Cinematic Alchemy with Chantal Akerman
With our shredded attention spans, what can the works of Chantal Akerman offer us even when they feel difficult to sit through?
“I don’t particularly enjoy it,” is how I find myself responding to most of Chantal Akerman’s films. Slow, structural, and experimental, they’re not easy to sit through because they unfold with no desire to engage. Without the controlled ceremony of watching them in the theatre, watching these films at home is a tremendous exercise in attention. However, what's the desired personal response we want a film to invoke in us? Is enjoyment, engagement, or entertainment the only goal of art?
Over on my film podcast, Deep Cut, we’ve been busy preparing and recording a new series on Chantal Akerman. It has somehow fallen to me to become the “resident expert” (expert is putting it a little strongly of course) on Akerman and learning about her approach to the craft has been illuminating.
I don’t feel particularly strongly about Akerman’s work. There are aspects of her identity that are crucial to the kind of work she produces and the themes she explores: her queerness, her Jewishness, her womanhood, her relationship with her mother. These are critical elements that, if your own personal experience rhymes with any of them, Akerman’s work takes on greater power. They speak directly to you.
I think my co-hosts, Eli and Wilson, both take away much more from Akerman because they connect more deeply with these essential themes. I am envious of their emotional response. I wish I could say my time overseas made me feel the aching future regret of not contacting my mother more, as it does for Akerman, and as it does for Wilson. I wish I had the same understanding of experiencing Jewish culture that allows me to feel the resonance in Jeanne Dielman between domestic and Jewish ritual, as it does for Akerman, as it does for Eli.
With that all in mind, what can Akerman offer me?
I reference this Q&A with Celine Sciamma at BFI, where she discusses Akerman’s work, in our upcoming episodes on Akerman:
I love Sciamma’s response to the clip from La captive at 16:25: she raises her arms, gestures randomly and makes a soundless face. It is “pure cinema” in that the only response is not words or analyses or dissertations but a feeling inexplicable. Akerman’s work refuses intellectual analysis. It is pure in that any act of explanation through written or spoken language can only create a weak facsimile of the response created inside you.
Sciamma calls Akerman’s work one that is in love with the language of cinema, in what it can uniquely produce that other art forms, or even language itself, cannot. For Akerman, this language primarily manifests in your forced experience of her timing and rhythm, the power of a cut, and the effects of a rectangular frame on action. Of course, all this goes for many other kinds of cinema. These are fundamental building blocks.
Maybe “refuse analysis” is the wrong way to put it. If anything, they can be easily dissected. The programmatic structure of News from Home is easily elucidated. We can plainly lay out the predefined temporal and spatial rules she follows for the editing of Jeanne Dielman that result in slow cinema. As opposed to rules chosen because slow cinema was the goal; a subtle distinction. However, intellectual analysis can only go so far with some of Akerman’s works. There is some other element at play that creates the emotional response.
That element is you. The alchemy of all cinema is that the sights and sounds it produces, coupled with the time you afford it, creates a “third thing” that can only manifest within you, essentially unique to your experience because only you have the ability to conjure it. I say “thing” because it is necessarily abstract and open-ended: a feeling, a thought, a revelation, a sensation, an experience.
I think the key for Akerman is that she respects time. Yours and hers. She has firm conviction in her own time, her own sense of rhythm, and she also venerates the time you afford her. She talks in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere about not wanting to steal time from you, but instead give it back to you and allow you to experience it. There’s a ritualistic nature to watching a film in the cinema: you “sacrifice” your time to the screen, relinquishing autonomy over the ensuing passage of time until the credits roll, and you hope for something in return.
For most films, the strategy is to engage and entertain across the runtime so you feel you get commensurate “return on investment” for that time, wherein it is full of action, intrigue, or emotional engagement. However, I think Akerman sees such strategies as distraction. A distraction from yourself, and your experience of that offered time. The deliberate slowness of her cinema creates the opportunity to align your time with Akerman’s time but still affording the opportunity to conjure your own response, something less immediate and reactive, something contemplative. With Akerman, you are allowed to sit with yourself.
I recently watched Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna, and once again the immediate response was, “I didn’t particularly enjoy it.” The pace of the film is slow, and we follow Anna, a film director, meeting lovers, family, and strangers as she travels around Europe, ostensibly travelling with a new film. In each encounter, Anna largely takes on the role of a listener as her counterpart unfurls a long monologue about themselves.
I can’t say these long conversations are particularly interesting, and many of them do little to uncover the full dimensions of Anna as a character. These conversations are generally self-serving from the perspective of Anna’s counterparts. Aside from Anna’s more intimate conversation with her mother, that finally allows us to hear Anna tell a story about herself, the encounters she has do not stick (neither with me nor her), and we can scarcely get a sense of Anna’s own emotional responses to these encounters.
