Chantal Akerman Retrospective Explores Slow Cinema from Feminist View
By Liam Lacey
The Toronto International Film Festival’s retrospective of the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, titled News From Home: The Films of Chantal Akerman — curated by TIFF programmer Andréa Picard and by Akerman’s collaborator and editor, Claire Atherton — opens Friday (November 1) with News From Home.
This 88-minute feature, a time-capsule of the pre-gentrified city, consists of long takes of carefully framed streetscapes, subway rides, and vistas of New York City, set against the din of traffic and ambient noises (all added later) and Akerman’s voiceover readings of letters her mother.
A scene from Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
The letters had been sent to her a few years before the footage was shot, between 1971 and 1973 when the director, in her early twenties, had lived in the city in the Hell’s Kitchen and Tribeca areas. The contrast between the images of a shabby, labyrinthine mid-seventies Manhattan and the fretful intimacy of the letters (bank loans, trips, family information and worries) makes this replete with regret and loneliness, and associations of every careless young person on their first journey away from home. The film ends with a foggy shot of Manhattan from the perspective of the Staten Island Ferry, including what was the World Trade Centre.
The New York period was formative for the young filmmaker. She took odd jobs, including as a cashier in a gay porn theatre, made a couple of short films and met, through visits to the Anthology Film Archives, Marcel Hanoun, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow; all important influences in her future work, the self-consciousness of the camera, and the treatment of time.
When Akerman released News From Home, she was already famous, at least in Europe. In 1975, at the Cannes Film Festival, at the age of 25, she had released her second feature, which remains her best-known and which screens Saturday (November 2). That’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is pretty much the Citizen Kane of feminist, avant-garde cinema, and films about sex and housework. Jeanne Dielman follows the deglamorized French star Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Day of the Jackal) as a widow with a teenage son over the course of three days. There’s minimal dialogue. Jeanne makes coffee. She peels a pot of potatoes. She shines her son’s shoes. She kneads ground beef for meat loaf, for about four minutes of screen time. Once a day, between 5 and 5:30 pm, she has sex with a different man for money, which is how she supports herself.
During evening scenes, there is a flickering light from outside, presumably from a neon sign, which feels like a danger sign. Sure enough, incrementally, Jeanne begins to unravel. She burns the potatoes and drops the utensil. Her son notes that her hair looks messy. Running just over 200 minutes, the film is both grimly funny and, to be blunt, borderline excruciating: You begin to become intimately familiar with the tile pattern on her kitchen floor and the handles of the cupboard doors. You might want to scream… which means you know how Jeanne feels.
At the initial screening at Cannes, Akerman recalled, you could hear the progressive slamming of seats as people walked out of the theatre. The novelist Marguerite Duras, heading to the exit, shouted, “This woman is mad.” Which was entirely the point. Spoiler-alert: On the third day, Jeanne stabs a client in the heart with a pair of scissors. Then goes back to her kitchen table for a blood-stained six-minute sit.
Akerman’s work, at least in North America, has been more written about than seen. The experience of encountering it for the first time is a little like crashing into a new continent, and realizing a lot of people you know have already been there. Filmmakers who cite her as an influence include Sofia Coppola, Kelly Reichardt, Catherine Breillat, Sally Potter, Gus Van Sant, Michael Haneke and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and filmmaker Peter Handke.
But it doesn’t stop with modern art house darlings. Videographer Arun Chaudhary, who shot the Bernie Saunders campaign and was the official White House videographer under President Barak Obama, has described how Akerman’s film D’Est influenced his framing of the corridors and shots of the Oval Office, of capturing people both aware and unaware of his camera.
Akerman — who suffered from manic-depression and took her life in 2015 — has a central role in feminist, gay, and Jewish filmmaking, though she tended to reject all these categories. Her relationship to her mother, an Auschwitz survivor, was central to her work. She has talked about how Jewish culture, which she knew through her paternal grandfather, ritualized every moment of the day and the anxiety that ensued when that ritual was lost.
She is also a central figure to a somewhat ill-defined but global trend of so-called “slow cinema,” a term that has been applied to filmmakers as diverse as Russia’s Alexander Sokurov, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Portugal’s Pedro Costa. She knew, she said, that one minute of screen time feels like five minutes in life, and she was conscious that in experiencing the pressure of time and reflective boredom, your will was part of what she was after, though she saw it as giving back time to the viewer rather than stealing it from her.
In his 2018 update to his 1972 Transcendental Style in Film, the filmmaker Paul Schrader talks about slow cinema this way: “Slow cinema is passive-aggression par excellence. The slow cinema director says, ‘I know what you want; I know what you expect; but I’m going to do the opposite.’ Why? ‘Because I’m after something else and will use your expectations to get it.’ The filmmaker has forced the viewer to join the process, creating his or her own narrative.”
Or, as the old prison adage goes, you do the time; you don’t let the time do you.
News from Home: The Films of Chantal Akerman is a world of consistent themes and many variations, with more than 40 documentaries, musicals, adaptations of Joseph Conrad and Marcel Proust and even a romantic comedy with William Hurt and Juliette Binoche (A Couch in New York).
The oeuvre begins in one kitchen — with the foreshadowing slapstick short film, Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town) which Akerman made at 18 — and ends in another, with her last film, No Home Movie, consisting of conversations, in person and over Skype, with her mother Natalia, shortly before her mother’s death.
News From Home: The Films of Chantal Ackerman screens at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox November 1 through December 14. For more information and tickets. For more information and tickets, visit www.tiff.net.