Chantal Akerman Passages
Eye Filmmuseum / naioÄąo publishers
Hotel Monterey
Hotel Monterey, 1972 16mm, colour, no sound, 63 min.
Hotel Monterey, 1972
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D’Est, au bord de la fiction
D’Est, au bord de la fiction, 1995 Video installation in 2 parts (24 + 1 monitors), colour, sound, 4 min. loop (last monitor: 5.30 min. for French version / 6.15 min. for English & Spanish version)
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Edited by Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond
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Eye Filmmuseum / naioÄąo publishers
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Contents
Works Saute ma ville, 1968 Hotel Monterey, 1972 D’Est, au bord de la fiction, 1995 Woman Sitting after Killing, 2001 From the Other Side, 2002 A Voice in the Desert, 2002 Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide, 2004 Là-bas, 2006 In the Mirror, 2007 Je tu il elle, l’installation, 2007 Femmes d’Anvers en novembre, 2008 Maniac Summer, 2009 Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai, 2009 La chambre, 2012 Maniac Shadows, 2012 My Mother Laughs Prelude, 2012 No Home Movie, 2015 Now, 2015
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Texts 18 Chantal Akerman – Passages Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond 22 Chantal Akerman: A Modern Adventure Cyril Béghin 54 Chantal Akerman: Writings on the Installations Introduction by Cyril Béghin 92 North, East, South, West On the Work of Chantal Akerman in the Space of the Museum Roos van der Lint 126 Chantal Akerman: Tattered, Shattered Time Dana Linssen 136 Oeuvre: films, installations and books 139 Images 143 Credits
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Chantal Akerman: A Modern Adventure
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Cyril Béghin
Few have noted that Chantal Akerman’s last film No Home Movie and her death in 2015 represented, more than any other work of art or event, the receding of a certain form of cinema and a certain way of thinking about film. While this formal and conceptual approach known as modern cinema has not yet come to an end, its adventurers have become rare; Chantal Akerman was the most singular of them all. For Akerman, ‘modern’ was probably not a rallying cry, but simply a word with ambiguous implications, such as when she used it in the first screenplay of Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) to refer to the cold sheen of objects surrounding a person born in the West in the mid-twentieth century, in the era of modernism: ‘modern and functional furniture (...), a modern desk lamp (...), a modern bathroom (...)’.1 Yet Akerman’s adventure may be such an essential one for the very fact that, starting with the tiled kitchen in Saute ma ville in 1968 and all the way through to the laptop conversations with her mother in No Home Movie in 2015, a constant in her work was the tension between this relatively thwarted modernity (which was primarily social and historical, but we’ll see it had other aspects) and a different, relatively twisted modernity (which was aesthetic and moral). By turning this tension into a deep line of questioning, Akerman joined some eminent elders such as Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, though she arrived here by different means.
1 Chantal Akerman, Elle vogue vers l’Amérique, no date (probably 1974), first published, in part, in Jacqueline Aubenas (ed.), Chantal Akerman, Atelier des arts, Cahier no. 1, 1982.
