பெண் திரை மொழி: -சாந்தால் அகர்மான்

நானொரு பெண்ணிய இயக்குநரா என்று மற்றவர்கள் என்னிடம் கேட்கும்பொழுது: ‘நான் ஒரு பெண். நான் சினிமாக்களும் எடுக்கிறேன்; சாந்தால் அகர்மான்

1950-ல் பிரஸ்ஸல் நகரில் ஒரு போலந்து யூத மரபு குடும்பத்தில் பிறந்த சந்தால் அகர்மான் திரைப்பரப்பு வெளியில் பெண்ணிய பிரச்சினைகளையும் பார்வைகளையும் ஏற்படுத்தி ஆண் திரைக்கதையாடலின் மீதும், மரபான சினிமா உருவாக்கங்களின் மீதும் தனது தனித்துவமிக்க ஆளுமையின் வழியாக தாக்கத்தையும் விமர்சனங்களையும் எழுப்பினார். பெண்களை மையமாக கொண்டு உணர்வுபூர்வமாகவோ, அறிவுபூர்வமாகவோ படங்கள் உருவாக்க முடியாமல் வழி திணறிக் கொண்டிருந்த 70களில், மோதி உடைத்துக் கொண்டு தனது தெளிவான படைப்புகளோடு அரங்கினுள் வந்தார். கோட்பாட்டு விவகாரங்களில் தலையிட்டுக்கொண்டாலும், யூத மரபோ நிலை நின்று போன பட உருவாக்க சம்பிரதாயங்களோ அகர்மானின் படைப்பாக்க ரீதியான உணர்வெழுச்சிக்கு விலங்கு போட முடியவில்லை.

1956 தனக்கு வெறும் 15 வயது மட்டும் இருக்கும் பொழுது பிரஸ்ஸல்ஸில் ஒரு தியேட்டரில், பிரஞ்சு புதிய அலை இயக்குநரும், உலக முழுவதிலும் புத்திஜீவி என்று அறியப்படுகிறவருமான ழான்லுக் கோடார்டின் ‘மண்டன் பியரோ’ பார்ததிலிருந்து துவங்குகிறது அவரது கலைப் பயணம். அதற்கு முன்பு வரை கோடார்ட் பற்றியோ அவரது திரைப்படங்கள் பற்றியோ கேள்விப்பட்டதும் இல்லை. சினிமா குறித்து அதிகம் சிந்தித்ததும் இல்லை. இப்படம் ஒரு முடிவுற்ற கனவையும் திரைப்படம் எடுக்க வேண்டும் என்ற ஒரு தீராத வேட்கையையும் அவருள் உண்டாக்கிற்று.

அகர்மானின் கனவு ஒரு திரைப்படம் எடுக்க வேண்டும் என்பது. எனவே பிரஸ்ஸல்ஸில் உள்ள பெல்ஜியன் திரைப்பள்ளியில் சேர்ந்தவருக்கு அங்கு கிடைத்ததோ வெறும் அச்சடிக்கப்பட்ட பாட திட்டங்களும், தொழி;ல்நுட்ப ரீதியான கோட்பாடுகள் மட்டுமே. தனது தீராத படைப்பு வேட்கையை சுருக்கிக் கொண்டு ஒரு சாதாரண மாணவியாய் இருக்க முடியாமல் படைப்பு உருவாக்க அனுபவம் எதையும் தராத அந்த திரைப்பள்ளியிலிருந்து வெளியேறினார். 1968ல் தனது முதல் சுய படைப்பான Saute Ma Ville யை எடுக்கிறார். வெறும் 13 நிமிடங்கள் மட்டுமே ஓடக் கூடிய அப்படத்தை எடுக்கும் பொழுது அவருக்கு வயது 18. அலுப்பூட்டக் கூடிய பள்ளியில் படிப்பை முடித்துக்கொண்டு வெளியேறிய அகர்மான் ஷோத்மாவில் உள்ள ஒரு ரெஸ்டாரொண்டில் சர்வராக பணிபுரிந்தும், நண்பர்களிடமிருந்து திரட்டிய சொற்ப பணத்தைக் கொண்டும் அப்படத்தை தயாரித்தார். முதல் படைப்பு அனுபவம் பற்றி அகர்மான் கூறும் பொழுது.

ஒரு நாள் எனக்கும் என்னைப்பற்றி ஒரு படம் எடுக்க வேண்டும் என்ற உணர்வு தோன்றியது. அது தான் Saute Ma Ville என்ற படம். எனக்கு காமிராவும், கொஞ்சம் பணமும், ஏதாவது விளக்குகளும், காமிராவை இயக்கித் தரக் கூடிய ஒருவரும் தேவையாயிருந்தது. எனக்கே தெரிந்த ஒருவரிடம் உதவியை நாடினேன். மற்றொருவர் ஒரு காமிரா கடன் தந்தார். கொஞ்சம் திரைச் சுருள் வாங்கினோம். இப்படியாக ஒரே இரவில் இந்த சினிமாவை செய்தோம். பிறகு நான் தான் அதை படத்தொகுப்பு செய்தேன்.

கோடார்ட் படங்களில் உள்ளது போல ஒருவர் மற்றொருவரோடு பேசுகின்ற அறிவார்ந்த காரணபூர்வமான உறவுகளின் உள் வயத்தன்மையை காட்சி பூர்வமாக காட்ட கூடிய ஒரு படமாய் இருக்க வேண்டும் என்பது அவருடைய லட்சியம். அதே நேரம் அவ் வயதில் ஒரு படத்தை உருவாக்குவதற்காக பணமோ, மற்ற வேறெந்த திறமையோ அவருக்கு அப்பொழுது இல்லாதிருந்தது.

பேசுபவர் யார்? என்ற கேள்வியை முதன் முதலில் எழுப்பியவர் ஜெர்மனிய தத்துவஞானி நீட்சே. 60களிலும், 70 களிலும் அமைப்பியல்வாத சிந்தனைகளில் இந்த கேள்வி தொடர்ந்து கேட்கப்பட்டதை பார்க்க முடியும். ஒரு படைப்பில் பேசுபவர் யார்? என்ற கேள்வியின் மீது பெண்ணியம் சார்ந்த அர்த்த குறுக்கீடு உண்டானது. ஒரு திரைப்படைப்பில் பெண் பேசுகிற பொழுது யதார்த்தத்தில் பேசுவது யார்? Sight & Sound என்ற ஒரு பிரசித்த பெற்ற ஒரு சினிமா இதழில் ஜானட் பர்க்ஸ்ட் ரோம் எழுதிய ஒரு கடிதத்தில் : ‘அகர்மானின் திரைப்படங்களில் பெண்களை குறித்த கதைகளல்ல. அவைகளில் குறுக்கீடு செய்து அதன் அடிப்படையை விசாரிப்பது தான் பிரதானமானது. இக் கேள்வியை வாழ்வின் இயல்பான அனுபவங்களுடன் எதிர்கொண்ட அகர்மான் தனித்துவம் வாய்ந்த நுட்பமான செயல் தீவிரத்துடன் அதனை உள்வாங்கிக் கொண்டு, தனது படைப்புகளின் ஊடே தீர்வுக்கான பாதைகளை செதுக்கினார். சோந்த அம்மாவுடன் கொண்டிருந்த அன்பார்ந்த பிணைப்பு, தனது யூத வம்ச பாரம்பரிய லெஸ்பியன் உறவின் முக்கியத்துவம் சலிப்பூட்டக் கூடிய பெண்ணின் தினசரி நடவடிக்கைகள் இவற்றின் மீதான அவரது விமர்சனபூர்வமான பார்வை அவருடைய படைப்புகளில் பிரதான அங்கம் வகித்தன. பெண்ணிய பார்வையுடன் புதிய யுகத்தின் தனியான திரைப்படைப்பாளி என்ற நிலையில்,Jeanne dielman, Je Duli Elle (நான், நீ, அது, அவள்) News From Home போன்ற அவரது ஆரம்ப காலப் படங்கள் அனைத்தும் பெண்ணிய பார்வையிலான சினிமா சித்தாந்தங்களின் அடிப்படையில் உருவாக்கப்பட்ட படைப்புகள் என்று கருதப்படுகின்றன.

1975 ல் Jeanne dielman படம் வெளிவந்த பொழுது, திரைப்பட வரலாற்றில் பெண் சாதனையின் முதல் ‘மாஸ்டர் பீஸ்’ என்றார் லேமண்ட். பட உருவாக்கத்திலும் படத் தொகுப்பிலும் அசாதாரண சிறப்புத் தன்மையுடன் கூடிய புதிய வெளிச்சங்களைப் பாய்ச்சியது இப்படம். Jeanne dielman ஒரு பெண்ணிய திரைப்படம் என்று சொல்வதற்கு அகர்மான் தயங்கவில்லை. ஒரு பெல்ஜிய விதைவித்தாயை பற்றியது இப்படம். புற உலகில் உள்ள இடையூறுகள் மூலம் சுயம் நசுக்கப்படுவதையும் மிகவும் ஆற்றலுடன் தனது அடையாளத்தையும் அடிப்படை உணர்வுகளையும் மீட்டெடுக்க வேண்டியதன் தேவையாகத் தான் Jeanne dielman ஒரு கொலையும் செய்ய வேண்டிய நிலை வருகின்றது. மிகவும் கவனத்துடன் படைப்புருவாக்க உத்திகளை அகர்மான் இப்படத்தில் கையாள்கிறார். உதாரணமாக நெடிய கதாபாத்திரத்தை சித்தரிக்கும் பொழுது அவளுடைய தினசரி நடவடிக்கைகளை அதிக பூடகத் தன்மையோடு தொடர்ந்து சித்தரிக்கிறார். ஒவ்வொரு நடவடிக்கையின் அசாதாரண தன்மைக்குள்ளும் அவர் ஆழ்ந்து செல்கிறார். தனது சுய வெளிப்பாட்டுக்காக அதி முக்கியத்துவம் வாய்ந்த காமிராவின் தன்மையையே மாற்ற வேண்டிய நிர்ப்பந்தம் என்பதனை இப் படைப்பின் மூலம் பிரகடனப்படுத்தினார். ஒரு குடும்பத் தலைவி என்ற நிலையில் ஒரு பெண்ணினுடைய மனம் தினசரி பணிகளின் மீதும், விவகாரங்களின் மீதும் அந்நியமான நிலையைப் பற்றி மிகவும் நுட்பமான முறையில் அவர் திரைப்படம் செய்த பொழுது பெண்ணிய வாதத்தினுடைய உலகத்திற்கும் சினிமாவிற்கும் இடையே உள்ள கடந்து வரவேண்டிய அந்த 18 ஆண்டுகளில் மிகவும் விவாதிக்கப்படக் கூடிய படைப்பாளியாகிவிட்டார்.Jeanne Dielman படம் மிகவும் இளவயது பெண்களின் சித்திரங்களின் வரலாற்றில் ஒரு மைல் கல்.