Strung together like this, and interspersed with scenes of Anna travelling on cabs and trains, Akerman charges the film with a prevailing emptiness. It builds to a listless ending in which Anna, finally home, lies in bed listening to her answering machine as people try to set up even more meetings with her. Will they take on the same tenor as the meetings we saw before? Does she look forward to more meetings, or does she look back fondly on those past meetings? Even in her own bed, Anna is travelling from place to place, her face stricken with a despairing loneliness. Even at home, she feels lost.
Arguably, those interstitial scenes feel more critical to the film than the meetings Anna has. I am taken by the shots from the train of the stations it pulls into and through. Deserted and warmly lit with incandescent lights, there are people but few of them, some travellers, some station workers. These stations feel cold, in temperature and feeling, laden with inherent sadness. The emotional tenor of Anna’s meetings seep into these landscapes, there’s a deep sense of being adrift. Furthermore, even within these meetings, it is the wordless moments between characters that feel like Akerman’s true focus. Look no further than Akerman’s own Toute une nuit, and From the East for proof.
Toute une nuit (A Whole Night) from 1982 is organised around a series of late night meetings over the course of a single night, and takes on a similar tone to those in The Meetings of Anna. Throughout the night we join multiple characters meeting, separating, embracing, or existing alone hoping to be with another. On paper, it sounds like an expanded version of The Meetings of Anna, but we are treated to dozens of these scenes and characters. They largely lack dialogue and no characters are named. These scenes live in the realm of pure action. It’s as if Akerman is asking, “What if the entire film was composed only of the moments where characters most strongly feel together and alone?” It is slow dancing, rushed consummation, and elongated partings over and over again, without context, plot, or story; a tapestry of romantic yearning, dissolution, and climax. It is pure feeling.
From the East, a documentary from 1993, captures the general vibe of the Eastern Bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It comprises sparse landscapes, wordless interior scenes, and many lateral tracking shots of people in transit: waiting for the train, the bus, or for the end to come. Despite the presence of a select few short scenes of energised partying or music, much of the film is focused on extended stasis. The landscapes of public transit spaces echo News from Home and The Meetings of Anna, and the interior scenes evoke Jeanne Dielman, frequently with a subject in the middle of their kitchen smoking a cigarette or doing a chore.
As in Toute une nuit, there is no single subject here, but rather a collection of scenes and landscapes that evoke some sort of pure feeling, of living ghosts and an eternal wait. The human subjects become part of these landscapes, imparting them with life, thereby making the physical spaces themselves “human.” It is as if Akerman is asking, “how can I make a scene of nothing make you feel something?”
There’s a funny phrase writers sometimes use where they call one work the “Rosetta Stone” for the rest of an artist’s work. Which is to say the work helps to unlock and understand the rest of the oeuvre. This is usually an early seminal work with clues towards an artist's predominant obsessions. I can’t say Akerman’s filmography has a singular Rosetta Stone, because it seems every single work associates to all the others in a tangled cat’s cradle of connections. Akerman has always been remarkably consistent.
As evocative as I might make these films sound, these are still not engaging films in the traditional sense. They are intriguing to turn over in one’s head, but they do not represent a fun time in the cinema or on the couch. However, there’s still value in that. They made me write these words. They made me contend with the value of cinema. They made me realise the power of sitting with myself. Akerman’s work can do that, you just need to give her time.
Other Notes
Hello readers, it’s been a little while hasn’t it? I’ve realised how long it takes an idea to take root. In the preceding two months, I’ve been working on a few other side projects, keeping Deep Cut going, and trying to get a handle on more writing, both for this newsletter and otherwise.
For this newsletter, I’m hoping to get back into it more regularly with shorter pieces and try not to have essay ideas grow into untameable beasts. This is a piece where I’m trying to quickly get at a simple idea, even so it grew a tad larger than I’d expected. I hope you liked reading it. If you did, look forward to our upcoming coverage on Akerman on Deep Cut. We’ve recorded episodes on Jeanne Dielman, News from Home, and No Home Movie. I’m currently choosing another narrative feature that would be worthy to discuss alongside Jeanne Dielman. The Meetings of Anna is a possible contender, but I’m curious about her later work, as well as her foray into making more “commercial” work. I’m curious how the commercial work might upend my idea of her “artistic consistency” I mentioned above.
If anything this piece is merely another exploration of the ideas I was playing with in the first piece since this newsletter’s revival, read it here. I think much of my current thinking about cinema comes from this same point.
I’ve also been writing little monthly wrap-ups on my media consumption over at the Patreon for Deep Cut, if you’re interested in reading my little monthly check-ins (as well as Eli’s and Wilson’s, which I always enjoy reading myself), do head on over there. I’ve thought about reproducing some version of them for this newsletter, but don’t particularly like repeating myself, and prefer the more focused nature of the things I write here.