Chantal Akerman and the savagery of a light Touch

 Image: D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction) [still], 1995; Video installation; Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

In common narrative cinema the myriad of camera motions are tailored to function as a pantomime of naturalistic experience and to provide the sense of momentum and action even in the absence of dramatic content. In general, however, this wealth of cinematic tools falls to the use of imitating the figure of life, but devoid of its temperature and substance, serving instead to breathe the specific illusion of visceral reality into what is otherwise little more than a fantasy of the familiar.  Distinct from such artifice, but nevertheless, enlivened by the potential of such powerful tools is something entirely less common—cinematic art.

For the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, this elusive silver thread of art has lead her toward a body of work which is strictly documentarian in temperament and minimalist in technique.  As it pertains to genre, Akerman has suggested that she does not believe in a distinction between documentary and fiction, and her facility for either is due in no small part to her cool but unflinchingly candid directorial voice.  As a result of this lightness of touch Akerman’s films develop by an accretion of momentum, rather than by the coercion of a specifically authorial presence.  Consequently, Akerman’s work is necessarily long form and has been described by some as a cinema of waiting in which nothing much happens.  In her work she resists the impulse to expository visual brevity, the typical shorthand for driving plot while bypassing the tedious details of experience; favoring instead to investigate the uneasy complexity present in the fullness of even empty moments.  In perhaps her best known and masterfully rendered Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975, Akerman does not merely demonstrate how distinct the notion of peeling potatoes or bathing is from the act itself, but further, as she painstakingly records the intimate minutia of Jeanne Dielman’s existence, Akerman reveals the unremitting nature of personal presence even in isolation, how central such experiences are to our process and identity, and in terms of cinematic conception, how impotent are our imaginations posed with extrapolating such complexity from  mere suggestion.

Characteristic of Chantal Akerman’s work there is also the photographer’s sensibility for composition and for the richness of pure aesthetic beauty.  Framed by her greatly restrained vocabulary of static camera angles, one develops an impression of what might be the immersion within literal moving pictures as much as engaging in a conventional cinematic experience.  It will likely come as little surprise then that aside from Chantal Akerman’s cinema craft, she is also an artist and her current multi-institutional collaboration, Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space, is currently installed at its final destination in the United States, the Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis.

The show itself is comprised of three principal installations and though each involves the reincorporation of footage from Akerman’s existing body of film work, it should nevertheless, be clear that these installations are not merely repurposed, reheated cinematic riffs.  The first piece for example, Les femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (Women of Antwerp in November), 2007 inherits its visual components from work which Akerman assembled in contribution to Jan Fabre’s I’m a Mistake, a choreographed and scored stage production concerned with the act of smoking as a metaphor for the fractious, self-consumptive processes of the artist, to which Akerman provided an assemblage of vignettes of women smoking which occurred as a structural backdrop.  In its current incarnation, however, the piece is formed into opposing projections.  The first is a multi-pane piece comprised of twenty distinct vignettes enumerated for the number of cigarettes to a pack, and oriented as a continuous five panel landscape of looping scenes.  In this apparently random succession of vignettes women are depicted across a range of emotional states, some are in motion, many are seated or standing in isolation, some are in the company of other women however ambivalent they appear to their presence.  Many of these sequences occur out doors and are marked by dramatic lighting and color, and striking architectural settings.

What is common to each of these women, however, is that they are all engaged in smoking, and that it seems to be intimately tied to the structure of their experience, even its emotional character.  The opposing projection, though no less dramatic, is considerably more limited in its palette and subject.  In this aspect of the installation Akerman attentively, if languidly, follows the motions of a woman portrayed in extreme close up and black and white who alternately draws from her cigarette, exhales the florid plume, ashes, and eventually extinguishes it in a neat glass ashtray and starts again.  If the multi-panel projection feels slightly emotionally loaded, then this piece feels somewhat romanticized.  Rather than being conspicuously indulgent though, the two projections achieve a kind of harmonious balance by their contrast and their simple visual attractiveness.  Women of Antwerp in November, appears as a work which explores the utility of the smoking act, the way in which smoking folds into the living experience and becomes to some degree inseparable from the other living processes.  Considering also that Akerman herself is an unrepentant smoker Women of Antwerp in November should certainly also be read as an ode of celebration to an increasingly embattled act which has long been emblematic of the creative experience.

De l’autre cote (From the Other Side), 2002 draws its source from Akerman’s documentary of the same name.  In this film Akerman explores, but from a disentangled emotional distance, the scenes and personal complexities of individuals for whom the border and walled partition between Mexico and Arizona are objects of a defining continual presence.  The first part of the installation features a single modestly sized television monitor with a video loop comprised of an extended nighttime scene of highway driving and traffic in which Akerman provides a voiceover recounting what seems to be the story of a landlord describing an illegal immigrant tenant.  Eventually this footage is resolved into a series of scenes showing the thermal camera images from U.S. Government helicopters and surveillance footage of spot lit flyovers.  The second and main body of the installation is a series of six triptychs of three monitors which face the viewer as he enters the gallery space.  Here the images alternate between long tracking shots of the border wall itself, or interviews with individuals on either side, or footage of automobiles jostling in the queue at the border crossing.  These images also originate with Akerman’s film, however, the presentation of the work in these random combinations of concurrent images underscores the sense of a multiplicity of experience in a way which is distinct from the sequential continuum of film.             

The final installation, D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction), 1995 borrows from Akerman’s film, D’est, 1993 in which she travels through East Germany, Poland, and Russia all the while recording the images of a culture locked within a crippling deliberation and exploring the lands of her own Polish, Jewish familial history.  It is here where Akerman provides her most voyeuristic and compelling work in the exhibit, as we capture long lines of people standing in the snow beneath heavy gray skies bundled against the cold, breath and cigarette smoke indistinguishable expirations to a gliding camera captured occasionally within the impassive gaze of the few.  We find images of vast prewar train stations or high-rise apartment buildings each intended as a promise to a future unfulfilled.  It is perhaps ironic that this work whose subject appears as a humanity living among its own remains and by virtue of the irreproducible structure of its past should find such helplessly gorgeous depiction at Akerman’s hands.  These are images which are posed upon the uneasy fulcrum of the dirge of human modernity and an absolutely irrepressible beauty.  As with From the Other Side, this piece is composed as a series of video monitors in eight triptychs, and the method of presentation here too, allows for an involving simultaneity which broadly expands its potency. 

Though film may bring to bear its reflexive fidelity and unmannered depiction, fluid and transparent interaction with one’s subject remains a unique rarity.  Nevertheless, Akerman’s work seems greatly informed by this oblique engagement of subject, and by this resistance to seek the preconception of its grasp.  Regardless of criticism it may have earned, it should be clear that it is by this precise character that her ability to render such complexity and constricted emotional surpluses has been charged.  Taken together the work in this exhibition serves as an elaboration and extension to Akerman’s filmic sources, rather than as a derivation, and it is by combination of her inflexible restraint and unapologetic visual command that such subtextual richness is provided and by which the ferocious delicacy of her work may be so gratifyingly expressed.