1972ல் நியூயோர்க் சென்ற அகர்மான் நவீன சினிமா படைப்பாளிகளுடன் தொடர்பை ஏற்படுத்திக் கொண்டார். கோடார்டினுடைய மற்றும் பிரெஞ்சு புதிய கலைப் படங்களைப் போல நியூயோர்க் நகரமும் அவருள் செலுத்திய தாக்கம் சாதாரணமானதல்ல. அது குறித்து அகர்மான் பியரோ ல ஹூ விற்கு இணையாக என்னுடைய நிலையை நிர்ணயம் செய்ததில் நியூயோர்க் நகரம் மிகப் பெரிய பங்கு வகித்தது. நான் பிராஷினுடைய படங்களை பார்த்தது அங்கே தான். அவரை விடவும் மைக்கோல் ஸ்நோவினுடைய படங்கள் (இவரது அபிமான இயக்குநர் மைக்கோல் ஸ்நோ) சினிமா மொழியினூடாக நிலைத்து நிற்கக் கூடியவை. அவருடைய படங்கள் – கதையோ, கதையாடலோ எதுவும் இல்லாத …. அதன் மொழி அது மட்டும் தான். வேறு எந்த ஒன்றையும் அடக்காத பிரித்து அறிய முடியாது…

தன்னுடைய முதல் படத்தை எடுப்பதற்காக தனிமையில் ஒரு நீண்ட காலத்தை அவர் அவஸ்தையுடன் கடக்க வேண்டியிருந்தது. தீராத ஆர்வம்

கொப்பளிக்க முதல் படம் எடுத்தது மிகப் பெரிய ஆவேசத்துடன் தான் என்ற போதிலும், பண வசதியின்றி அதனை பிரிண்ட் எடுக்க முடியவில்லை. Jetu il elle (நான், நீ, அது, அவள்). அகர்மானின் இந்த முதல் படத்திலும் சித்திரவதையும் வேதனையும் முழுதுமாக உள்வாங்கப்பட்டு, அதற்கான விடுபடலுக்கான தேடலே பிரதானமாக இருந்தது அவருக்கு.

அவருடைய சினிமாக்களுக்கு சில சிறப்பான தனித்தன்மைகள் உண்டு. சொந்த கதையம்சமும், ஆளுமையும். அம்மாவோடு அவருக்கு உள்ள உறவும் ஒரு முக்கியமான அங்கமாகும். மற்றொன்று தனது படைப்புகளில் அவரை முயன்ற நடித்த, கதாபாத்திரங்களின் வழியே தனது அடையாளத்தை வெளிப்படுத்துவது. நான், நீ, அது, அவள் என்ற இப்படத்திலும் இறுதியான அவஸ்தையை ஏற்படுத்துகிற, நீண்ட, அற்புதமான அந்த பகுதி, பெண் அடையாளங்களின் பிரதி பிரதி விம்பமாய் மட்டுமல்ல, பிரகடனப்படுத்திக்கொண்டு, உடைத்து திறக்கிற புதிய பரிமாணத்தையும் தரக் கூடியதாய் இருந்தது அக் காட்சி. 

தற்கிடையில் படமெடுக்கும் கனவுகளுடன், படப்பிடிப்பு நிலையங்களில் அலைந்து திரிந்தார். ஸ்டூடியோக்களில் வைத்து குறைந்த பட்ச பரிசோதனை படங்கள் எடுத்த அனுபவத்தின் வெளிச்சத்தில் தான் Jetu il elle  படம் எடுத்தது. படம் 1974 இல் முடிவடைந்தாலும் கூட 1976இல் தான் வெளிவர முடிந்தது. 1968இல் பாரிஸில் வைத்து, தான் எழுதிய ஒரு கதையை ஆதாரமாக கொண்டு மிகவும் குறைந்த பொருட் செலவில் இப் படத்தை உருவாக்கினார். 'ஒரு புதிய அனுபவ பார்வையுடன் - மிஸ் என்ஸின் - உருவாக்குவதற்கு ஆறு வருட இடைவெளி எனக்கு உதவியது. ஒரு நடிகை என்ற நிலையில் என்னுடைய பங்கும் அப்படைப்பு அனுபவத்தின் ஒரு பாகமாயிற்று' என்கிறார் இப் படம் குறித்து அகர்மான். ஒரு பெண் அவளுடைய உள்ளார்ந்த ஆற்றலை தேடி கண்டெடுப்பதின் உருவகக்கதை தான் இப் படம். மேலும் பெண்களின் தனித்துவமான பிரச்சினைகளை பேசிய துநயnநெ னநைடஅயn படம் உருவாக இந்த பட அனுபவமே ஆதாரமாக இருந்தது.  

இ
1976இல் நியூயோர்க்கில் அவரது இரண்டாவது பயணத்தின் இலக்காக இருந்தது News from Home. தன் முதல் பயணத்தில் அம்மா தனக்கெழுதிய கடிதங்களை மையமாக வைத்து உருவாக்கிய இந்த 116MM 6 படம் அமெரிக்காவில் பரிசோதனை படங்களில் பிரபலமான ஒருNon – Fiction தயாரிப்பாக இருந்தது. சுய விவரணப் படங்களிலும் பரிசோதனை படங்களிலும் காணக்கிடைக்காத ஒரு படைப்பாக்க முழுமையை இவருடைய படங்களில் நாம் காண முடியும். 
 
 ஊடே பிரத்யேக தன்மையை உருவாக்குகின்றன. நகரத்தின் பிளவுண்ட வழிகள், ஆள் அரவமற்ற Sub – way க்கள் - இவையெல்லாம் காண்பிக்கப்படுகிற பொழுது, அவை சில நேரங்களில் உயிரோட்டத்துடனும், சில நேரங்களில் வெற்று சூன்யமாகவும், காட்சியளிக்கின்றன. ஆனால் நாம் பார்க்கிற வெறும் கடிதங்களில், 'நீ' குறிப்பிடக் கூடிய அந்த மகள் அல்ல. அந்த மகளை நாம் ஒரு போதும் காண்பதுமில்லை.   News from Homeஐ தொடர்ந்து Les Rendezvous Anna, 1982  1982 இல் Toute One Nuif  ரேகை  - ம் வெளிவருகின்றன. பிரஞ்சு தொலைக்காட்சிக்காக சில ஆவணப் படங்களை அவர் தயாரிக்கிறார். அவைகளில் மிகவும் கவனிக்க தகுந்தது பீனா போஸ்ஸை குறித்த ஒன்றும், தன் சகோதரனும், பியானோ கலைஞரும் ஆகிய ஆல்ப்ரட் பிரன்ஜலியோடும், செய்த மற்ற இரண்டு படங்களும்.   அவருடைய முதல் இரண்டு படங்களானMonterey – 1972, Jetu il
இந்த படத்தினுடைய பின்னணி ஒலியில் ஒரு பெண் கடிதங்கள் வாசிக்கிறாள். நகரத்தில் மற்ற சப்தங்களின் ஊடாக தன்னுடைய அலைதலை வசிப்பிடத்துடன் கலந்து எடுப்பதன் வழியாக கதையில் சித்தரிக்கப்படுகிற பொருட்களின் கூடுதல் பிரதான அம்சத்தை தேடி எடுக்க அகர்மானால் முடிந்தது. இந்த படத்தில் காண்கிற காட்சிகளும், சப்தங்களும் முழுதும் ஒற்றை உலகமல்ல. முன்னிலையில் மிதந்து வரக்கூடிய காட்சிகள் புகைப்படங்களி
ன் elle – 1974 இ துநவர டை நடடந – 1974 என்பவைகளை தொடர்ந்து அவருடைய தயாரிப்பும் தைரியம் மிகுந்த 200 நிமிட படமான Jeanne dielman – 1975  இல் வெளிவந்தது.   1993இல் வெளிவந்ததில் Dest.  சுற்றிலும் உள்ளிலும் மனித ஓசைகளை அதிகம் உட்கொண்டிராத இந்த 70 காட்சிகளில், மனிதர்கள் உங்கள் சொந்த வாழ்வை முன்னேற்றி செல்வதற்கான சிரமங்கள் தான் விரிகின்றன. சிலர் வலுவிழந்து நடக்கும் பொழுதும் மற்றும் சிலர் வாகனங்களில் விரைகின்றனர். சிலர் பலவற்றை பேசி நடக்கின்றனர். இதில் எல்லாவற்றிலிருந்தும் விலகி யாவரும் காத்திருக்கின்றனர். சில சமயம் சிலர் அவர்களுடைய லௌகீக சுகங்களுக்கு பின்னால் ஒடுகின்றனர். நாம் அவர்களை காணும் பொழுது TV பார்த்துக்கொண்டோ, ஒப்பணை செய்து கொண்டோ இருக்கலாம். ஆனால் எப்பொழுதும் ஒரு வித பரப்பரப்போடு – மிகவும் அலட்சியத்தோடு இருக்கின்றனர்.    
ாட்டு உத்திகளை அகர்மான் கையாண்டாலும் படமாக்குகின்ற விதத்தில் அவருடைய தனிதன்மை மிகுந்த ஆளுமையில் ஒரு முற்றிலும் புதிய வடிவை எடுத்து விடுகிறது.   அகர்மானின் சமீபகால படங்கள் From the Other Side  (2002) அமெரிக்காவில் குடியேறிய மெக்சிகன் தொழிலாளர்களை பற்றிய ஆவணப் படம். அமெரிக்க அரசாங்கத்தின் கெடுபிடியான குடியேற்ற தடுப்பு சட்டங்களை பாத்திரமாக விமர்ச்சிக்கின்றது இப்படம். அமெரிக்க சமூகத்தை உருவாக்கியதில் மிகவும் அடிமட்ட நிலையில் இன்னமும் மெக் சிகன் தொழிலாளர்களே உள்ளனர். தொழில் தேடி ஓரிடத்திலிருந்து மற்றொரு இடத்திற்கு பயணம் செய்ய வேண்டிய நிலையில் உள்ளவர்களுக்கு தங்களுடைய பயணம் தொடர்ந்து கொண்டே இருக்க வேண்டும் என்று இந்தப் படம் குறிப்புணர்த்துகின்றது.   காந்தி பௌலர் அகர்மான் பற்றி 'அவருடைய சினிமாக்களின் பிரதானமாக ஒரு சோகபாவத்தை நிருத்தி வருகிறார். அதனால் நவீன சினிமாக்களோ, கலாரீதியான சினிமாக்களோ, பெண்களுடைய தன்னிச்சையான சினிமாக்களோ மிகவும் விவாதிக்கப்படுகிற பொழுது அவருடைய 
எப்பொழுதும் முதலிடம் வகிக்கக் கூடிய அகர்மானின் பிடித்தமான எழுத்தாளர் ஆகிய மர்சேன் ப்ரூஸ்டீன்“La Prisonniere” என்ற நாவலின் 5ஆம் பாகத்தை ஆதரமாக கொண்டு உருவாக்கியது தான் La Captive  (2000) என்ற திரைப்படம் கதையினுடைய திரைப்படம் என்பதை விட திரைப்படம் எடுக்க இக் கதை உதவியது என்பதே பொறுத்தம். தன்னுடைய குறுகிய ரசானுபவத்தை அகர்மான் 5 படத்தில் மிக சமார்த்தியமாக உபயோக்கித்துள்ளார் என்று விமர்சகர்கள் சுட்டிக் காட்டுகின்றனர். ப்ரூஸ்டீன் நாவலில் உள்ள பரோக் அம்சத்தை விவரிக்க கூடிய ஒரு சிரமத்தையும் அகர்மான் மேற்கொள்ளவில்லை. ராஷோமானி னோவ், மொசார்ட், ஷிபார்ட் என்று இவர்களுடைய இசை மட்டும் தான் சினிமாவை முழுமையாக பற்றி இருக்கக் கூடிய இணைப்பு சங்கிலிகள். ஹிட்ச்காக்கின் 'வெர்டீகோ' நினைவூட்டக் கூடிய ரீதியில் ஒரு முடிவடையாத கதையின் வழியே கட்டுப்
பாசினிமாக்கள் புறக்கணிக்கப்படுகின்றன என்றாலும் அவைகளை இவற்றிலிருந்து ஒதுக்கிவிட முடிவதில்லை'   மிகவும் முக்கியமான காட்சிகளிலும், காமிரா கோணத்திலும் சலணங்களையும்  ( Pan Shot)இ அண்மைக் காட்சிகளையும் (Close up Shot) எதையும் நாம் காண முடிவதில்லை. பதிலாக அவர்  விரும்பக் கூடிய தாழ்ந்த காமிரா கோணங்களில் உள்ள நிச்சயமாக காமிரா கையாளுதலை தான்.   புதிய சினிமாவில் மிகவும் இயந்திரத் தனமான உலகத்திற்கு தன்னுடைய சினிமாக்களில் வழியாக அவர் திரைக்கதையின், கலைப்பூர்வ தன்மையின், கதாபாத்திர சிறப்புத் தன்மையை உடைய சிறப்பு மிக்க படைப்பை கொண்டு வந்தார். சுதந்திர சினிமா என்கிற பதத்திற்கு புதியதொரு அர்த்தம் சந்தால் அகர்மானால் தர முடிந்தது. அகர்மானின் சினிமாக்களும் முழு சுதந்திரத்தை உடையதும் அழுத்தத் திருத்தமான படைப்பு உத்வேகத்தினுடையதும், தீர்க்கமான கலைப்பார்வையும் உடைய படைப்புக்களில் மறு உருக்கலாகும். குறியியல் வாதி என்றோ, அமைப்பியல்வாதி என்றோ, பெண்ணியல் வாதி என்றோ ஏதேனும் ஒரு முத்திரை குத்தி அகர்மானின் சினிமாக்களை ஒதுக்க நினைத்தால் நட்டம் நிச்சயம் நம் எல்லோருக்கும்தான். பெண்கள், பிரச்சினைகள், பாலுறவு, குழந்தைகள், உணர்வுகள் என்று எல்லாவற்றாலும் ஆன அகர்மானின் ஆழத்தில் இறங்கி சென்றால் நம்முடைய அவசியமான ஒரு உலகம் அங்கே நிச்சயமாக இருக்கும்.   நனறி- நிழல் 
மலையாளம் வாரிக, 12 டிசம்பர் 2003ல் வந்த சங்கர் கட்டுரை IFFK 2003 Booky; C.S வெங்கடேஸ்வரன் கட்டுரையை தழுவி தமிழில் எழுதப்பட்டுள்ளது.

