THE FILMS OF CHANTAL AKERMAN
On one hand, the films of the 39-year-old Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman are about as varied as anyone could wish. Some are in 16-millimeter and some are in 35; some are narrative and some are nonnarrative; the running times range from 11 minutes to 205. The genres range from autobiography to personal psychodrama to domestic drama to comedy to musical to documentary to feature-in-progress–a span that still fails to include a silent, not-exactly-documentary study of a run-down New York hotel (Hotel Monterey), a vast collection of miniplots covering a single night in a city (Toute une nuit), and a feature-length string of Jewish jokes recited by immigrants in Brooklyn exteriors (Food, Family and Philosophy), among other oddities.
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The Akerman retrospective that started at Facets Multimedia Center earlier this month and concludes in early February isn’t quite exhaustive: probably the most significant omissions, currently unavailable in the U.S., are Dis-moi (1980), The Man With a Suitcase (1984), and her most recent feature, Food, Family and Philosophy, aka Histoires d’Amerique (1988). (An uncharacteristic and fairly conventional documentary about Pina Bausch and her dance company, One Day Pina Asked . . ., also made in 1984, which turned up on cable a few years ago, is also missing.) Nevertheless, this is the most complete presentation of Akerman’s work that Chicagoans are likely to get in the foreseeable future. And considering both the importance of her work and its general scarcity in the U.S.–none of her films, for example, has yet made it onto video–interested viewers should brave the risk of uneven and/or calamitous projection that plagues Facets screenings and check this filmmaker out. Whether you love or hate her work, I can guarantee you won’t find anything else remotely like it playing anywhere else; and three of her very best films–Window Shopping, Toute une nuit, and her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman–are showing this week.
There are, however, two potential obstacles to appreciating Akerman’s films that might be mitigated by a discussion of them. The first has to do with the role of a director and how it’s perceived. It’s widely believed, with some justice, that film criticism and appreciation in general made a significant step forward when the French term mise en scene was introduced in this country in the 60s, largely through the writing of Andrew Sarris. Becoming aware of the director, or metteur en scene, meant becoming aware of a director’s style and vision, and even though Sarris’s adoption of the term needlessly added hyphens to the French–giving “mise-en-scene” a certain mystical flavor in English which it retains even today–the term has added something of value to our overall conception of cinema.
The second obstacle to appreciating Akerman’s films has to do with Akerman’s being a Belgian Jew–though she has spent extended periods of her adult life and shot several of her films in both France and the U.S. Most of her films are in French, and it has been all too easy for many critics to discuss her work as if it were essentially part of the French cinema; but it’s an impulse that should be firmly resisted. The cultural dominance of France and the U.S. in relation to such countries as Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada has led to a streak of cultural imperalism that confuses our understanding of filmmakers as important as Michael Snow (Canadian) and Jean-Luc Godard (Swiss) as well as Akerman.
If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.
Perhaps the most extreme evocations of “normality” in Akerman’s work are the many heterosexual couples seen in Toute une nuit and Window Shopping. And somewhere in between are the formidable figures of Jeanne Dielman, a widow and compulsive housekeeper who turns tricks with male clients in the afternoons, and Anna in Les rendezvous d’Anna, a Belgian filmmaker traveling on the train from Cologne to Paris via Brussels and making various stops on the way. One token of Anna’s in-betweenness is her visit with her mother, played by Lea Massari, in Brussels. Instead of going home, where Anna’s ailing father is already asleep, they check into a cheap hotel room where Anna, lying naked beside her mother in bed, calmly describes a lesbian affair she has recently become involved in. (Her lover is never seen in the film, but she’s heard on Anna’s answering machine when she returns to Paris; and, to complicate matters, the voice is Akerman’s.)
There is something heroic about this failure, however, because in keeping with Flannery O’Connor’s statement quoted above, part of Akerman’s integrity as an artist consists of what she is not able to do. The yearning for romance and for the romance of the ordinary is a central ingredient of her work, but the most remarkable moments in her films are those in which her other, demonic impulses rebel against this fantasy. Emblematic in this respect is the ending of Toute une nuit, an insomniac’s movie about insomniacs, in which a couple’s lovemaking is gradually smothered, and all but obliterated from our attention, by the hectoring sounds of early-morning traffic outside. The tortured aggressiveness of such a moment is finally what her filmmaking is all about–her cold, elegantly symmetrical compositions and brutal sounds being hammered into our skulls with an obstinate will to power that makes Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Peckinpah, and Clint Eastwood all seem like pussycats.
