense of projection, a relationship between inside and outside, physical and mental space. Her traveling-dwelling in material space forms a psychogeography, and it involves a particular form of spectatorship. With her characteristic frames fixed as if to seize any motion that enters them, Akerman, in films such as Toute une nuit (1982) or Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), constructs a geometry of passage and a relational form of screening that empathetically includes us viewers. Typically in her cinema, the camera position is not centered on character identification but tends rather to move independently, remaining steady in time to observe space. It does not ask us to pry but simply to witness. We are made to exist in the space, and invited to stay overtime. This “being there” in time enables us to make a psychic leap, going beyond mere attendance toward a more intimate involvement. Refusing voyeurism and reaching for a closer spectatorial position, the work finally allows us to become participants. In this way, a visitor to Akerman’s world can even become sensitized to her own position in it. The placement of her camera sometimes indi -

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00247 by guest on 29 September 2021 Akerman. D’Est au bord de la Fiction. 1995. Installation view, Miami Art Museum. Photograph by Nancy Rubinson Watson. Courtesy of the Chantal Akerman Estate and Marian Goodman Gallery. © The Chantal Akerman Estate.

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cates where the author stands in all senses, since it even includes the measure of her slight height. It is a position that marks her presence there, never so close as to interfere or so far that her presence as a fellow traveler is not felt. From Akerman’s screens of projection, then, an experience of Einfühlung emerges: a “feeling into” the space of both landscape and streetscape. A sense of material space is enhanced by her careful architectonics of shot composition. Here, a purely formal arrangement, like an empty frame, can convey an affect. As an atmosphere unfolds in slow time-space, we can absorb what is in the air and share in a mood. Akerman’s work is, indeed, about this particular affect: a psychic atmosphere that transpires on the surface of things. Shot in what I would ultimate - ly call a distant intimacy, her images are formally arranged to allow for the kind of reserve that is needed to engage us closely. They enable, that is, the kind of analyt - ic detachment—the form of screening—that is necessary to create real empathy. This particular sense of “screening” is materialized in a film such as Là-bas (2006), which reflects on the very notion of what a screen is, treating it as a space of filtering and an architecture of sifting. Akerman increasingly explored her Jewish identity and family history in recent years, and Là-bas chronicles her sojourn in Tel Aviv with an act of screening space that makes ambiguous, even conflicting feelings of belonging clearly felt. Refusing to represent any site of trau - matic history directly, she shoots the film mostly from the interior of an apart - ment. She allows us to see the outside world only through blinds that are made of loosely woven reeds. A screen-partition is constructed to form a delicate physical boundary between inside and outside. This screen functions to filter the outside world but also “curtains” the space inside, enabling layers of history and memory to sift through. The screen fabric offers Akerman the shelter she needs “over there” to look out and see inside herself. Such a screen makes a process of intro - jection possible within its boundaries, which can be crossed. Over time, then, the screen becomes a textured space that retains complex forms of projection within its fabric. The material of this interwoven screen projects the filmmaker’s view - point and fabrication of intimacy. It is tailored to hold Akerman’s particular ver - sion of empathy: a position of distant proximity. We emerge with Akerman into the world only to look inward; we remain inside to look out. In this way, we plunge into the depth of a psychic, subjective space and even into personal history. Regardless of the distance we have traveled, the journey of discovery inevitably turns out to be an inner journey, one of self- analysis. We recognize this particular chamber. We know this curtained world, fil - tered through the screen of the installation of Là-bas , for we have been asked before to dwell in this room. Moving through the architecture of the interior in films such as Saute ma ville , La chambre I (1972) , Je tu il elle (1974), or even Hotel Monterey (1973) or Demain on déménage (2004), we have traversed a textured geog - raphy of interiority, both familiar and familial. This sense of familiarity invokes the familial because Akerman’s inner explo - rations, in film as in writing, are haunted by the maternal. Akerman’s mother, the

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subject of her 2013 memoir Ma mère rit , is present even when she is not there, as in News from Home (1977), where the visual chronicle of the filmmaker’s life in New York is tied to the sound of her letters. Concern and care, in Akerman’s world, also reveal that a mother’s traumatic history can live on inside her daughter, who must often struggle to exit her world. This experience is a familiar scene in psy - choanalytic terms. Such representations of the ties that bind mother-daughter, and of a chamber turning into confinement—the complex nuances of oikos— touch a generational chord. And so even if one was not fortunate enough to know Akerman personally, this inner vision can feel familiarly close. 1 It is as if this woman, this artist, had the ability to relay experiences that come from a place of reflection inside many of us. Despite the various media or locations they employ, whether in the cinema or the art gallery, as we step into any of Akerman’s many chambers we access rooms of projection that envelop us empathetically, for in these chambers we sense the depth of an intimate experience that we can share. Resting on the border of the screen of projection, this particular “feeling into” the space can become a mutual boundary to cross. And thus, safely positioned at a distance, we too can engage our own perilous history of projection: a voyage to—and a view from—home. Until, abruptly, Akerman’s journey reaches an end, with the terminal No Home Movie (2015). In her final chronicle of women’s lives, interior scenes in her mother’s Brussels apartment are intercut with moving desert scenes shared with her gallery film Now . Akerman documents her mother ailing and dying in her presence, even in virtual presence, as Skype is used as a way not simply of commu - nicating but of making a film where there is no more distance. In this way, she ren - ders the time of aging as it is, not as it is shown in movies. Caring for one’s mother is here an everyday occurrence, a quotidian worry, even a tedious experience made of daily chores, constant care, and watching. One waits for that meaningful conversation that might shed some light on traumatic family history and afford release, but in vain. In this personal documentary, time flows as it does in real experience, not as a series of events but as inexorable flux. In the end, after her mother has died offscreen, Akerman herself exits the scene, leaving her empty room behind. In film, as in life, that chamber can no longer be inhabited. Akerman’s last film was not a home movie, and there will be no more home to look into. The door of that familiar, exploratory chamber has been shut forever, for her and for us.

1. I am grateful to Annette Michelson for introducing me to Chantal in the early 1980s, initiating a friendship that has much enriched my life and work.

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