கட்டுரை---ஹவி

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சாந்தால் அகர்மானின் உரையாடல்கள் மற்றும் திரைப்படங்கள் பற்றிய கட்டுரைகள்

இனைப்பு-

In her own time

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Miriam Rosen

• 1Almost thirty years after Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles earned its twenty-five-year-old director a central place in the history of feminist cinema, the Centre Georges Pompidou is mounting a major survey of Chantal Akerman's work. In anticipation of both the forty-film Beaubourg retrospective, which opens on April 28, and the Paris premiere of Akerman's newest film, Demain on demenage, Miriam Rosen spoke with the Belgian cineaste about her place in contemporary film culture.

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Static shot, interior, day.

Frontal view of an airy, white-walled, white-curtained apartment furnished with worktables and chairs (three each), computers (two). A shaggy dog enters smack in the middle of the frame, tail to the camera. As he takes his place front left, a slight, dark-haired woman in a dark jacket and pants enters and sits down on the chair front right.

Such is the beginning of Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1996), a first in the history of the venerable French public-television series Cinema, of Our Time, each installment of which had been--until then--one filmmaker's profile of another. As Chantal Akerman (the woman in the chair) explains at the outset, since the directors she suggested had already been filmed, she proposed a self-portrait "with the idea of making my old films talk, of treating them as if they were rushes that I'd edit to create a new film, which would be my portrait of me." However, she goes on, the producers wanted her not only to appear on-screen but to talk about herself, and "that's where the problems started."

Medium close-up. By way of solution, Akerman offers a series of halting "attempts" to discuss her work--or rather, to read the bits of text she has written around and about it, punctuated by fade-outs and ultimately presented in the third person because (as in the long Jewish joke she tells about a man so incapable of vaunting the merits of his cow at market that a neighbor has to do it for him) she prefers her films "when somebody else talks about them." In fact, the only movie she mentions is Jeanne DieIman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the two-hundred-minute chronicle of three days in the life of a widowed Brussels housewife turned part-time prostitute which brought the twenty-five-year-old director to the attention of art-film and feminist circles. Rather, after a fleeting reference to her intrepid beginnings in Brussels at the age of eighteen and the early years with practically no money and no audience, she enumerates what the "good cow salesman" would point out: "language, documentary, fiction, Jews and the second commandment ... frontal images." And the fact that she was born in Belgium in 1950, that her parents were Polish Jews, and that "her cinema is totally impregnated with that." And her persistent struggle to escape these (and other) categories.

Close-up. The story of her maternal grandmother's deportation to Auschwitz, of her paintings, which were lost, and of her diary, which survived.

Static shot. Interior, night. In a "last attempt" that follows some forty-five minutes of unidentified excerpts from a selection of her work to date, the filmmaker (now seated in an armchair) states: "My name is Chantal Akerman, I was born in Brussels. And that's the truth. That's the truth."

As Akerman initially envisioned, the films--fifteen of them presented in nonchronological order, like a vast audiovisual stream of consciousness--are left to do most of the talking. They talk, for example, about immigration and migration, from the Eastern European Jews of her grandparents' generation in Histoires d'Amerique (American Stories, 1988) to her own discovery of New York in News from Home (1976), stylistically marked by the experimental cinema of Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas but accompanied by her mother's letters from Brussels (which Akerman herself reads in voice-over). They talk about coming of age, from the "tragicomic burlesque" of her first film, Saute ma ville (Blow Up My City, 1968), and the early sexual questioning of Je tu il elle (1974), both of which feature Akerman as the young woman in question, to later versions of same in J'ai faim, j'ai froid (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold, 1984) and Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des annees 60 a Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the '60s in Brussels, 1993). They talk about music and dance, in a remarkable montage of sequences from the avant-garde Toute une nuit (All Night Long, 1982); Les Annees 80 (The Eighties, 1983), which was literally a dress rehearsal for a musical comedy in progress, Golden Eighties (1985); and Un jour Pina m'a demande (One Day Pina Asked Me, 1983), a stylized documentary on Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. And. of course, they talk about time and memory, composed and recomposed in static shots and frontal images, in a constantly expanding and overlapping repertoire of experimental films, dramatic features, musical comedies, and documentaries. And ultimately about the tension between the continuity of the shots and the subjects and the discontinuity of the history underlying them.

Eight years, two long fictions (and one seven-minute short), two feature documentaries (and one video "mise-en-scene" for public television), three installations, and one novella after Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman came into the world, the filmmaker's self-portrait remains uncannily faithful to its subject. Not because the works repeat themselves but, on the contrary, because each one is the product of a Sisyphuslike attempt to explain the inexplicable, to find the definitively missing links and fill in the irreparable gaps. An effort that, like the peeling of potatoes in Jeanne Dielman, the endless waiting lines in D'Est (From the East, 1993) or the deportation of "dirty" immigrants in De I'autre cote (From the Other Side, 2002), is common to her "story" and ours.

At our interview last February, there was no dog--we met at the Paris office of Paulo Branco, the producer of La Captive (1999) and her new "musical tragicomedy," Demain on demenage (Tomorrow We Move), which premiered in France last month--but as in her self-portrait, Chantal Akerman, dressed in a dark jacket and pants, came into the room and sat down directly in front of me. In the succession of "attempts" to talk about her work that followed, what came out--with difficulty--reinforces the impression that in fact each film, each installation, each book could be called Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman. The interview was no exception. And that's the truth.--MR

MIRIAM ROSEN: Your Centre Pompidou retrospective lends itself to an overall view, but it's not easy to find an angle from which to approach your work. All of a sudden, I thought of the notion of the frontalier, the border crosser or, perhaps better, border dweller. What's interesting about this is not solely geographical, because you're always on the border between various domains of creativity, various genres, various media ...

CHANTAL AKERMAN: That's so vast.

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MR: But everyone finds something different in your work, which doesn't quite fit together as a whole--and yet, you're a single person.

CA: Yes, one poor little person!

MR: And that's why this notion of "border dweller" interests me: That is where you touch down.

CA: Actually, you should write about me without speaking to me. That would be better. It's true, I made From the Other Side, which is, of course, a documentary about Mexicans crossing the border. I've made plenty of things that had to do with that. And one could say that I'm on the border between so-called experimental film and narrative film and that I travel from one to the other. And I'm here, but I could be elsewhere. But I've already spoken about all that.

MR: Texts are everywhere in your films. This goes back to Je tu il elle, with the text that you write in the bedroom while eating sugar.

CA: Yes, because Je tu il elle was initially a short story.

MR: Did you plan to publish it?

CA: No, it was for me. And afterward, I wanted to make it into a movie, but it was written as a short story, not as a screenplay. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna [1978] was also written as a text, not as a screenplay. And Nuit et jour [Night and Day, 1991] was a short story at first. Afterward, I developed it into a screenplay.