No Home Movie, 2015
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It is also important to reiterate the power of this modern approach at a time when, as evidenced by this exhibition and its catalogue, art museums welcome the work with more breadth and urgency than movie theatres do. After being solicited to make a video installation for the exhibition ‘Passages de l’image’ at the Centre Pompidou in the late 1980s and finally taking the leap with D’Est, au bord de la fiction in 1995, Akerman never abandoned the fundamentals of a critical realism inherited from modern cinema — extended shots, editing in independent blocks, audio disjunctions, obvious ness of artifice — in her work akin to contemporary art, which most often consisted of a spatial reconfiguration of her films. But by opening her work to video installations, Akerman participated in a blurring of aesthetics that her films had already produced at the turning point of the 1980s, when Golden Eighties displayed the spruce signs of a cinema of citation and the playful distance and visual kitsch that directly affiliated it with post modernism. At first glance, this same blurring makes it difficult to think about the radical minimalism of Jeanne Dielman (1975) with the referential opulence of La captive (2000), the soundstage romance of Un divan à New York (1996) with the documentary bitterness of Sud (1999), the intimate depths of the novel Ma mère rit (2013) with the desert bombarded by the sounds of an invisible war in the installation Now (2015). But isn’t crossing different landscapes one of the things that makes an adventure an adventure? You can’t categorize an adventure: by definition, it is open to whatever happens. In that respect, it would always be ‘modern’, a tired word that refers both to what is current and to different periods of the past, depending whether you’re a historian of societies, of literature, of painting, or of cinema. Akerman often stated her ‘non-belonging’: ‘I don’t belong anywhere’ is one of many phrases she repeated, adhering to the art of repetition found both throughout her work and her spoken words, and which became the title of a beautiful documentary portrait of the filmmaker.2 Non-belonging is the ultimate in adventure. As for the modern adventure, the ultimate can be to escape from the modern itself, constantly, through a joyful taste for novelty and a freedom that remains unaffiliated, while rooting a few unshakeable principles in that modernity — after all, to turn to the history of cinema, this is exactly what was done by Roberto Rossellini, the recognized founder of the modernity referred to here. Chantal Akerman followed this very trajectory — without planning to, of course. She began with the avant-garde (as in her New York films), continued with two monuments of pure modernity (Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman, the masterpiece she devoted herself never to remake), characteristics of which would resurface in later films (D’Est, Là-bas, No Home Movie) or tempered in an apparently more consensual fiction (Les rendez-vous d’Anna, 1978). Akerman then committed herself to the postmodern (Golden Eighties, 1986; Histoires d’Amérique, 1989), paid a deceptive homage to classic American comedy (Un divan à New York), and visited mannerism (La
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2 Marianne Lambert (dir.), I Don’t Belong Anywhere. The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (Brussels, Artémis Productions, 2015).
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Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975
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captive) and the ‘contemporary’ (the installations), the whole while writing texts — a play (Hall de nuit, 1992), a brief narrative (Une famille à Bruxelles, 1998), a self-portrait (Autoportrait en cinéaste, 2004), and a piece of auto-fiction (Ma mère rit) — whose styles primarily reveal the influence of the Nouveau Roman, despite the fact that the only writer she truly claimed to like was Georges Perec. But there’s more than a single guiding principle running through this imbroglio of approaches, styles, languages and formats. Things require a certain amount of time to be seen. The shot is the fundamental unit of cinema. The frame rigorously organizes space. A person always comes toward us head-on. Some situations cannot be represented. Loneliness is inexorable. Everything could end with a song. But why is it so important to affirm the weight of the modern in a body of work that begins by telling us about something entirely different? For the simple reason that nothing in Akerman’s work moves us or makes us think outside of the experience of its form. Declarations are few, but pressure and impressions are many. Jeanne Dielman’s mechanical life in the closed environment of the extended shots makes an impression; the stream of anonymous bodies on Russian sidewalks in D’Est, even more numerous on the monitors for the installation D’Est, au bord de la fiction, makes an impression; the areas of darkness and blown-out lights piercing the filmmaker’s mother’s apartment with abstract zones in No Home Movie make an impression. Contrary to appearances, there are no big subjects in Akerman (like feminism, homosexuality, and more generally, romantic freedom, the memory of the concentration camps, post-colonialism), only big forms through which these subjects appear as much as they become diluted, in a lability of meaning that is her work’s primary modern feature.
