On her arrival at the Cologne station, she’s met by Ida (Magali Noël) – the mother of a former fiancé whom she has twice changed her mind about marrying. They converse until evening, when Anna boards the Paris train where she talks to a young German who’s moving to Paris (Hanns Zischler). She gets off the train in Brussels, her hometown, where she’s met by her mother (Léa Massari). Instead of going home, where Anna’s ailing father is already asleep, they check into a hotel where Anna, lying naked beside her mother in bed, describes a lesbian affair she has recently become involved in and feels good about. The next night, arriving in Paris, she’s picked up by her regular boyfriend (Jean-Pierre Cassel), who takes her to still another hotel. Finding him feverish, she takes a cab to a late-night pharmacie to buy him some medicine. Finally returning home – it’s still dark – Anna plays back the recorded phone messages that have come during her absence. As a plot, this is obviously quite minimal. Each of the ‘encounters’ described above consists mostly of a monologue – by Heinrich, Ida, the German on the train, Anna herself (to her mother), her French lover, Anna again (when she sings him a song), and the voices on her recording machine (one of which, incidentally, is Akerman’s). In keeping with Akerman’s usual respect for real time, large chunks of this mainly unacted material are simply set down like slabs in front of the viewer without the usual punctuation of camera movements, fades or dissolves. In a manner recalling Bresson, Antonioni and Straub-Huillet, the locations where these monologues are placed seem featured, lingered over – persisting before, during, after, and even in between the words that are spoken there, constantly threatening to swallow them up. René Magritte’s painting Man With Newspaper (1927-8) tells me something about the customary disquiet of Akerman’s world. In it, four panels, two on top and two on the bottom, show the same corner of a sitting room, with one difference: in the first panel a man is seated at the table by the window reading a newspaper, and in the other three panels, neither the man nor the newspaper is in evidence. A narrative is implied between the first and second panel – the disappearance of the man and newspaper – without being confirmed, and we’re left with the eerie fact of three identical ‘empty’ rooms. Similarly, many of Akerman’s settings suggest absence even more than presence. *** Saute ma ville, made when she was only 18, as her attempt to do something Chaplinesque. I strongly suspect that she was thinking about Chaplin’s fourth comedy short made at Mutual, his justly celebrated One A.M. (1916), where, apart from a cab driver glimpsed briefly at the very beginning, Chaplin is the only actor in sight, his character arriving at his own home and proceeding to interact catastrophically with the various props he encounters as he tries to get upstairs and go to bed. Akerman has described her first film,, made when she was only 18, as her attempt to do something Chaplinesque. I strongly suspect that she was thinking about Chaplin’s fourth comedy short made at Mutual, his justly celebrated(1916), where, apart from a cab driver glimpsed briefly at the very beginning, Chaplin is the only actor in sight, his character arriving at his own home and proceeding to interact catastrophically with the various props he encounters as he tries to get upstairs and go to bed. Daisies, released two years earlier in 1966, when the two teenage heroines pretend to ‘clean up’ after their protracted and extravagant food orgy inside a banquet room.) Chaplin’s narrative pretext for all the comic chaos engendered is his character’s extreme drunkenness. Akerman – whom we hear manically and wordlessly singing offscreen from the very outset, and is also the only character we see, arriving home and in her case restricting her activities there to a kitchen – provides no narrative context of any kind beyond a certain punklike rebellion against the various domestic rituals that she performs or pretends to perform. These are the same sort of rituals, such as cooking, eating, cleaning up, and polishing shoes that, seven years later, Jeanne Dielman will compulsively embrace, although in this case Akerman’s own frenzied and parodic enactments eventually culminate in a series of offscreen explosions from a gas stove that fulfill the film’s apocalyptic title. (The ‘cleaning up’ that she performs earlier is in such a destructive manner that it recalls the final sequence in Vera Chytilova’s radical Czech farce, released two years earlier in 1966, when the two teenage heroines pretend to ‘clean up’ after their protracted and extravagant food orgy inside a banquet room.) Hotel Monterey and the 11-minute La Chambre – both made in New York during her two or three years there in the early 1970s, and both shot by Babette Mangolte, who introduced her to the North American avant-garde cinema of that period (a major influence), and would subsequently shoot Jeanne Dielman – are also ‘studies’ of solitude, but in this case ones where a minimalist aesthetic and a particular sense of rooms and shots as almost interchangeable predominate. The two major films of Akerman that follow, both silent, the 65-minuteand the 11-minute– both made in New York during her two or three years there in the early 1970s, and both shot by Babette Mangolte, who introduced her to the North American avant-garde cinema of that period (a major influence), and would subsequently shoot– are also ‘studies’ of solitude, but in this case ones where a minimalist aesthetic and a particular sense of rooms and shots as almost interchangeable predominate. Akerman appears in almost a third of the films excerpted in her Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1997) – more if one adds a couple in which we hear her offscreen voice – and one of the fascinations of this critical and selective tour is watching her own gestures being reproduced in other films by some of her actresses. (Clément nibbling food off a stray hotel tray on a hallway floor in Les rendez-vous d’Anna je tu il elle.) But