Now it's a little harder to get money. Now I'm obliged to write screenplays because otherwise I won't be given money. Because otherwise I'll be told that it's literary, it's theatrical, I don't know what, but not cinema. Which is too bad because writing a screenplay--"Summer, a small bedroom at night"--doesn't offer the same pleasure. You write the most succinct descriptions possible and then dialogue and that's it. Before, when I wrote texts, I at least had the pleasure of writing a text.

MR: The text is like a mark in time, while someone's reading, and afterward.

CA: When you read a text, you're on your own time. That is not the case in film. In fact, in film, you're dominated by my time. But time is different for everyone. Five minutes isn't the same thing for you as it is for me. And five minutes sometimes seems long, sometimes seems short. Take a specific film, say, D'Est: I imagine the way each viewer experiences time is different. And on my end, when I edit, the timing isn't done just any way. I draw it out to the point where we have to cut. Or take another example, News from Home: How much time should we take to show this street so that what's happening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we can go from the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete--or move forward in another way. I'm the one who decides. At times I've shot things and I've said, "Now this is getting unbearable!" And I'll cut. For News from Home it's something else, but I have a hard time explaining it. I'm in the middle of writing a book about all this, and I'm finding it very difficult to explain. Today I'll write about time--I write more or less every day because I have very little time to do it--and it's too soon.

When you're editing, something happens that tells you this is the moment to cut. It's not theoretical, it's something I feel. Afterward, explaining it is always very difficult. In the beginning, especially with Jeanne Dielman, a lot of people thought I was a great theoretician. Quite the contrary. Later, when people would meet me, they'd realize that. Everyone thought, for example, that Jeanne Dielman was in real time, but the time was totally recomposed, to give the impression of real time. There I was with Delphine [Seyrig], and I told her, "When you put down the Wiener schnitzels like that, do it more slowly. When you take the sugar, move your arm forward more quickly." Only dealing with externals. When she asked why, I'd say, "Do it, and you'll see why later." I didn't want to manipulate her. I showed her afterward and said to her, "You see, I don't want it to 'look real,' I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes." But I only saw that after Delphine did it. I hadn't thought of it before.

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That's for gestures, actions, let's say. There's also the case of static shots where nothing happens, like in Hotel Monterey [1972], where you see a hallway and nothing else. How long will we hold this shot of the hallway? In the montage, you can feel it. Obviously, it's very personal, because someone else would have held it half as long or three times as long. How do you explain that? You have to be very, very calm. When I edit, when I sense that I'm at the quarter mark or halfway through the film, I begin to screen it for myself, with my editor, Claire Atherton, with whom I've worked for years--almost by osmosis. We close the curtains, take the phones off the hook, and try to have a floating gaze, as an analyst might call it. And we say, "That's it!" Why? It's inexplicable. And that's why it's difficult for me to talk about it.

MR: You've said, "To make a film, you still have to write," but perhaps it should be, "In order for me to make a film ..."

CA: No, no. It's not for me; it's because you have to ask for money. But that suits me, in fact. It's good for me [in English in original]. Because the minute I start writing, I like it. But for the documentaries now, they want it to be more and more defined, and I absolutely cannot define things. So I circle around it. I write around the film, around the hole, let's say, or around the void. Because I want to go make a documentary without knowing what I'm doing. They always demand, "Tell us what you're going to do." And all I can tell you is that I just don't know. It's precisely because of this lack of knowledge that there can be a film.

MR: On the question of time, I'd have thought that today people would be more used to your way of working. It doesn't conform to the norm of dominant cinema, but it embodies what's most normal and most human.

CA: You know, when most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment--for them--is to say, "We didn't notice the time pass!" With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads toward death. There's some of that, I think. And that's why there's so much resistance. I took two hours of someone's life.

MR: But we've experienced those two hours, instead of sitting in a traffic jam or in front of the TV.

CA: Yes, I agree. And not only that. I find that, on the contrary, during this time, we feel our existence. Just by the fact that we're somewhere beyond the merely informative. For example, in D'Est, we see people standing in line, and the shot lasts seven or eight minutes. Now, whenever my mother sees news about Russia she says, "I couldn't help but think of your film. I'll never see news about Russia in the same way again." That's something. For people of my mother's generation, they recognize themselves in the film; for example, in D'Est she recognizes clothes she used to wear, she recognizes faces. These images exist in her already. When I made the film I--who was born after the war--often wondered why I shot this and not that. I didn't know. But afterward, when the film was finished, I understood that those particular images were already in my head, and I was looking for them.

I'm speaking here of what we call documentaries. In all these so-called documentary films, there are always different layers. These are just people waiting for a bus, but they still evoke other things. They may evoke the lines in the camps or in wartime. In Sud [South, 1999], a tree evokes a black man who might have been hanged. If you show a tree for two seconds, this layer won't be there--there will just be a tree. It's time that establishes that, too, I think.

MR: Another characteristic of your films lies in the musicality of the languages. Not simply the reading of letters, say, or the very written dialogues, but the sound of your voice. In French, in English, in Hebrew with the installation Bordering on Fiction: D'Est [1995], and now in Spanish with From the Other Side. I get the impression there's a whole story there as well.

CA: Well, this is the story of the mother tongue, which one either has or doesn't have. I'm first-generation Belgian. My mother arrived from Poland when she was ten. There's a certain music in the Polish language that lurks behind her French--increasingly so, as she gets older. She drops articles like le and la. For example, she now says, "I am going to doctor," as you would in Polish. I was also raised with Hebrew, with the songs and prayers, and when I write, there's something of a chant about it.

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MR: I heard it while reading and rereading your novella Une Famille a Bruxelles [A Family in Brussels, 1998]: The syntax is very spare, and all of a sudden I realized that it's like biblical Hebrew, with the repetition--and, and, and!

CA: And God said ... and ... and ... and. It came out that way, yes. When I was small, it was a mixture of my mother's French and the synagogue, because my grandfather took care of me, and he didn't speak French and we always went to the synagogue.

MR: Do you speak Yiddish too?

CA: Well, I understood it, but I've forgotten almost all of it. I forgot it because I was taken out of the Maimonides School at the age of nine, when my grandfather died. Nevertheless I think that I was definitively marked by Hebrew, Yiddish, and all that.

And then my language is very poor; I have a very restricted vocabulary. Deleuze explains this very well when he speaks of Kafka's language and minor literature. There are no big car accidents, no big effects, everything is very, very, very, very tight.

MR: I think if you scratch the surface a little, almost everyone is minor.

CA: Not in France.

MR: Yes, in France, precisely. If you scratch.

CA: There's an enormous amount of people who are not border dwellers, first of all. There are still people who belong to this quote-unquote "land" and to this language. There are still "French people."

In the United States--in New York, in any case, and in other places, too--there are people who come from countries all over the world. You don't feel bad speaking bad English. Whereas in France or in Belgium--for example, on my first school paper, the teacher wrote, "colloquial." I went to a "high-class" high school, and I never felt like I belonged. I was made to feel that in various ways, and particularly because of my way of speaking. In New York, everyone knew that I came from France or from Belgium, but I felt at ease.

MR: Why did you choose New York when you were twenty-one?

CA: It was just a desire, like that. I don't know anymore. I had the impression things were happening there, but I had no idea. I knew a few words of English, very few, when I arrived. I learned to get by rather quickly, and I never felt that I spoke badly. Here in France, yes. That's why I say there are "French people." In New York, I felt relieved of the weight of not belonging. And at the same time, I felt that I didn't belong. But that was part of the pleasure. Here, not belonging is not a pleasure.

MR: But if you remain in foreign territory, where you have to speak properly, the decision to adapt Proust for your film La Captive is hardly anodyne. You once remarked that "this book was made for my cinema"--that was in the magazine Les Inrockuptibles--but with all the declensions of these languages, with your voice, with accents or without them, isn't it also a way of saying, "I am here," working with an icon of French literature?

CA: No, I don't think it was to prove that I had access to real French literature. For me, when I saw the hallways, the bedrooms, and all that in Proust's The Captive, I said, that's for me!

MR: We've discussed time and space, the editing of your films, texts and languages, and installations. But we haven't spoken about the image.

CA: Most of the time I make an image head on. I don't think that a frontal image is idolatrous, because it's a face-to-face with the other. But I realized that later, not at the beginning. The other will be in my place when they're sitting in the movie theater. Which is the same thing one could say about time: We sense time, so we sense ourselves. Face to face with an image, we sense ourselves. We are always on the outside when it comes to the other. Proust, when he speaks of kissing his grandmother, says, "But I was only kissing the exterior!" That really struck me. It's this exteriority that is under examination in my films. It's the same thing with time, because the other doesn't have the same experience of time. His own time comes into play, and his perspective comes into play, and it's a gaze directly at you. Which cannot be denied. So that's not voyeurism. If you looked up, down, to the side, etc., you would be a viewer-voyeur. And that's not happening here.

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MR: In the last part of the installation D'Est, there was a lone video monitor, and one heard your voice reciting the second commandment, which, of course, forbids graven images. That surprised me, because you speak of it as if this prohibition really concerns you.

CA: Yes, but that came later, when I had already made a lot of films. All of a sudden, I thought of that, and I said to myself, if I make images like this, en face, then it's not idolatrous. But, anyway, these are explanations after the fact.

MR: If I'm not mistaken, you never shoot your own images but always use a camera operator--from the beginning all the way to From the Other Side, in which you employed a mix of media, including your own small digital-video camera. Nonetheless, it's curious that, given the one-woman band that you are, you don't operate the camera yourself.

CA: That's true, but I'm always very close to the image. I'm the one who does the framing. I may not have pushed the button, but I did the lighting.

MR: Finally, to return to "minor literature," which you spoke about in an interview over twenty-five years ago, here's a question that I have today: With this retrospective at the Centre Pompidou and everything that surrounds it, the fact of being featured at Beaubourg and exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery, you are no longer really "minor." How does that realization sit with you?

CA: You mean, I'm becoming part of the establishment?

MR: No, I don't think you're becoming part of the establishment, but getting that kind of recognition changes your relationship to the world.

CA: Yes, but I don't feel it. Frankly, I don't feel it. I know that I have to work, I have to go on. When I passed Beaubourg the other day, I saw Sophie Calle's name displayed in big letters, and I said to myself, "Hey, will my name be in big letters like that?" And then, well, I thought about something else.

Miriam Rosen is a writer living in Paris. (See Contributors.)