Je tu il elle, 1974
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De l’autre côté, 2002
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Woman Sitting after Killing, 2001 36
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Marcher Ă cĂ´tĂŠ de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide, 2004
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Chantal Akerman: Writings on the installations Introduction by Cyril BĂŠghin
Chantal Akerman, New York, 1976
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Chantal Akerman’s relationship to writing went far beyond the technical requirements of filmmaking. As a complete auteur, she never directed a film or made an installation for which she did not write the screenplay or the concept, sometimes with the assistance of cowriters. Some of the scripts have been published (Les rendez-vous d’Anna, Un divan à New York) and Akerman also wrote numerous short pieces and a handful of books. Was Chantal Akerman a writer? Her modernity is anchored in this temptation also found with Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer, not to mention writer-filmmakers like Marguerite Duras and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The first sentence of the narrative My Mother Laughs (2013; 2019 English translation) pretends to set out the failure of the temptation — ‘I wrote it all down and now I don’t like what I’ve written’ — the better to launch into words: ‘words, always the same ones, endlessly repeated, I got to know the love words of an ancient language’. The litany of obsessive repetition, the insistent or passionate rhythm of the sentences, the simplicity of the lexicon, the knots and forks of what is told through the even mesh of language all match Akerman’s writing with her voice. Which is why the following selection of texts, while focused on the installations and the films that led to installations, such as D’Est and No Home Movie (connected to the installation Now), also includes three transcriptions of the filmmaker’s voice, with the texts for La chambre, La vingt-cinquième image, and Le jour où.
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La chambre 2 (1972) Voiceover text for a sound version of the short film La chambre, never produced. Chantal Akerman Foundation. First published in Dominique Bax and Cyril Béghin (edd.), Chantal Akerman, festival Bande(s) à part, 2014. ‘You pulled my hair and disappeared before I could even hit you or shout so I stayed still and turned away, I went back down the slippery stairs and found myself outside, the airport was white in the sun, I walked straight ahead, I stopped a moment to ask for the bus, and I kept walking, I took the bus nearly without knowing, I fell asleep, I woke up, I got off the bus at Grand Central — I went down 42nd Street, I looked at a watch three times and I’m sure it was only one hour slow so it was only then I started running to the subway. I’m writing you that I was crying while I ran, the sun was overexposing the alley, I took the IND. On the train a fat black man was opening his mouth in a smile-grimace then closing it to reopen it. There was only me and him on the train, I got off a long way from home and I walked, I went slowly up the stairs and threw myself on the
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bed, I got back up to check the two clocks, they both said 10:30, they were probably an hour slow. I went back to bed, I slept on my stomach, my head in my arms, I couldn’t see if you weren’t there. I slept until midnight, probably for an hour, I got up, I took all the clothes out of the closet, put all the dirty ones on one side, all the ones that needed sewing on the other, and threw the clean ones back in the closet, I hemmed the pink pants sitting on the floor on the rug next to the bed. I left everything on the floor I went back to bed, I saw the bed was full of blood, I got back up I turned off all the lights except the one in the kitchen, I lay back down on my stomach and started violently masturbating I told myself that now I would have all the space I wanted, my desire immediately passed, I moved my hand away from my genitals and I lay on my back and started writing you in my head so I got back up it was 3 AM so 4 AM and I started writing you at the kitchen table. All my love. Chantal.’ Chantal Akerman
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Face à l’image (1988) In 1988, Raymond Bellour, Catherine David and Christine Van Assche commissioned Chantal Akerman to make a video installation for the exhibition ‘Passages de l’image’, which would be held at the Centre Pompidou in 1990. Akerman never made this installation, and would not pursue the project whose foundations were laid with this artist’s statement. First published in Trafic no. 35, P.O.L, fall 2000. For this exhibition, I’d like to work from two ‘sentences’ found in the Bible.The first ‘sentence,’ which is the most well-known, is a prohibition, the prohibition on representation, and is the Second Commandment. I quote from memory: ‘You will not make any image that is a likeness of something on land, in the seas, or in the heavens and you will not bow down before them.’ A prohibition that refers to the prohibition on idolatry. The other ‘sentence’ is an exegesis given by some, including Rabbi Judah I: when a single letter of the text is missing, the entire text is invalidated, because each letter must be separate, it must be surrounded on all sides by a margin, a white space on the parchment, because this white space is itself a source of meaning. High definition creates an excess of seeing that prevents one from looking. No free face to face. We are swallowed by the image. We remain fascinated, we don’t see anything anymore.