Akerman’s disarming tactic of using herself as a star – which she criticises in her introduction as a dubious form of bravado – and some of her stars as versions of herself has to be weighed against her determination to film anonymous, everyday people as if they were just as important and her determination to integrate and intermingle stars and nobodies in films such as Les années 80 and Histoires d’Amérique. Indeed, it’s part of the dialectical power of Jeanne Dielman to simultaneously present us with both a star performance (by Seyrig) and a sense of the mundane, giving the everyday and the unexceptional a monumental, epic style. The sorrow and beauty throughout Akerman’s work, with its shining nocturnal moods and glowering compulsive activities, has a lot to do with exalting the unexceptional, the neglected corners of the world around us. comes just after we see Akerman compulsively devouring sugar from a spoon in.) But Akerman’s disarming tactic of using herself as a star – which she criticises in her introduction as a dubious form of bravado – and some of her stars as versions of herself has to be weighed against her determination to film anonymous, everyday people as if they were just as important and her determination to integrate and intermingle stars and nobodies in films such asand. Indeed, it’s part of the dialectical power ofto simultaneously present us with both a star performance (by Seyrig) and a sense of the mundane, giving the everyday and the unexceptional a monumental, epic style. The sorrow and beauty throughout Akerman’s work, with its shining nocturnal moods and glowering compulsive activities, has a lot to do with exalting the unexceptional, the neglected corners of the world around us. isn’t able to do – which is in part a recurring desire and a relative failure to make lighthearted, commercial genre films, such as a musical à la Jacques Demy and/or a romantic comedy à la Woody Allen. The second of these aspirations, admittedly, crops up only intermittently in A Couch in New York – in some of the extended dialogues between friends as they walk through Manhattan, in various gags about New York neurotics speaking to their psychotherapists, and in the use of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ over the final credits. But even though Akerman shows some adeptness in directing both Juliette Binoche and the dog that usually accompanies her, which helps to compensate for her lack of a light touch elsewhere, her style of filmmaking remains almost dialectically opposed to Allen’s dialogue-driven comedy, treating the texts of her characters’ speeches almost as if they were found objects rather than the patter found in standup routines. By the same token, one could argue that, paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor, Akerman’s integrity is partially a matter of what sheable to do – which is in part a recurring desirea relative failure to make lighthearted, commercial genre films, such as a musical àand/or a romantic comedy àThe second of these aspirations, admittedly, crops up only intermittently inin some of the extended dialogues between friends as they walk through Manhattan, in various gags about New York neurotics speaking to their psychotherapists, and in the use of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ over the final credits. But even though Akerman shows some adeptness in directing both Juliette Binoche and the dog that usually accompanies her, which helps to compensate for her lack of a light touch elsewhere, her style of filmmaking remains almost dialectically opposed to Allen’s dialogue-driven comedy, treating the texts of her characters’ speeches almost as if they were found objects rather than the patter found in standup routines. By contrast, it could be argued that the urge to create a Demy-like musical has already yielded at least four separate Akerman features – not only Les années 80 (forty minutes of videotaped auditions and rehearsals, followed by three completed musical numbers) and Golden Eighties (the finished musical, with a somewhat different cast), but also Toute une nuit (which often suggests a depressive musical, a musical without music) and the opening stretches of Nuit et jour, which arguably represent her most successful effort to date in this direction, perhaps because the ‘musical’ elements here are more integrated and used more lightly, when Julie starts to sing wordlessly along with the lush strings on the sound track – sometimes in unison, sometimes complementing or augmenting the musical backdrop. After she and Jack walk downstairs to go their separate ways – he to his taxi, she on her nightly tour of the city – she begins to sing out loud to the same tune, this time without accompaniment, a kind of celebration of her life as we’ve come to understand it. ‘During the day, he tells me about his night, and at night I wander across Paris. … We don’t have a child; it isn’t really the right time. … I always get home before him. I wait for the day and erase the night. It’s summer in Paris, the time for abandonment, when days are the longest. … We don’t have a phone, but we don’t know anyone anyway.’ Sometimes we see her singing while she walks and sometimes we merely hear her offscreen, but the movement of her walk and the movement of the melodic line both proceed continuously and fluidly. One of the more touching aspects of Les années 80 and Golden Eighties is that Akerman’s own exuberant conducting of a robust waltz sung by an actress in a sound studio in the former film is far more animated, physical, emotional, and moving than the ‘finished’ (and abbreviated) version performed by a different actress is in the second film. More generally, Akerman’s documentaries might be said to run the gamut from the relatively routine (Un jour Pina à demandé [1983] and Sud [1999]) to the extremely powerful (D’est and De l’autre côté [2002]), with Les années 80 and Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman somewhere in between these extremes. Perhaps the two most extreme expressions of neurotic regression in Akerman’s work after Saute ma ville are the first third of je