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Bibliography for: "In her own time"

Miriam Rosen "In her own time". ArtForum. FindArticles.com. 26 Mar, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_42/ai_n6080

INTERVIEW Chantal Akerman

by Sam Adams January 28, 2010

ARTICLE 2

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“Je fais la politique de la terre brûlée,” says Chantal Akerman. “I follow the policy of scorched earth.” In an interview at the Dia Gallery’s Soho apartments to promote the DVD collection Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, Akerman wasted little breath qualifying her remarks on subjects like her formative influence Jean-Luc Godard, whom she now regards as an anti-Semite, and the wealthy donors who fund the gallery installations that have become a major part of her work in recent years. (She calls them simply “the enemy.”) Since her beginnings as a teenage filmmaker—see her short “Saute Ma Ville” on Criterion’s DVD of her landmark 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—Akerman has had a heedlessly individual voice, disregarding structural and sexual barriers with a combination of youthful energy and preternatural insight. Watching her direct Delphine Seyrig in the bonus materials on the Criterion disc, it’s astonishing how young Akerman looks, and how confidently she schools one of French cinema’s biggest stars in the precise mechanics of the domestic duties that occupy most of the film’s three-hour-plus run time. The works in the Seventies collection are no less adventurous, from Je, Tu, Il, Elle’s nakedly personal depiction of Akerman’s wanderlusting relationships with women and men to Les Rendez-vous D’Anna’s portrait of a rootless filmmaker. In person, Akerman is as restless as her vagabond characters, pacing the apartment’s cramped kitchenette and occasionally crossing to her nearby laptop to look up an elusive English word.

The A.V. Club: I wanted to start at the very beginning, with you as a 15-year-old seeing Pierrot Le Fou—

Chantal Akerman: Oh, I have said that a hundred times. Forget about it. You know all about that. I have told that story one million times. And I am so angry at Godard that I don’t even want to think about it. Because he is getting to be such an asshole now, and he’s anti-Semitic. He gave me the push, but that’s it.

AVC: Skipping over the anecdote, then, what was it that made you want to be a filmmaker?

CA: Well, yes yes. It’s Godard, it’s Pierrot Le Fou. But it’s very simple. I was not interested by cinema when I was young. And it’s also related to Brussels. Most of the films were forbidden. You needed to be 16 to see any interesting things. So all I saw before that was big American shit like, I don’t know what: warfare, Les Canons De Navarone, The Ten Commandments. We were just going to the movies to kiss and eat ice cream and eventually look at the movie. But I didn’t care. I was much more interested in literature; I wanted to be a writer. Then I saw Godard’s film, Pierrot Le Fou, and I had the feeling it was art, and that you could express yourself. It was in 1965, and you felt that the times were changing. He was really representing that, and freedom and poetry and another type of love and everything. So as a little girl, I went out of that place, the cinema, and I said, “I want to make films. That’s it.”

AVC: A lot of people make art to get out of the place where they grew up, but so many of your films have to do with travel and moving from place to place—

CA: You mean nomadisme. Well, I’m Jewish. That’s all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

AVC: And you had a sense of that even at 15?

CA: I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school… First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don’t know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, “What are you talking about, what’s that?” It’s not my world.

AVC: Were their families wealthier?

CA: My family was poor. When I was 12, we weren’t so poor anymore, we were middle-class. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had. And my father had to start to work when he was 12. He was cutting cloth. The director of the school went to see my grandfather and he said, “You have a son and he is brilliant and he is going to be a worker?” And my grandfather said, “There is no other way. We have to survive.” So on my father’s side, wealthy, well-educated. All my aunts were learning piano; you know that type. My father was a worker. He was the fastest cutter of cloth in the whole city. At the age of 18, he had already his own factory, and he was paying for everyone. So he started to do piano and everything, because that’s how they were educated before. But he didn’t have time to learn anything. He could read, but you should have seen the way he was signing [his name]. It took him a while to sign; he was not used to writing.

So I was at school at the Jewish school… Very good, first in the class. But then my grandfather died, and he was the very religious one. My father said, “Okay, enough with the Jewish school.” He put me into a public school and he said, “If you are the first one in your class, that means the school is bad.” That was his humor. Then I was so good there, that for high school, the director of the school said to my mother, “She is very good, but she should be educated.” So they put me in that terrible school, where after one month they called my mother to say that I was unbearable. Because it was very strict. So I ejected totally. I ejected and I felt I didn’t belong, and that was a class thing. But not only, because you know when the Jews have money in Europe—or in Belgium, maybe not in France—they don’t belong to a class. The Jews who came from Poland and they made money in schmattes, in clothes, they are not classy people. They are just inventive, strong workers, and they made money, and they want their children to go to school.

But my father, he was so busy working that he didn’t look at what I was doing. So I didn’t go to school. After a while, I hated that school so much, that class so much, that class thing. You know that first thing I wrote in school, un rédaction… I don’t know how you call it. Un essai. A little story you have to write. They said, “popular style,” which they despised. They didn’t like the way we are eating, to serve the soup. You have to take it from here, and I took it from there. I was called, I had to go to see the director of the school, and they say “You are badly educated.” That was the high school, and I hated it. They wanted my skin. At the age of 14, I was learning Latin and Greek and everything, but I didn’t give a shit. But I was obsessed by literature. It was at that moment that I discovered Godard. And they wanted me to repeat a grade, the school, because I had bad points in education, politeness and education. So I didn’t go to the school anymore.

AVC: You were graded on politeness?

CA: I had only 20 out of 80 on politeness and education. So I didn’t go to the school, and I was walking in the street. Going to cafés, or coming to pick up my girlfriend. Like in Portrait Of A Young Girl [At The End Of The 1960s In Brussels]; it was exactly that. So why am I saying all those things, because you were speaking about class?

AVC: About what drove you to make films in the first place.

CA: Because I wanted to write and then I saw [Pierrot] and I understand that I could express myself in a more… Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

AVC: That fear of being a writer, being stuck in an enclosed space and unable to write your way out, is palpable in Tomorrow We Move and The Man With A Suitcase.

CA: The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work… Sometimes not very frontally. La Captive, it’s the same, Jeanne Dielman, it’s the same. She is also in her own jail, and she needs her jail to survive. That’s why when she got an orgasm, it destroyed her jail and her existence, and so she killed the guy. And the jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me. Thank you. [Laughs.]

AVC: Was that something she spoke about?

CA: No, never. Never, ever, ever. If she knew I was telling that, she would think I was crazy. She doesn’t want to say anything about that. I wanted her to talk about it, and she said, “Well, I can do a lot of things for you, except that. Otherwise I will get crazy.” Except that it’s the other way around. She is crazy, you know.

AVC: And that’s why you went to her diaries in the gallery installation Maniac Summer?

CA: Well, the diary, can you imagine, my grandmother, what strength, what she wrote at the age of 15 in the little village in Poland among religious people. You know that she can only write to the diary, because she is a woman in 1920.

AVC: That idea of the jail, that confined space—

CA: It’s the same thing as… I don’t know if you saw the film “Là-bas,” “Down There.” It is the same thing.

AVC: Sometimes it’s a place where someone lives, and often it’s a hotel room as well, someplace inherently transient.

CA: A room is a room is a room is a room is a room is a room. [Laughs.]

AVC: The flip side of that would be, perhaps, the tracking shots in From The East, where the camera effectively never stops moving.

CA: It’s also a jail, because what you feel is an implosion instead of an explosion. The whole film is an implosion. You feel as a viewer, when you face the film and you experience the film, you feel an implosion. “When is it going to be the next…” and it is unbearable, but you know for good reason. It’s not sadistic at all.

AVC: That’s very much the feeling of watching Jeanne Dielman, where the repetitive ritual of her daily chores forges a connection with the viewer that’s practically physical, to the extent that you feel a jolt when she drops the shoe that she’s shining, or lets the potatoes boil over. It’s an effect you can really only achieve with a film of that length.

CA: It is physical, but you know, when I started to shoot Jeanne Dielman, at the beginning, I was not aware of what was going to be the film. Everything was written in the script already, but still. After three or four days, when I saw the first dailies, I realized and I said, “My God, the film is going to be three hours and 20 or 40 minutes long, and it’s going to be developing little by little.” For example, when after she sleeps with the guy for the second time, and you feel something happens, even though the length of the shots is more or less the same as before, certainly there is an acceleration inside the viewer, just because, “Oh, she forgot to put the money there, and then suddenly she doesn’t know what to do.” It’s like the end of her life. She doesn’t leave any room for anxiety. It’s like the workaholic, they do the same. When they stop, they die, because then they have to face something inside of them that they don’t want to face. When she has that, that’s the anxiety.

I think I am speaking about people. Jeanne Dielman is not special. I can do that with a man, going to work and doing the same thing and being happy because he has the key and he opens the door and then his papers are there and his secretary. Imagine, and then something has changed and he can’t stand it. Because change is dangerous. Change is fear, change is opening the jail. That’s why it is so difficult for yourself to change deeply.

AVC: The making-of documentary by Sami Frey on the new DVD is fascinating, especially the extreme precision with which you coach Delphine Seyrig. Have you worked with an actor that way before or since, or did that just come from the particular film?

CA: It’s really related to that film. That film was about gesture. And choreography, in order to give you the feeling that it’s real time. It’s not. It’s totally choreographed. It’s a very specific film in those terms.

AVC: It’s fascinating, because the way Seyrig moves, you would swear she’d done these same things the same way thousands of times.

CA: She never made coffee in her life. I had to teach her to do this, and when we talk about how to make the veal and things like that. It was what I saw when I was a kid. My aunts and the aunts of my mother. The gestures of the women around when you are a child. What else are you looking at? What they do, the women. Usually, the man isn’t there. The man is working. And you have the woman, if it was a mother, or maid, or aunt, someone taking care of you as a child, 99 percent of the time it’s a woman. And you do things all the time. As a child, it is something you look at. So it’s really a film that was inscribed in me from my childhood.

AVC: Did you know that at the time?

CA: No, I didn’t. Well yes, because some time in Sami’s film, we are fighting about how to do the veal or the meatloaf, I don’t remember, and I said, “Okay, I will call my aunt.” Delphine is a very proper woman, from high society. She’s from the [Ferdinand] de Saussure family, the structuralist. Old money. Swiss. Protestant. I was a little girl, third generation in Belgium, who was making all the time mistakes when she was talking in French. So she was high-class and I was like that. She never did those things. At one point, I am laughing when she says “Jeanne Dielman will never wear that!” I’m laughing, because I realize that the experiences of life were at that moment so different. But she had the courage to go do it and to go to the end, even though it wasn’t easy for her. She trusted me, but she needed all of her trust to be fed.

AVC: No one had made a movie like that before.

CA: Yes, but you know Delphine was here in New York in the ’50s. She was part of that group. She did Pull My Daisy with…

AVC: Robert Frank.

