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. — Chantal Akerman 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 Je tu il elle, 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 (Tomorrow We Move, 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.