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A surplus of reality that attempts once again to transgress the prohibition on representation. Yet this is the high definition I will have to work on, to classify, to leave white spaces on and make the illusion appear. Six little screens on which I’m requesting carte blanche. Perhaps a kind of cubist work in which one of the screens would show the front, another the back, another the side, as if the image wanted to show everything but couldn’t. Or in the same state of mind, a face, barely filmed differently, but never allowed to ever render the soul. And never could the sum of these screens make up the entirety of an object or a person, and the more the illusion is perfect, the greater the illusion. An old debate, no doubt, the old ‘This is not an apple,’ but still relevant. Finally, a lot of current research on image and sound, like the hologram, for example, tends only to provide a surplus of reality. Still and always this confrontation with the Second Commandment: ‘You shall not make images…’ Chantal Akerman
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Chantal Akerman, 1950s Chantal Akerman’s parents, Jacob (Jacques) and Natalia (Nelly) Akerman-Leibel, 1947
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Chantal Akerman and her mother, Natalia Akerman, at a baby beauty contest, 1950s Jacob, Natalia and their daughters Chantal and Sylviane, in Bois de la Cambre, Brussels, c. 1961 58
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Chantal Akerman as a teenager, 1960s
Father Jacques Akerman in his boutique, c. 1981
Chantal Akerman, Agadir, Morocco, late 1999
Jacques Ledoux, Chantal Akerman, Delphine Seyrig, 1970s Chantal Akerman, place and date unknown
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Chantal Akerman: Tattered, Shattered Time
Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964
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Dana Linssen
‘I want the spectator to feel… the time used in each shot; to make this a physical experience in which time unfolds in you, in which the time of the film enters into you.’ 1 Writing about time is a tricky business. Before you know it, twice as much time as the time you wanted to talk about has elapsed. The time you wanted to describe, and the time spent writing. Unless you’re writing about the time that passes while the time slips by. One minute gone. 52 words. Less than one word a second. Is that a lot or a little? Things only get more complex if you want to write about looking at time. Or the feeling that time evokes in you, something that, as Chantal Akerman once said 2, she wanted to achieve with her work. There is time, and there is the perception of time. And then there is the looking, the writing, the reading. But what about thinking? And who’s to say that all those different times last equally long? You would need a multitude of times to create a Borgesian Map that does justice to the experience that Akerman was referring to, a time map instead of a land map that folds in several dimensions over and around that one moment of experience. And we all know how unfortunate it ended for the cartographers in Borges’s short story On Exactitude in Science. And then we haven’t even mentioned understanding time. Chantal Akerman worked with time as a cineaste and artist. Time was her framework and her material, just as it is for so many contemporary film and video artists. Two images. First and foremost, the static shot of actress Delphine Seyrig at the end of Akerman’s feature film debut Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), sitting at the dining table and waiting for nightfall. Or not waiting, but sitting, while night falls. It is preceded by many similar long shots. Jeanne Dielman peeling potatoes. And taking a bath. Never before in the history of film had we seen how long it takes to peel potatoes. Or take a bath. But that ending, in which Seyrig is reflected in the smoothly polished table in front of her by the neon light from outside, is incomparable. She is there, in the image. Nothing that has gone before is resolved. (Jeanne Dielman minutely follows three days in the repetitive life of a Brussels housewife who entertains men in her apartment every afternoon for money.) In that final shot she is also her reflection, and in the faint evening glow we can just about no longer make out her bloodied hand. Her reflection is therefore not so much a mirroring of the moment but a reflection of a time that was, or a foreshadowing of a time yet to come. Or a time that could have been. The echo of a violent act. 1 2 7 Passages
1 Darlene Pursley, ‘Moving in Time: Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit’, Modern Language Notes 120 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