CA: And [Alain] Resnais also was a bit, not experimental, but… She did daring movies. As soon as she started to work, she did daring things. Even though she did not come from that world, she came from a world… Her father was a friend of Picasso; he had many Picassos. They were that type of well-educated people who could recognize a good artist before others, and she was like that. Even if it was against something inside her. Tell me one actress in 1972 in France, except Delphine, at her level, who would love Hôtel Monterey. No one. No one.

AVC: It’s interesting you mention Jeanne Dielman coming from the perspective of a child. But when a child watches her mother or her aunts making dinner, that usually provides a sense of security and a structured environment. But in the few movies of yours where the characters actually do stay in one place—Jeanne Dielman; Tomorrow We Move; The Man With A Suitcase; Je, Tu, Il, Elle—the home is a source of anxiety. It’s not a place where people go to rest.

CA: That’s because it’s me. I’m speaking about me all the time. I’m my main interest—I’m joking. I’m joking. You have to understand that I’m a child of the second generation, which means my mother was in Auschwitz, and the aunt of my mother was in Auschwitz with her; my grandmother and grandfather died there. So yes. All of those gestures they work for you, or for them, to fill their time or not feel their anxiety. But the child feels everything. It doesn’t make the child secure. You put the child in a jail.

AVC: Children do feel everything. Even the things that you don’t say or express, they pick up on.

CA: They pick up and they don’t know exactly what to make of it, and so they endure it.

AVC: What’s interesting about Tomorrow We Move is, it takes the form of a farce, but it’s taken past the point where it would be funny, and the anxiety becomes real. You have, for example, the real-estate agent who makes a joke about the gas chambers, which is a moment of genuine horror in the midst of this absurdity.

CA: It’s all my obsession. It’s to try to take a little bit of distance, and to mix many elements. That’s why the film probably didn’t work, because people want either/or. They don’t want hybridization. There’s a lot of hybridization in that film. When he recognizes the smell of Auschwitz, I love it. I had an awful joke about Auschwitz during the whole shoot; I drove everybody crazy with that joke. But that joke makes me feel good. You know what “cuit” means? When something is cooked. It’s a joke like that: “What are the birds doing when they fly over Auschwitz? ‘Cuit! Cuit!’” It’s awful, but it’s desacralizing. For me, it’s good.

AVC: It removes the tension. It’s an escape valve.

CA: But without denial. With the existence of it.

AVC: It’s been said that that’s the source of a lot of Jewish humor.

CA: Have you seen the film Histoires D’Amérique? It’s also a mixture of humor and monologue, and it shows how the Jewish humor comes from drama and tragedy.

AVC: Annie Hall is also about that.

CA: Of course, yes. I remember those animals, the lobsters. And of course, as a Jew, you don’t eat that.

AVC: And it runs through the whole film. It starts with that Groucho Marx joke about how you wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have you as a member. People take that as just generic inferiority, but that joke is specifically about country clubs in Hollywood that wouldn’t admit Jews.

CA: I know, I know. And not only in Hollywood, all over America. And it’s still the case in Maine, in some clubs. It’s unsaid, you know? But it’s the reality.

AVC: Your films are so often concerned with enclosed and circumscribed spaces. Was it natural to go from that to the gallery installations you’ve done in recent years?

CA: It was not natural. It happened because Kathy Halbreich from MOMA asked me to do something for the museum. I said yes, but at the time, I didn’t know even what an installation was. I had never seen one. So when she came in 1990… It was during one of my shoots. I said, “Yes, I don’t mind doing something, if I do a movie. And then from the movie I can do an installation.” She said, “I’m interested in history. I’m interested in languages.” And I said to her, “It’s been a long time I’ve wanted to make a film about Eastern Europe, and it’s now opening.”

So she said, “Great.” And I thought I would use all those Slavic languages like music, changing little by little, in all the countries. I didn’t use any of it. I made almost a silent movie. Then she didn’t find the money, so I found the money myself to do a film about Eastern Europe: From The East. Two years later, they called me and said, “We have the money to make the installation.” I said “Great. What can I do now?” And I started to play around with the material. I did From The East, and I thought it was so interesting and playful and so light. Compare that to making a film. And that you could do it yourself and in your home, and not depend on production, and do it with almost nothing. And I loved that lightness. It was like finding again my debut, like I was doing with Babette [Mangolte], with one or two reels, little things here and there. And I loved it.

So I did more and more and more. I had, just now, a show in Paris. And I shot myself a year and a half ago, in my place, in my window, in my street. I heard something about Hiroshima and the speed of the light and the fact that the shadow of the people, who were already dead and on the ground, were still kind of there, by the radiation. I did something related to that. It’s can be inventive. You don’t have to tell a story, and you don’t have to please a TV or an audience. What I think is dreadful about art is the way it’s related to the money afterward. Not when you do it… Because when you do it, you do, it in a way, like in your kitchen, you know? But after that, it’s like 5,000 rich people have access to it. A movie, even though it can be a bad movie or a good movie, it is more democratic. That annoys me. The people who buy my films, for example, the people who buy my installations, well, it’s sometimes a foundation or a museum. When it’s a foundation, it’s related to very, very, very rich people—who are your enemies! Your enemies are feeding you. But you’re not meeting them. So it’s a very strange thing.

So that’s all I can say. I love to do it, because it’s a process you can do without money. I did this one in Paris, and now I want to do one about three cities. I want to do it about Detroit; Gary, Indiana; and Little Haiti in Miami, about the foreclosures. But I can do it in such an inventive way, because I don’t think it is right to show and make people enjoy looking at poverty. But in a true installation, you can find a way to do it in a different way. And I have an idea. I was supposed to shoot already in Miami last week, but I couldn’t do it. And it cost nothing, and I can afford it, you know? And that’s great. I do it myself with my own little camera. I don’t use a DP. I do it myself. Because what I hate in movies is all those people you need. And then I realize I do better when I shoot by myself.

AVC: You’ve made a lot of documentaries in the U.S., from the short films in the new collection to more recent works like South and From The Other Side. What brings you back?

CA: Well, the U.S. is so iconic, you know? And also, you see more things when they are far away. When I’m in my neighborhood, I don’t see anything anymore, because I’m so used to it. When I go somewhere else, suddenly, I’m alive. I’m on alert, and I can be fresh. I was in my neighborhood last week and I needed a cigarette, because I couldn’t sleep. So I went at 4:30 in the morning to a café 500 meters from my place. And it was another city… Totally different than where I go every day. And I said, “God, I will do that again.” That’s another subject I want to do. It’s my street, suddenly different at 5:00 in the morning. I can shoot for one week. That’s enough to make a movie.

AVC: That goes back to the idea of jails. You circumscribe your own world without realizing it, until you go a few blocks in a different direction and you’re in a completely different environment.

CA: That’s more in New York, because Paris is not so square. I’m not good at the geography of the city in Paris, so I’m always lost. Here, you can never be lost. In Paris, even when I walk to my gallery or whatever, I always take another route, because Paris is not built that way.

AVC: Your films are full of director surrogates, like Aurore Clément’s character in Les Rendez-vous D’Anna, whose first name is your middle name. But physically, they’re very different from each other, and from you.

CA: Well, you know, nobody looks like me, so I better have someone totally different. It’s like in La Captive. The way Proust describes Albertine is, she’s tall with curly black hair and with matte skin. So I said, “Of course I have to change her name, I have to really not have someone look like Albertine, because it will never be like Albertine. So just have the best actor possible for it, and that’s it.” For Aurore, yes… She’s blonde, pale, skinny, and elegant and everything. I loved her. At the beginning, I have to say, I was trying to find more like me, because I was unaware of it, that it would be a mistake. So I thought Maria Schneider. I met Maria Schneider, and God, she was at that period on so much drugs. She was so crazy. And then I said to myself, “Why should I go and look for someone who looks more like…” Well, she doesn’t look like me, but she’s a brunette. It’s better to have someone different so I can, in a way, not try to force her to be like me, because it’s silly. Otherwise, I had better act the part myself. I love Aurore, and I think she did a great job. But I didn’t know that if I have to do something, I will probably do it again myself. For a while, I didn’t want to act. I don’t know why. Well… “act.” I don’t act, I just am there.

AVC: A lot of good acting is along those lines.

CA: But that’s not what the people are thinking. Look at Charlotte Gainsbourg, in the Lars von Trier film [Antichrist]. She’s unbelievable. She doesn’t act; she’s there. She’s great. I think, God, she’s great. And you love her for that, because it’s so daring, what she has to do. And she does it as if it is nothing. I don’t know how she does it. I think she’s brave, brave, brave. Really, I fell in love with her when I saw that film. She is a revelation. Total revelation.

AVC: Speaking of people who don’t look like the filmmaker, she is, in a way, playing Lars von Trier in that movie. She’s going through a severe depression a lot like the one that inspired the story.

CA: Well, you know he’s very, very, very clever about women. He gives the woman a space that I don’t know any filmmaker does. Because in Breaking The Waves, [protagonist Emily Watson] is the Christ. Which man is doing that? I don’t know any man giving that space to a woman. No one. And in Dogville, it’s great what he does with Nicole Kidman. It’s fantastic.

Link-http://www.avclub.com/articles/chantal-akerman,37600/

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La Captive (The Captive)

Interviewed by David Wood

What attracted you to an adaptation of Proust's "La Prisonnière"?

I grew up reading Proust all my life and he's very dear to me. After my last film, "Sud", was so poorly received, I needed something to rejuvenate me. My producer Paulo Branco rang me from Cannes where Ruiz's "Time Regained" had screened to tell me he was thinking of tackling Proust. I jumped at the opportunity. I also liked the idea of an adaptation that was not too literal which is why I chose not to set the film in the past.

"La Captive" begins like a detective story.

Yes, it does, especially Hitchcock's "Vertigo", in the sense that we first see a man stalking a woman. The music also adds to the tension, an effect I was very conscious of achieving when selecting it. I also went back to look at Godard's "Contempt".

It is something of a departure for you in that it deals with a male protagonist.

Many people have said that but it was a conscious decision. When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films. It's true that I did write this from the perspective of Simon (Stanislas Merhar) and enjoyed the process of doing so.

You are well served by your cast.

I was very fortunate. Both Stanislas Merhar and Sylvie Testud were excellent and worked extremely well together. Interestingly, Testud was not so good during her audition and rang to ask me to give her a second chance. I am pleased now that I did.

Like much of your work "La Captive" is stylistically very precise.

This is a style that I am most comfortable with. In the film I worked very hard with Antoine Beau (production design) to achieve the look, specifically in terms of colour, that I wanted. But I still like to work relatively simply with long takes and medium close-ups. It does however have some very fluid camerawork.

