Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2019

To challenge the increasing tendency to read Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre autobiographically, this article analyses two documentaries on the filmmaker. It theorizes the effects of the increasingly frequent appearance of the filmmaker on screen in such documentaries and in her own films by reviewing both tendencies through the classic debates about authorship. Noting and critiquing the way in which the documentary filmmakers attempt to mimic ‘Akerman’ filmmaking, the article argues that their attempts betray the codes that constitute ‘Akerman’ cinema by reproducing the modes against which her cinema worked. ‘Akerman’ names a cinematic journey towards the formulation of an aesthetic language of space, shot, frame and temporality through which to make visible the unseen and make audible the unspoken that constituted both the conditions and the imperative for a cinematic intervention from a historically situated post-war, post-Shoah ‘Polish Jewish family in Brussels’. This article proposes the term filmworking (drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s post-traumatic concept of artworking) to reveal how Akerman queered cinema. This effect emerges only from close analysis of each instance of filmworking and not from the closed tropes of a retrospective narrative of the life of the filmmaker, who, being repeatedly interviewed, herself contributed to such extra-cinematic explanations and closures of her own work.

In my 2004 article on Chantal Akerman’s News From Home (1976), I deployed a Deleuzian reading of the film to release the film from being interpreted as manifesting the impossibility of a woman’s desire (Stephen Heath) or a desire to return to the mother (Richard Kwietniowski), arguing instead that the indeterminacy of the final sequence opens out onto a transformative freedom from identity. In this article, I persist with this idea but reconsider it in relation to Griselda Pollock’s convincing insistence that Akerman’s work is a journey towards maternal trauma, a position that she develops in relation to Akerman’s installation Walking Next to One’s Shoelaces Inside an Empty Fridge. Before encountering this work, Pollock says that Akerman’s cinematic intervention was linked to ‘the choked feminine voice in culture meeting a new cinematic formalism’ rather than to the ‘deeper trauma’ of being the child of a Holocaust survivor. Pollock’s convincing reading of Akerman’s installation as visualizing the effects of unmourned trauma transmitted to the children of Holocaust survivors had a profound impact on me, one that I take into consideration in my reframing in this article of the final sequence of News From Home. In this, I deploy Raymond Bellour’s adaptation of psychoanalyst Daniel Stern’s notion of ‘amodal perception’ as a sensory, kinetic modality of spectatorship. This model allows me to retain the transformative freedom from identity in my earlier reading, while nonetheless mapping early intersubjective relations onto the pleasures of the film body Akerman called ‘la jouissance du voir’.

This article elucidates the complex ethical paradigm at the heart of Chantal Akerman’s work and thought, arguing first that her ethics are as concerned with the figure of the self as they are with the figure of the other and that, second, these ethics exist as much in the spatial and durational structures of her work as in the content of her images. In this way, this article contends that approaching Akerman’s work through the question of ethics allows one to see consistencies across her film and installation work, even as her aesthetic strategies shift across the different dispositifs of the cinema and the gallery or museum. Addressing these shifts, I offer the concept of Akerman’s ‘ethical pedagogy of the image’ – a term that implies both a method and a site of instruction. Drawing on these two meanings, this article ultimately reveals that Akerman’s pedagogical aim involves turning viewers’ ethical attention back on to themselves – to offer a prompt and a space for reconsideration of their own ethos.

This article revisits Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), seeking to map its nomadic trajectories through different media. I elaborate on Akerman’s notion of a ‘cinéma de ressassement’, a cinema of mulling over or chipping away. Rather than focusing on the film itself, I concentrate on two lesserknown works that explicitly return to Jeanne Dielman, functioning both as works in their own right and as paratexts, revealing the film’s processes in different but corresponding ways: the installation Woman Sitting After Killing, made for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and Autour de Jeanne Dielman, a making-of documentary shot on Portapak by Sami Frey in 1975, edited by Akerman and Agnès Ravez in 2004, and released as a special feature on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. The article contends that these two ‘returns’ to Jeanne Dielman rework the complex temporalities of the film in addition to revisiting its political concerns. Autour de Jeanne Dielman places Jeanne Dielman squarely within a feminist framework through its central positioning of Delphine Seyrig’s feminist discourse. I map the ways in which ressassement exposes the processes of a feminist filmmaking concerned with disrupting ‘chrononormative’ (Elizabeth Freeman) narratives. Building on B. Ruby Rich’s characterization of Akerman’s work as a ‘cinema of correspondence’, ultimately the article asks what counts as productive labour, suggesting that Akerman’s returns to Jeanne Dielman highlight its commitment to feminist and queer failure as a productive working method.

This article offers the first scholarly study of Chantal Akerman’s installation Maniac Shadows (2013). It argues that the deviating sensory strategies at work in this installation form part of a process of ‘queering’ that allows for the expression of queer forms of embodiment and pleasure. These queer tactics include sonic excess and spatial disintegration, skewed framing, haptic auditory perception and an emphasis on indeterminacy and ambiguity, primarily through the figure of the shadow. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological approach to queerness, the article explores the sensuous queer effects arising from instances of audio-visual disorientation in Akerman’s installation. It suggests that the centrality of shadows, combined with the amorphous soundscape and the presence of opaque images and oblique angles, produce jarring moments of strangeness that undermine notions of a stable unified subject and disrupt heteronormative space. Offering an alternative perspective on the autobiographical accounts of the installation that have emerged so far, the article suggests that Akerman’s experimentation with spatial ambiguity is tied to a queerly inflected unravelling that pervades Maniac Shadows, as the artist fashions a less constricting and more subversive relational space for herself and her audience to grow into.

In 2004, Chantal Akerman created two works – a feature film Tomorrow We Move (Akerman, 2004) and a video installation To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (Akerman, 2004) – which feature the diary that her Jewish maternal grandmother had kept before dying at Auschwitz. Prompted by the contradictions manifest in the installation (spontaneity vs control; uniqueness vs familiarity), I will argue for an intricate interrelation between the documentary video and the fiction film. In relation to the thematic content of both works, I will subsequently demonstrate that the ‘porous’ form of narrative that this assemblage generates allows Akerman to challenge and transform dominant conceptions of storytelling, identity, history and memory. In particular, through analysing the modes of writing she portrays in both films in relation to Virginia Woolf ’s work, I will contend that Akerman is deeply aware of the political implications of thinking porously.

‘Disappearance’ in Chantal Akerman’s films means, in this essay, disappearance from a specific person. The attributes of the one who disappears are charged with special meaning for the one left behind, the one affected by the disappearance. It is not that someone used to be present and now they are not, but that one person is no longer there for another person. A dyad is involved, but its presence is felt from the perspective of half of that dyad. Whence the aptness of Barthes’s prologue to The Lover’s Discourse, that today that discourse is one of extreme loneliness.

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 209pp., ISBN 9781137365873, Hardback, £79.99

Siobhan Davies Dance, London, 27 February–11 April 2018