2 Ibid.
(Her last client gives her a first orgasm, and then she kills him. After the little death, the big death). Does that shot last three minutes? Or seven? Or ten? Does it last longer the first time we watch it? The second image, an equally long shot, in D’Est, an experimental documentary from 1993, a travelogue made as the Soviet Union was falling apart. But now the camera moves. A tracking shot along a street lined with endless rows of people waiting. The camera at eye level. Their eyes tell stories of a time that was. And even more so of an indeterminate time, the time in which they are, in which, just like in that final shot in Jeanne Dielman, something else moves. There the light, here the camera, yet it seems slower and slower, as though time is getting heavier and heavier before it freezes. That shot encapsulates something paradoxical and tragic: time, real time, has finally been recorded, yet it also marks the end of time. The force of gravity has brought life to a halt. D’Est was the first work that Akerman presented not only as a linear film but also, in 1995, as a 24-screen installation, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and subsequently at many other venues, always in slightly different forms. She opened up that one screen, the wretchedness captured in that endless tracking shot, on multiple screens, in a simultaneity of multiple moments, a strategy of fragmentation and decomposition. The simultaneity of the 24 screens calls to mind the 24 frames per minute of a standard film projection. Akerman also reworked that final scene in Jeanne Dielman into a video installation. Just like all her spatial work, it is firmly rooted in and related to her films. For Akerman, spatial presentation was, again and again, a way of interrupting the linear perception of time (with all its complications of causality). Of thinking about time in spatial terms. Woman Sitting after Killing (2001) is a spatial presentation on seven screens of that final scene from Jeanne Dielman, but a slightly different moment appears on each screen. Those time intervals create a sense of discontinuity, as though you are no longer in time but have fallen between the cogs of time. Both works create the impression that you are lost in a clockmaker’s workshop. Time has been broken. You could say that modern time started with the invention of the clock. There’s more to it than that, however. As we see in these two works, time is both a process and a measure. Time is not only time, but also duration, something we think is endless and eternal, because we don’t know where it starts and ends. Time is transience (just think of all the hotel rooms, stations and other ‘temporary spaces’ that appear in the work of Akerman!). Time is movement, then this and then that, regularity and 128 P a s s a g e s
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disruption, causality and chance, continuity and discontinuity, parallelism, singularity and synchronicity. All that cannot be read on the face of a clock. And anyway, before the clock was the calendar. And before the calendar, the sun and the moon. Night and day lasted as long as it was dark and light. You could say that was when the fundamental concepts of film, the cinematic and the specific form that is video art, came into being, long before ways had been found to capture time and light, record it and, hence, manipulate it. The first films made by the Lumière brothers at the end of the nineteenth century recorded minor events. A train arriving at a station. Workers leaving a factory. Events of a certain duration, determined not only by the length of the event itself — after all, in the conception of time as a continuous, causally determined flow there is always a before and an after that seems endless — but also by the length of the film reel, the medium on which the event is recorded. From that moment on, time is reproduced. There is the time of the event, and then the possibility of endless repetition. A copy of a copy of a copy. A better starting point for modern time, one could argue, is Andy Warhol’s eight-hour film Empire (1964). A film like the needle of a sundial (just like Francis Alys’s 12-hour Zócalo (1999), which follows the shadow of a flagpole on the central square in Mexico City). A film like a solar eclipse (like James Benning’s L. Cohen (2018)). The emergence of film and moving media has fundamentally altered our conception of time. Indeed, time itself has become an essential aspect of the art forms it has spawned, which is why they are called time-based arts. After being washed out as a film academy student and having blown up the world in her first short film Saute ma ville (1968), Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s where she discovered the work of Warhol, and the diary filmmaker Jonas