Link-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2001/04/26/chantal_ackerman_the_captive_interview.sht

CHANTAL AKERMAN

Je tu il elle, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, News from Home,

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna,Toute une nuit, The Eighties, D'Est, La Captive, From the Other Side, Tomorrow We Move

Related Reading: Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday by Ivone Margulies and Film: The Front Line - 1983 by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Je tu il elle, 1974

[I You He She]

Je tu il elle opens to the terse and contextually ambiguous, yet personally revealing statement "...And I left" as a nameless young woman - later identified as Julie (Chantal Akerman) - sits on a chair off-side of the frame with her back to the camera as she recounts an autobiographical anecdote into an obscured journal. The fragmentary and dissociated introductory episode provides an appropriate and incisive distillation into the essence of film (and more broadly, to Akerman's cinema) itself as Julie passes idle time in her austere and sparsely furnished studio apartment by arbitrarily painting the walls in a different color one day to suit her whim (then another color on the next day), repositioning her few odd bits of furniture (a mattress, a bureau, a mirror, and a chair) within the confines of the room, and writing copious, but logically asequential and fractured stream of consciousness notes that methodically chronicle her thoughts, sentiments, and impulsive activities during her isolated, self-imposed solitude. The implicit obsessiveness to Julie's seemingly Sisyphean ritual of meaningless and ritualistic domestic activity is an image that not only prefigures her seminal film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, but also illustrates the filmmaker's often revisited (albeit, abstractly) theme of perpetual displacement: a sentiment of instinctual, existential rootlessness that carries through to a subsequent - and equally atemporal and indeterminate extended sequence - of Julie in an acute angle crane shot as she stands on the sidewalk of a busy intersection. Accepting a ride from an unnamed truck driver (Niels Arestrup) - the eponymous, referential "he" of the depersonalized title - Julie embarks on a different course of figurative displacement: abandoning her spartan apartment on a self-migration to an unknown destination as she accompanies the driver on his tediously autonomic long distance excursion. A third (and equally jarring) temporal break shows Julie near the main entrance of a nondescript residential building - presumably having earlier parted with the truck driver - as she pays an unexpected visit to her estranged lover (Claire Wauthion) who, despite having admitted her into the apartment, promptly tells her that she cannot stay, then proceeds to further compound the emotional ambiguity of her declaration by obliging Julie's request for food and implied consent to her instigation of sexual intimacy. Julie's actions are reduced to the primal and elemental: her consumption of sugar while writing letters in her apartment mirrors a subsequent scene in a bar in the company of the truck driver then finally, in her presumptuous seating at the kitchen table at her lover's apartment. Akerman incorporates dissociated aural cues that illustrate the heroine's innate pattern of alienation and estrangement: non-diegetic narration that either precedes, follows, or does not at all correlate with Julie's on-screen actions; the truck driver's extended monologues that convey the semblance of intimacy without the physical act; Julie's momentary reconciliation with her lover that centers around the most fundamental instincts of human behavior. Akerman further reinforces the themes of instinctuality and dispossession through acts of dislocation and migration: physical objects (the re-arrangement of furniture), self (hitchhiking), and emotional attachment (abandonment of her lover). Chronicling Julie's estranged but illuminating interaction with her environment, Je tu il elle serves an abstract, but intrinsically lucid framework for Akerman's languid, meditative, provocative, and indelibly haunting expositions on spiritual and existential transience.

© Acquarello 2004. All rights reserved.

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Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975

[Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels]

In the unnerving silence of a sparsely furnished kitchen in Brussels, a poised, anonymous middle-aged woman (Delphine Seyrig) - identified only through the title of the film as Jeanne Dielman - completes her food preparation, places the contents into a large cooking pot on the stove, reaches for a match, lights the burner, and with chronological precision, finishes replacing the matchbox from its original location as the doorbell rings, switching the lights off as she leaves the room. The scene then cuts to an unusually framed shot of a truncated Jeanne at the entrance of the apartment as she accepts a hat and coat from an unidentified guest (Henri Storck) before retreating, out of view, into a bedroom at the end of the hallway. Moments later, the obscured image is reconnected to a familiar referential framing of the darkened hallway as the unknown guest re-emerges from the room and prepares to leave, handing Jeanne a pre-arranged sum of money before confirming their next appointment for the following week. She deposits the money in a soup tureen in the dining room, then returns to the kitchen to attend to the boiling pot, before tidying the bedroom and meticulously bathing and changing clothes after the encounter. And so Jeanne's monotonous daily ritual unfolds through the tedium of household chores, impersonal sexual transactions, trivial errands, and alienated conversations with her son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), revealing the silent anguish of disconnection and systematic erosion of the human soul.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a visually rigorous, uncompromising, and understatedly harrowing portrait of alienation, repression, and marginalization. Using primarily long take, medium shots from the repeated perspective of a stationary camera, Chantal Akerman creates an innately disquieting atmosphere of stasis and monotony. From the opening image of Jeanne facing away from the camera, to her visually decapitated shot as she politely receives clients by the entrance hallway of the apartment, Akerman uses extended, isolated framing that inhibits personal identification of the title character and reinforces a pervasive sense of unconscious, mechanical activity. The repeated filmic cued scene transitions associated with the actuation of light switches throughout the apartment further underscore the fragmented nature and dehumanized automation of her domestic tasks. By presenting the controlled and deliberate gestures inherent in Jeanne's ritualistic actions that betray an implicit violence beneath the veneer of structure and order - as she bathes (note the similar imagery of cleansing in Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent), knits, shines shoes (a familiar episode from Akerman's short film, Saute ma ville), and peels potatoes - the film provocatively captures the unarticulated tragedy of estrangement, loneliness, and disconnection.

© Acquarello 2002. All rights reserved.

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News from Home, 1977

News from Home presents a series of abstract and fragmentary images of everyday urban life in 1970s New York City, accompanied by the distinctive narration of filmmaker Chantal Akerman as she dispassionately reads through her mother's alternately affectionate, melancholic, and sincere, but maternally manipulative letters from her native Belgium. The film opens to the surreal image and ambient sound of early morning Manhattan, as occasional cars and delivery trucks traverse through an unusually empty streets, punctuated by Akerman's resonant voice as she reads her mother's sometimes tangential and anecdotal news from home: "My dearest little girl, I just got your letter and I hope that you'll continue to write to me often. Anyway, I'll hope that you'll come back to me soon. I hope that you are still well and that you're already working. I see that you like New York and you seem to be happy. We are very pleased even though we'd like to see you again very soon." As the rhythm of the mundane and episodic fragments of metropolitan life begin to converge with the cadence of the articulated, but unavoidably distanced expression of a mother's ambivalence over her daughter's absence, Akerman reflects the alienating and personal struggle of a young artist.

Chantal Akerman creates a visually dissociative, rigorously symmetrical, and understatedly affecting chronicle on alienation, longing, and creative expression in News from Home. Akerman juxtaposes the novelty and indigenous energy of the city with the palpable estrangement from home and family to reflect the dilemma between emotional need and artistic independence: Akerman's off-camera narration that, in turn, serves as a surrogate voice for her geographically distant mother; the intrusive, distracting, and often overwhelming sounds of the city in motion during the reading of the letters; the dynamic interaction between film and real-life as the idiosyncratic behavior of inquisitive and perplexed subjects are captured before the static and inanimate camera. By illustrating the confluence of environmental stimuli and emotional sentiment, Akerman reveals the personal disconnection and isolating process of cultural immersion inherent in the maturation of an artist.

© Acquarello 2002. All rights reserved.

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Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, 1978

[The Meetings of Anna]

Les Rendezvous d'Anna opens to a shot of an empty train station in an unspecified German city. In near silence, the passengers deboard a parked train and exit through the platform staircase, as a lone woman makes her way towards an empty telephone booth and stops to make a call. Moments later, she emerges from the telephone booth, presumably unable to contact the intended party, and proceeds down the staircase. The severe and rigorously framed scene is an introductory glimpse of the rootlessness and alienation of an independent minded filmmaker named Anne Silver (Aurore Clement) who has been traveling through an endless series of distant, impersonal cities in order to promote her latest film. Anne arrives at a hotel to a waiting message from her mother (Lea Massari) asking her to stop through Brussels for a long overdue visit, and seems surprised by her mother's knowledge of her constantly evolving itinerary. Alone in the hotel room, she attempts to initiate an operator-assisted telephone call to Italy, only to be informed of a two-hour connection delay. In order to pass the time, she inspects the room, listens to the radio, and makes a reluctant call to an old family friend named Ida (Magali Noel), apologizing for her unavailability to visit. Later in the evening, she returns to the hotel room with a gentle, emotionally wounded man named Hans (Helmut Griem), but inevitably rejects him despite his sincerity and tenderness. The following day, on her way to Brussels to visit her mother, Anna encounters Ida while changing trains at a Cologne station. An unexpected train delay forces a tenuous reunion between the two women, as Ida implores Anna to reconcile with her son and marry, even as she recounts her own growing distance from her husband. Inevitably, as Anna passes through these anonymous stations, the pattern of emotional isolation and missed connection that would invariably define her transient existence emerges.

Chantal Akerman presents a deeply personal, challenging, and affecting portrait of alienation and artistic disconnection in Les Rendezvous d'Anna. Using repeated images of impermanence and isolation, Akerman depicts the role of the artist in society as an objective and dispassionate chronicler of life's process. The constant movement of trains, indistinguishable hotel rooms, anonymous brief encounters, and prolonged absences from home and family reflect the profound loneliness and personal sacrifice that has consumed Anna's existence in pursuit of creativity and artistic independence. Strangers, estranged friends, and even lovers attempt to briefly connect with Anna, only to find her withdrawn and unaffected by their attempts at emotional (if not physical) intimacy. In the end, Les Rendezvous d'Anna becomes a poignant and emotionally conflicted examination of the artist as a perpetual exile and distant spectator of humanity.

© Acquarello 2001. All rights reserved.

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Toute une nuit, 1982

[A Whole Night]

Toute une nuit presents a series of brief, disconnected, near silent vignettes that capture the inherently intimate episodes that transpire throughout the course of human relationships. A woman (Aurore Clement) deliberates on placing a telephone call to an absent lover before deciding to hail a taxicab to his apartment. A man and a woman sitting at adjacent tables of an anonymous bar exchange reluctant, fleeting glances as they wait in vain for their respective lovers to arrive, and eventually succumb to an impulsive, awkward embrace. An unconcerned young woman smokes a cigarette as she sits in a diner with two young men before being confronted to choose between them. A hurried man misses an opportunity to meet his lover outside her home. A middle-aged couple awaken to the noise of an off-the-air television set and decide to go out for the evening. A woman hurriedly packs her belongings into a suitcase and sneaks out of the apartment only to return home at dawn to her oblivious, sleeping husband. Lovers consummate their relationship or part to their separate ways at entrances and stairwells of impersonal apartment buildings.

