Few have noted that Chantal Akerman’s last film No Home Movie and her death in 2015 represented, more than any other work of art or event, the receding of a certain form of cinema and a certain way of thinking about film. While this formal and conceptual approach known as modern cinema has not yet come to an end, its adventurers have become rare; Chantal Akerman was the most singular of them all.

For Akerman, ‘modern’ was probably not a rallying cry, but simply a word with ambiguous implications, such as when she used it in the first screenplay of Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) to refer to the cold sheen of objects surrounding a person born in the West in the mid-twentieth century, in the era of modernism: ‘modern and functional furniture (…), a modern desk lamp (…), a modern bathroom (…)’.¹ Yet Akerman’s adventure may be such an essential one for the very fact that, starting with the tiled kitchen in Saute ma ville in 1968 and all the way through to the laptop conversations with her mother in No Home Movie in 2015, a constant in her work was the tension between this relatively thwarted modernity (which was primarily social and historical, but we’ll see it had other aspects) and a different, relatively twisted modernity (which was aesthetic and moral). By turning this tension into a deep line of questioning, Akerman joined some eminent elders such as Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, though she arrived here by different means.

It is also important to reiterate the power of this modern approach at a time when, as evidenced by this exhibition and its catalogue, art museums welcome the work with more breadth and urgency than movie theatres do. After being solicited to make a video installation for the exhibition ‘Passages de l’image’ at the Centre Pompidou in the late 1980s and finally taking the leap with D’Est, au bord de la fiction in 1995, Akerman never abandoned the fundamentals of a critical realism inherited from modern cinema — extended shots, editing in independent blocks, audio disjunctions, obvious-ness of artifice — in her work akin to contemporary art, which most often consisted of a spatial reconfiguration of her films. But by opening her work to video installations, Akerman participated in a blurring of aesthetics that her films had already produced at the turning point of the 1980s, when Golden Eighties displayed the spruce signs of a cinema of citation and the playful distance and visual kitsch that directly affiliated it with post-modernism. At first glance, this same blurring makes it difficult to think about the radical minimalism of Jeanne Dielman (1975) with the referential opulence of La captive (2000), the soundstage romance of Un divan à New York (1996) with the documentary bitterness of Sud (1999), the intimate depths of the novel Ma mère rit (2013) with the desert bombarded by the sounds of an invisible war in the installation Now (2015). But isn’t crossing different landscapes one of the things that makes an adventure an adventure?

You can’t categorize an adventure: by definition, it is open to whatever happens. In that respect, it would always be ‘modern’, a tired word that refers both to what is current and to different periods of the past, depending whether you’re a historian of societies, of literature, of painting, or of cinema. Akerman often stated her ‘non-belonging’: ‘I don’t belong anywhere’ is one of many phrases she repeated, adhering to the art of repetition found both throughout her work and her spoken words, and which became the title of a beautiful documentary portrait of the filmmaker.² Non-belonging is the ultimate in adventure. As for the modern adventure, the ultimate can be to escape from the modern itself, constantly, through a joyful taste for novelty and a freedom that remains unaffiliated, while rooting a few unshakeable principles in that modernity — after all, to turn to the history of cinema, this is exactly what was done by Roberto Rossellini, the recognized founder of the modernity referred to here. Chantal Akerman followed this very trajectory — without planning to, of course. She began with the avant-garde (as in her New York films), continued with two monuments of pure modernity (Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman, the masterpiece she devoted herself never to remake), characteristics of which would resurface in later films (D’Est, Là-bas, No Home Movie) or tempered in an apparently more consensual fiction (Les rendez-vous d’Anna, 1978). Akerman then committed herself to the postmodern (Golden Eighties, 1986; Histoires d’Amérique, 1989), paid a deceptive homage to classic American comedy (Un divan à New York), and visited mannerism (La captive) and the ‘contemporary’ (the installations), the whole while writing texts — a play (Hall de nuit, 1992), a brief narrative (Une famille à Bruxelles, 1998), a self-portrait (Autoportrait en cinéaste, 2004), and a piece of auto-fiction (Ma mère rit) — whose styles primarily reveal the influence of the Nouveau Roman, despite the fact that the only writer she truly claimed to like was Georges Perec. But there’s more than a single guiding principle running through this imbroglio of approaches, styles, languages and formats. Things require a certain amount of time to be seen. The shot is the fundamental unit of cinema. The frame rigorously organizes space. A person always comes toward us head-on. Some situations cannot be represented. Loneliness is inexorable. Everything could end with a song.