tu il elle L’homme à la valise, both mocking self-portraits of a sort as well as speculative fictions which show Akerman alone in a room, her character steadily growing crazier and more obsessive over several days. In the far more comic L’homme à la valise, in which she is sharing an apartment with a young American man she hardly knows, she barricades herself in a single room and sets up a TV camera by the window to monitor his various comings and goings. (Along with a few of Akerman’s other television films – perhaps most notably her Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles – this is one of her best films that’s also one of those hardest to resee, which is why I can’t discuss it here in any detail.) and the last half ofboth mocking self-portraits of a sort as well as speculative fictions which show Akerman alone in a room, her character steadily growing crazier and more obsessive over several days. In the far more comic, in which she is sharing an apartment with a young American man she hardly knows, she barricades herself in a single room and sets up a TV camera by the window to monitor his various comings and goings. (Along with a few of Akerman’s other television films – perhaps most notably her– this is one of her best films that’s also one of those hardest to resee, which is why I can’t discuss it here in any detail.) In je tu il elle je who has not yet found a tu, an il, or an elle. And all of this activity is periodically described by her in offscreen narration, recounting her various actions dryly and factually, adding occasional updates on the people or the snow that she sees outside through her window. , Akerman’s first feature (and the only one to date in black and white), she compulsively repositions the mattress in her one-room, ground floor flat as well as the voluminous pages of the letter, apparently to an unnamed friend or lover, that she keeps writing and rewriting (rearranging the various drafts in various rows like playing cards in a game of solitaire), and the clothes (black sweater and trousers) that she keeps taking off and then either putting back on or draping over her body like bed sheets, meanwhile, no less compulsively, eating spoons full of sugar from a paper bag. Late in this sequence, even the various mounds of sugar get repositioned as well – transferred via her spoon back from the tops of the pages of the letter to the paper bag, for instance. All of these manic activities might be said to resemble the various creative options of an artist working within a minimalist context and strictly for herself (an audience of one), yet completely uncertain about her various decisions – namely, awho has not yet found a, an, or an. And all of this activity is periodically described by her in offscreen narration, recounting her various actions dryly and factually, adding occasional updates on the people or the snow that she sees outside through her window. Cut to a freeway under a drizzling rain, where we see her picked up as a hitchhiker by a young truck driver, inaugurating the film’s second part. It’s part of the film’s evolution as indicated in its title that she continues to narrate offscreen, but more sparingly, until her offscreen voice disappears in the third sequence. Most of this second sequence unfolds like a road movie without dialogue, much of it punctuated by the silent meals of the two characters (the first and longest of which is accompanied by them watching an offscreen television set in a diner). In one sequence she masturbates him while he’s driving; the only words we hear are his various instructions to her and his commentary on his family as well as what’s currently happening. Basically, according to what we see and hear, one might almost say that she’s ‘servicing’ him like a vehicle; after existing only for herself in the first sequence she appears to exist mainly for this stranger in the second. And only in the third sequence, where she visits a young woman she already knows – a sequence that culminates in their nude lovemaking on a fully made-up bed – does she appear to achieve a relationship with some measure of equality (although even here, one might say that she’s initially ‘serviced’ by her friend, who dutifully feeds her when she announces first ‘I’m hungry’ and then, somewhat later, ‘More’). Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, Akerman speaks about the important influence exerted on her career by having learned that her maternal grandmother painted large canvases, none of which seem to have survived, which showed women who appeared to be looking out at the viewer. She also cites in the same documentary the Second Commandment and Jewish taboos against visual representation, especially art produced by and about women, all of which suggests that both the monumentality of Akerman’s own work and its periodic sense of transgression can be described in part as a form of feminist rebellion. In, Akerman speaks about the important influence exerted on her career by having learned that her maternal grandmother painted large canvases, none of which seem to have survived, which showed women who appeared to be looking out at the viewer. She also cites in the same documentary the Second Commandment and Jewish taboos against visual representation, especially art produced by and about women, all of which suggests that both the monumentality of Akerman’s own work and its periodic sense of transgression can be described in part as a form of feminist rebellion. *** There are at least two potential obstacles to appreciating Akerman’s films that have a lot to do with the terminology routinely employed by film criticism. 