Chantal Akerman presents a structurally challenging, yet emotionally honest, understatedly humorous, and visually compelling choreography of motion, rhythm, and passion in Toute une nuit. Using short takes, minimal dialogue, and fragmented narrative, Akerman distills the visual narrative into the brief, yet essential moments that define the spectrum of human interaction: separation, attraction, reconciliation, reunion, intimacy, absence, rejection. Filmed as a narcoleptic journey through a sultry and languorous evening in summertime Brussels, Toute une nuit becomes a subtle and relevant validation on the singularity of human existence - a chronicle of the irrepressible passion and vitality that lay beneath the surface of an alienating urban landscape.

© Acquarello 2004. All rights reserved.

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Les Années 80, 1983

[The Eighties]

The decontextualized sound of a feminine voice repeatedly delivers the ambiguous, singular declaration, "At your age, grief soon wears off" against the dissociative sight of an extended duration black screen, as the unseen actress subtly modulates her articulated tone from somber resignation to pragmatic trivialization, to optimistic encouragement, and finally, to compassionate reassurance at the guiding instruction of an off-screen director (Chantal Akerman). The opening sequence provides an insightful glimpse, not only into Akerman's deliberative and exacting methodology, but more broadly, into the filmmaker's familiar expositions on such amorphous themes as identity, repetitive ritual, and identification of the speaker. Segueing into another seemingly illogical - and equally contextually indeterminate - isolated shot of women's legs promenading, dancing, scurrying, and even occasionally strutting on a cobblestone road (in a fractured, musical interlude that playfully recalls the introductory sequence of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), the film's fragmented structure soon begins to reveal an intrinsic logic to its seemingly disconnected assembly of episodes as a disembodied pair of feet slips out of a pair of practical black boots and into a more visually striking pair of red medium-heeled shoes before walking out of frame. The wardrobe-changing sequence is then followed by the screen test of a young actress who, having received a set of stage directions given by the filmmaker, delivers an impassioned (and perhaps over-emotive) performance of selected excerpts from the script, depicting the heroine, Mado's crushing revelation of her unreciprocated love for her employer's son, Robert. However, a subsequent actress (Lio) provides a more distilled and enigmatic interpretation to a similar set of directions - an emotional opacity that is highlighted by a freeze frame close-up from her screen test - as Akerman provides constructive criticism on her captivating, but intentionally muted performance. Like the aesthetic change in footwear in the earlier sequence, the filmmaker has replaced actresses for the role of Mado, a decision that is seemingly (and idiosyncratically) punctuated by the sight of the actress' awkward, improvisational dance to the tune of an ensemble musical sequence from the film project.

Composed of interrelated vignettes of script reading, casting, dress rehearsal, and vocal recording, and culminating in completed excerpts from the film's completed musical sequences, The Eighties captures the rigor, discipline, and meticulous attention to detail inherent in the creative process. Using repeated, identical directions to assorted actors and actresses and presented as culled, day-in-the-life vignettes from the rehearsal process, Akerman revisits the distilled fragmentation and intrinsic choreography of Toute une nuit in order to create an intriguing narrative puzzle that, in the absence of knowing the unfilmed musical's underlying plot, nevertheless conveys its emotional essence. Moreover, the extracted, dialogue-less acting exercise provides, not only an insightful examination into the interchangeability of role and identity in human relationships, but also as illustration of emotional (or more broadly, spiritual) transience and dislocation - the absence of the "true" speaker - a pervasive theme in Akerman's oeuvre that is often visually manifested in her non-fiction films through extended takes of desolate environments and featureless landscapes (News from Home, Hotel Monterey, D'Est, and From the Other Side), and in her feature films through disembodied framing (most notably in the static, decapitated shots of the heroine in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles). It is this amalgam of repetition, fragmentation, and displacement that inevitably defines the film's idiosyncratically curious, yet infectious, alchemy: a choreography borne of role-playing, existential ambiguity, and quotidian ritual.

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D'Est, 1993

[From the East]

The opening image of D'Est is of an unhurried, stationary shot of a green hazed, obscured highway at twilight, as the intermittent hum and audibly shifting Doppler frequency of a distant, revving engine from an occasional traversing vehicle - some errantly never materializing on screen - provide the sole, false anticipation of a visual break from the seeming interminable view of the desolate, anonymous urban landscape. A subsequent montage of quotidian shots establish the season as summer in Eastern Europe: a daylight interior shot of an open window overlooking a lush meadow, a Cyrillic café sign swaying in the wind, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt leisurely sitting on a public bench while smoking a cigarette (with a beer bottle politely set to the side of the frame at the foot of the bench for the duration of the shot), an elderly couple playing a board game by an open window, a group of revelers spending a lazy day on the beach, a crowd gathering at an amphitheater for an outdoor concert. Three instances of relative motion in the early sequences of the film reinforce the underlying dichotomy of these introductory images: an extended dolly shot of an elderly woman slowly (and laboredly) walking uphill as a sprightly child on a bicycle momentarily whisks past her; a car longitudinally speeds past a lone tree on a rural dirt road before a plodding, horse-drawn cart eventually reaches the same intersection and transects the vertical axis of symmetry demarcated by the tree on the horizon; a motorcycle crosses a rural intersection at full throttle as another horse-drawn cart lumbers through town and turns to travel in the opposite direction. In each episode, the apparent relativism of the subjects' coincidental juxtaposition serves as a visual metaphor for the transitory juncture (and intersection) between past and present (or more appropriately, future), traditional and modern ways in the rapidly transforming socioeconomic landscape of the region in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is this cultural climate of uncertainty, directionlessness, and supplanted expectation that is inferentially punctuated in Chantal Akerman's ingeniously metaphoric transitional shot of a billboard outpost sign in the unusual shape of an upended cross that serves, not only to indicate the bellweather changing of the natural seasons (and political climate), but also the film's thematic progression from a sense of stasis to physical transience and migration as a group of people are shown walking through dirt roads and empty streets carrying suitcases, visual imprint that are thematically presaged (and figuratively set into motion) in a preceding, double entendred, culminating shot of peasant women cadently harvesting potatoes (a root vegetable) into galvanized steel pails in an open field at the end of the farming season.

The film's intrinsic diurnal rhythms of isolated, interior spaces (people sitting at their dinner tables, applying cosmetics, watching television, or eating alone) and crowded, anonymous exterior spaces (most notably in the ghostly, nocturnal silhouette of people passing through the streets amidst the sound of a rock and roll tune from an overdriven radio that eventually dissipates - and is visually reduced - to the entrancing syncopation of alternately blinking, red traffic lights) similarly carries through to the blue-hued, winter images of perpetual displacement and migration as sinuous, hyperextended tracking shots of foot traffic and endlessly winding queues begin to dominate the latter half of the film. As in the earlier sequences, coincidence and synchronicity play an integral role in the resolution of the images as bystanders alternately engage, challenge, appear bemused by, or confront the camera, while others appear (perhaps deliberately) oblivious of its presence (in an understatedly insightful episode, an attractive, handsomely dressed woman feigns indifference at the approaching camera, but inevitably finds the temptation to look too irresistible and is captured betraying a momentary gaze directly into the eye of the apparatus). (Also note that the initial, transitional, nighttime image of a public queue as people stare out into an undefined space is similarly incorporated by Philippe Grandrieux in the post-apocalyptic prelude of La Vie nouvelle, a film that similarly hints of the collapse of a political bloc, in this case, the break up of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.) A delirious, sweeping panning shot through the atrium of a grand, central train station reinforces its figurative representation as an existential weigh station for lost souls as interminably waiting travelers come in from the cold and encounter even more queues within for the use of telephone booths, ticketing, train boarding, and departure. Concluding with a truncated traveling shot of yet another, seemingly ubiquitous public queue, the film reveals an intriguingly transitory and unresolved intrinsic reality: a haunted and indelible reflection of spiritual rootlessness and inertia in the wake of a crumbled ideology, human abandonment, and directionless revolution.

© Acquarello 2005. All rights reserved.

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La Captive, 2000

[The Captive]

An outwardly fragile and introspective man named Simon (Stanislas Merhar) stands in a darkened room poring over an audioless film footage of a group of holiday revelers at a seaside resort in Normandy. Repeatedly cueing the film to the excerpt of a beautiful young woman, Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and a friend, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) overlooking the beach, Simon attempts to decipher Ariane's passing comment, concluding that her inaudible articulation to an unseen, off-camera listener must have been "I really like you". The enigmatic and curiously alienated prologue provides an insightful, yet forbidding glimpse into the relationship between the reclusive Simon and his lover Ariane: an obsession that is also manifested in the image of Simon trailing behind the oblivious Ariane as she drives alone to a secluded residential hotel (in a slow, labyrinthine pursuit that pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo). Relegated to a life indoors due to chronic allergies and the entrusted care of a frail, elderly grandmother (Françoise Bertin), Simon has brought the seemingly acquiescent Ariane into his suffocating, insular household where he has furnished an adjacent room for her so that he may summon her at his discretion (deriving profound intimacy from observing her sleep), and has made arrangements with Andrée, an accommodating and trustworthy mutual friend (and reliable spy), to accompany her on brief excursions into town to stave off boredom and restlessness. However, as Simon becomes increasingly suspicious of Ariane's time consuming personal activities and mystified by her complacent inscrutability, he embarks on a consuming and ultimately destructive quest to possess his elusive lover completely.

Perhaps the most Bressonian of Chantal Akerman's minimalist and dedramatized cinema (most notably, in the bookend structure and psychological deconstruction of A Gentle Woman), La Captive is an elegantly sinuous and provocative exploration of obsession, madness, and intimacy. Although inspired by Marcel Proust's La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of his epic masterwork In Search of Lost Time, Akerman distills the lush texturality and baroque elements of Proust to create a spare and essential portrait that nevertheless retains the thematic density and emotional ambiguity of the psychological novel. From the estranged opening sequence as Simon studies a celluloid image and speaks for a silent and physically absent Ariane, Akerman establishes the film's subjective point of view and implicit objectification of - and control over - a voiceless (or more appropriately, silenced) Ariane. Visually, Akerman further reflects Simon's literal projection of Ariane through disorienting images of converging and diverging shadows cast on anonymous streets and an unfinished alabaster sculpture at an empty museum that represents both idealized perfection and dimensional incompletion. Moreover, Simon's perception of Ariane's untenable opacity is subsequently illustrated through an oddly distanced, non-coital sexual encounter between Simon and an unconscious Ariane - her impenetrable thoughts occluded by sleep. By presenting psychological interiority through an overarching narrative circularity and incorporating visually austere and oppressively isolating landscapes, Akerman creates a haunting and irresolvable odyssey of possession, passion, disconnection, and myopia.

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………………………………………………………………………………………………………… நனறி- நிழல்………கட்டுரை—ஹவி