Francis Alÿs, Zócalo, Mexico City, 22 May 1999
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Credits This publication was published on the occasion of the exhibition Chantal Akerman – Passages, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam March 21 – May 31, 2020
Eye Filmmuseum IJpromenade 1 1031 KT Amsterdam, the Netherlands +31 (0) 20 5891400 info@eyefilm.nl Exhibition The exhibition is curated by Jaap Guldemond in collaboration with Marente Bloemheuvel Director Eye: Sandra den Hamer Director of Exhibitions/Curator: Jaap Guldemond Associate Curator: Marente Bloemheuvel Project Manager: Claartje Opdam Graphic Design: Joseph Plateau, Amsterdam Film Programmer: Anna Abrahams in collaboration with Marian Cousijn Publicity and Marketing: Annabel Essink, Marnix van Wijk Technical Production: Rembrandt Boswijk, Indyvideo, Utrecht; Christophe Leunis, Vertigo, Antwerp and Martijn Bor Audiovisual Equipment: Vidi-Square, Zandhoven (B) Installation: Syb Sybesma, Amsterdam Lighting: Maarten Warmerdam, Studio Warmerdam, Amsterdam Lettering: Riwi ColloType, Amsterdam
Publication Edited by: Marente Bloemheuvel, Jaap Guldemond Essays and texts: Chantal Akerman, Cyril Béghin, Dana Linssen, Roos van der Lint Graphic Design: Joseph Plateau, Amsterdam Translation: Nicholas Elliott (FrenchEnglish); Billy Nolan (Dutch-English) Copy-editing: Billy Nolan Project Manager: Claartje Opdam Project Coordination: Milou van Lieshout Printing and lithography: Wilco Art Books Amersfoort Paper: Munken Polar 120 grs and 300 grs Fonts: Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk, AG Buch Condensed BQ Publisher: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, naioıo publishers Rotterdam Acknowledgements Sylviane Akerman Claire Atherton Chantal Akerman Foundation Carole Billy, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, London Sonia Wieder-Atherton Images All images: Courtesy of Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, London © 2020, the authors, the photographers, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, naioıo publishers, Rotterdam, Chantal Akerman Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, London
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC-organization the copyrights have been settled with Pictoright in Amsterdam. © 2020, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam Although every effort was made to find the copyright holders for the illustrations used, it has not been possible to trace them all. Interested parties are requested to contact naioıo publishers, Korte Hoogstraat 31, 3011 GK Rotterdam, the Netherlands. naioıo publishers is an internationally orientated publisher specialized in developing, producing and distributing books in the fields of architecture, urbanism, art and design. www.naioıo.com naioıo books are available internationally at selected bookstores and from the following distribution partners: North, Central and South America Artbook | D.A.P., New York, USA, dap@dapinc.com Rest of the world - Idea Books, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, idea@ideabooks.nl For general questions, please contact naioıo publishers directly at sales@ naioıo.com or visit our website www. naioıo.com for further information. Printed and bound in the Netherlands
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Chantal Akerman (Belgium, 1950-2015) was one of the first film directors to switch to the visual arts, in the mid-1990s. The transition would mark the start of a second – parallel – career. By the early 1970s Chantal Akerman had grown into one of the most important feminist avant-garde filmmakers of her generation with films like Je tu il elle (1974) and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Akerman discovered the possibilities of exhibition spaces in 1995, when she reconfigured her film D’Est, originally a documentary, as a large spatial installation on 25 monitors. This publication focuses on Chantal Akerman’s spatial works and features a wide range of personal photographs and texts written by herself. Three essays by different authors reflect on her highly personal oeuvre, which is characterized by a detached approach to seemingly ‘ordinary’ lives and the perception of time, as well as to migration, trauma and the roles of women. Akerman shows that beneath the surface of everyday life, there lies a profusion of intense events, memories and emotions.
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Eye Filmmuseum, www.eyefilm.nl naioıo publishers, www.naioıo.com