But why is it so important to affirm the weight of the modern in a body of work that begins by telling us about something entirely different? For the simple reason that nothing in Akerman’s work moves us or makes us think outside of the experience of its form. Declarations are few, but pressure and impressions are many. Jeanne Dielman’s mechanical life in the closed environment of the extended shots makes an impression; the stream of anonymous bodies on Russian sidewalks in D’Est, even more numerous on the monitors for the installation D’Est, au bord de la fiction, makes an impression; the areas of darkness and blown-out lights piercing the filmmaker’s mother’s apartment with abstract zones in No Home Movie make an impression. Contrary to appearances, there are no big subjects in Akerman (like feminism, homosexuality, and more generally, romantic freedom, the memory of the concentration camps, post-colonialism), only big forms through which these subjects appear as much as they become diluted, in a lability of meaning that is her work’s primary modern feature.

In the most banal sense, the adventure is there from the filmmaker’s beginnings: a young Belgian woman moves to the United States to make movies, without any money or guarantee she’ll succeed, after making her first short film at the age of 18. She is not even looking for the Hollywood machine, but she finds the New York avant-garde. In the 1977 masterpiece News from Home, she depicts this personal and intellectual exile like a disappearance of the self in the repetitive views of New York City. Later it will be Anna’s travels in Europe, the shoots in Eastern Europe and North America for D’Est, Sud and De l’autre côté, the location scouts for a documentary project on the Middle East, then the making of Là-bas in Tel Aviv, then Asia in Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai and La folie Almayer (2012) — adapting Joseph Conrad was both a way of thumbing her nose at French cinema’s parochial lack of audacity and a means to assert this sense of adventure loud and clear, even if it was fated to come up against unsurpassable obstacles. Adventure, in the form of a big departure and exploration, is therefore the constant and necessary horizon of all the claustrophobic spaces, all the fatal imprisonments, all the ‘captivities’ recurring throughout the films. This dialectic between ‘la chambre’ (‘the room’) and ‘là-bas’ (‘out there’) is what make Akerman’s work in the enclosed spaces of museums fit in the general coherence of her art. The installation >From the Other Side, created for Documenta in 2002, set these terms in the clearest manner. A movie screen had been erected in the desert, on the border between Texas and Mexico. The last shot of the film De l’autre côté, a nocturnal tracking shot, was projected on the screen at daybreak. While the light of the sun slowly made the light of the film image disappear, the whole thing was filmed and broadcast live in a ‘black room’ at Documenta. Shut in and faced with a framed image, viewers contemplated the erasure of a double boundary: the invisibility of the border, the dilution of the lights.

The repetitive structures, extended durations, and immobility in Akerman’s films and installations are more often commented on than her taste for departure and movement. Yet the hold of the banal and the paralysis of daily life and routine are inseparable from what blows them apart: Saute ma ville. Let’s not forget that one of the first titles for what would become Jeanne Dielman was Elle vogue vers l’Amérique [She Sails toward America]. But to be satisfied with thinking of the filmmaker’s modern adventure as the narrative of a constant back and forth between inside and outside, coercion and liberation, oppression and emancipation, would be to miss the experience it offers. In an illuminating short essay, Giorgio Agamben warns against understanding the word ‘adventure’ only through its romantic distortion.³ Before ‘adventure’ referred to an extraordinary series of events or the path of someone’s destiny, the medieval texts conflated it with the form of the poem that related its episodes. Adventure must then be understood as the location of a coincidence between ‘events and tale, between facts and words’: the adventure is the poem.⁴ Akerman’s modernity is probably also due to her deliberate anti-romanticism, according to which form is not the lyrical expression of content but a sometimes difficult experience that requires the viewer to make a perceptual adjustment, as if the screen were an interface with its own set of sometimes blinding rules, of which the primary ones are those of perspective.⁵ When viewing an Akerman film or installation, one must accept the adventure of perception to access the one that is shown or told. The best example is the mise-en-scène in Là-bas, in which the film-maker travels to Israel to lock herself up in a room in Tel Aviv and film at great length a neighbouring building through the horizontal grid of its Venetian blinds, while speaking off screen about her daily life and her familial, reflexive relationship to the country’s history. The framework of the blinds replaces the narrative framework: nothing happens and yet the image is ‘riddled with events’⁶ as insignificant as they are loaded with resonances by the situation and the voice. In Akerman’s most beautiful works, the modern adventure is literally this concretion of meaning in form, which Giorgio Agamben refers to as ‘poetic truth’.⁷