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 scène started becoming more widespread during the 1960s. Becoming aware of the director, or metteur en scène, meant becoming aware of a director’s style and vision. Mise en scène literally means ‘place on the stage’, making us aware that it is the director who places the actors, the décor and the camera in relation to one another. It is the stage of filmmaking that takes place after the writing of the script, during the shooting, and before the editing, and because the commercial Hollywood cinema tends to break up these three activities according to a strict division of labour, the importance of mise en scène as a creative concept is that it is distinct from both of the other processes. But there is another French term, in some ways even more important, that hasn’t entered common usage, in part because the concept behind it is a little more difficult to grasp: découpage. In terms of its popular French usage, it has three separate but interlocking meanings: the final form of a script, the breakdown of a film into separate shots and sequences prior to filming, and the basic structure of a finished film. (The verb découper means ‘to cut out’ or ‘to cut up.’) The term découpage implies that there is a continuity between script and editing – a continuity imposed not by a writer, director, or editor, but by a filmmaker who carries the project through from beginning to end – and that mise en scène becomes a means toward an end in this continuity rather than an end in itself. If the term mise en scène implies an industrial model of cinema, the term découpage implies an artistic or artisanal model. The latter term makes sense in France, where a filmmaker’s right to final cut is a part of actual law; it makes less sense in countries where even the writer-directors who have an unusual amount of creative freedom – Woody Allen, for instance – do not produce a découpage in the sense that Robert Bresson does. (As we know from Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen’s 1986 book When the Shooting Stops … the Cutting Begins: A Film Editor’s Story, practically all of Allen’s features are restructured and re-created in the cutting room, and the original scripts are quite different from the finished products.) In this context it is misleading to talk merely about Akerman’s mise en scène in spite of her close attention to framing, because from that vantage point, many of her movies look rather anemic. It’s her découpage that matters – that is, not only what happens in her shots but what happens between them, among them, across them, and through them. (The same thing applies to practically all of the most important filmmakers in the history of movies: Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Andrei Tarkovsky and Orson Welles may be known to us as master directors, but their art is ultimately the art of découpage rather than simply mise en scène.) Consequently, comparing Akerman to someone like Woody Allen, Paul Mazursky or Steven Soderbergh on the level of mise en scène is about as meaningless as comparing a microscope to a microwave, or a minimalist artist to an entertainer. ‘Carl Dreyer’s basic problem as an artist,’ wrote the late Robert Warshow in 1948, reflecting on Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), ‘is one that seems almost inevitably to confront the self-conscious creator of “art” films: the conflict between a love for the purely visual and the tendencies of a medium that is not only visual but also dramatic.’ This is a problem addressed in one way or another by each of Akerman’s features to date, beginning with her painterly, silent, nonnarrative Hotel Monterey and her narrative and relatively unpainterly sound feature je tu il elle made two years later. Then came many efforts to combine and somehow reconcile the visual with the dramatic, starting with Jeanne Dielman. News From Home is essentially a nonnarrative study of Manhattan exteriors accompanied by Akerman’s voice as she reads letters she received from her mother while she was in New York, material that inevitably introduces narrative elements. A similar mix is operative in Histoires d’Amérique, although here the setting is a single park and the narrative elements come from the various Jewish jokes being told. Les rendez-vous d’Anna, L’homme à la valise, and Golden Eighties are all unabashed story films, but the first two make use of some of the claustrophobic painterly elements in Hotel Monterey, while the third defines narrative as an interlocking series of mini-plots. Toute une nuit is also made up of multiple mini-plots, but other than occurring over a single night most of them don’t interlock, and the overall effect is more painterly than narrative; the same is true to an even more radical extent of Histoires d’Amérique. Les années 80 regards its actresses in part as painterly subjects or models and incorporates narrative only in the sense that it charts the development of certain songs and performances. In broad terms, the polarity between painting and narrative is one between persistence and development. A painting exists in space, a narrative in time; persisting is what a painting does in time, and developing is what a narrative does in space. Consequently, insofar as Akerman’s films resemble paintings, character and plot development is always something of a problem, and insofar as they impose narratives, the persistence of people and places without any development is also something of a problem. The second obstacle to appreciating Akerman’s films has to do with Akerman being a Belgian Jew – even 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 this is 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 imperialism that confuses our understanding of filmmakers as important as Michael Snow (Canadian) and Jean-Luc Godard (Swiss) – two of Akerman’s major influences – as well as Akerman herself. The fact that Snow made his best-known film, Wavelength (1967), in a Manhattan loft and that Godard made many of his best-known features in France obviously adds to this confusion, and at the same time it falsely enhances the reputations of these filmmakers by seeming to make them more fashionable. It’s been argued more than once that if Wavelength had been shot in, say, a Toronto loft, it might never have been so important to many Manhattan critics, and it’s worth adding that the period when Godard was most fashionable coincided with the period when he was based in Paris; now that he’s based in rural Switzerland, his work is generally considered a good deal more perverse and impenetrable.