What the viewer experiences is not a ‘device’ (a dispositif) but an image or a group of images. While the border is sometimes thin, it is crucial. It obviously participates in the blurring referred to above: Akerman’s work became affiliated with the ‘contemporary’, another catch-all term, because it appeared to submit to and be ideally adaptable to the aesthetic of devices. The geometry of frontal and lateral shots, the mechanics of tracking shots, the purified plasticity of spaces (from the kitchen in Saute ma ville to the one in No Home Movie by way of the Rodin Museum in La captive and the installations), and the apparent clarity of certain intentions or of the genres apparently adopted (the alternation between documentaries and fictions) seem to indicate an art of systems, in which the structuring of the elements with which the works are made and exhibited is as important as the works themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. Akerman often said that La région centrale made such an impression on her precisely because the crux of Michael Snow’s film is to never show the device that produces its breathtaking shots. We are invited neither to observe arrangements (whether visual, sculptural, or of perspective) nor to draw meaning or emotion from the interaction between these arrangements’ design and montage, which would have meaning in and of themselves, and a series of figures that tell a story or embody facts. One can no more separate Jeanne Dielman from the strange blue light blinking in her living room than the views of the desert in Now from the V-shaped formation of the screens on which they are projected. These are not so much devices as mise-en-scène; it is always a question of producing images which the viewer will experience in a certain space and a certain amount of time — as poor or as impossible as these images may be, as Akerman stated at the end of the installation D’Est — and following the mosaic dictate that constantly guided her (in Akerman’s work, the device does not replace the prohibition on the image, as it would be so convenient to think).

There are still other forms and reasons to Akerman’s attachment to modernity. Some are featured in the moving simplicity of the story in Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (1994): romantic freedom and the evidence of homosexuality, which don’t prevent one from playing more or less sad games with men and the irremediable loneliness with which most adventures of the heart come to an end. The filmmaker’s modernity does not only stem from the fact that she blurs the limits between fiction and auto-fiction this way, including by regularly appearing on screen in person, through a physical commitment that sometimes only requires a handful of gestures and positions (up to and including the installation Maniac Shadows and the film No Home Movie) or might come closer to the work of an actress (in this regard, the most successful is probably the comedic chamber piece L’Homme à la valise, made for television in 1983 and starring Akerman in one of the lead roles). Akerman always refused to comment on the feminine, feminist or homosexual nature of her cinema or any other reductive notion of that type: yet another way in which she is not ‘contemporary’. If she was able to wryly state: ‘And why shouldn’t a woman like me make a man’s movie from time to time?’⁸, it’s precisely because one also finds a kind of masculine question in her films (but not in the installations, which may be something worth thinking about), in the form of complex and unbearable figures, in the melancholy of spaces and loves that are impossible to share (literally, in the alternation of lovers in Nuit et jour, in 1991, then in the alternation of apartments in Un divan à New York). Stanislas Merhar twice embodied one of these figures, first as the jealous and desperate lover in La captive, then the pathetic father in La folie Almayer (‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a film featuring such an image of a father,’ Akerman was delighted to note).⁹ ‘I’m a woman’ is the minimal and entire statement written at the beginning of the diary kept by her grand-mother, a woman murdered in Auschwitz, and quoted by the filmmaker at the heart of one of her most essential installations, Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (2004). The feminist richness and power
of analysis of Akerman’s cinema are unrivalled in poetic truth because she never used it to take another position or include a watchword, and because to this policy of refusal she joined a radical art of representation and point of view (there is no better deconstruction of the male gaze than the voyeuristic and deadly chase in La captive), as well as an indefectible obsession, the one that made her mother — that is to say the daughter of the woman who could say ‘I am a woman’ — a constant key to the films, up to and including No Home Movie.

Where and when does modernity begin? The historical answers can go back in time along with those from Chantal Akerman’s genealogy. The young woman of the 1960s who discovers the avant-garde at the same time as her sexuality is modern; her mother who survived the death camps, who nearly went to settle in Israel with her husband during the early days of the Hebrew state, and whose survival wordlessly bears witness to the definitive terror by which the Second World War placed a caesura in the heart of history, is tragically modern; the mother of the mother, a contemporary of Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad and Colette who was swept away by
Nazi barbarism, is nothing but modern. This too was not intended by the filmmaker, but it seems possible to reread her work as a fragmentary archaeology of modernity, both historically and aesthetically, the two fitting together in the adventure of memory composed by the films, installations and books. The cut-off era for this archaeology, the furthest that we can follow it back, is the one that every historian considers the moment the notion was actually born: the publication of Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life in 1863 with a chapter entitled ‘Modernity’. This happens to be the year Isaac Bashevis Singer begins the story of his novel The Manor, in which he describes the fate of a family of Polish Jews torn between tradition and the new world, and which Akerman adapted into a screenplay in the late 1970s, but never found the financing to film. The 1860s is also when Dostoyevsky wrote The Idiot, which the filmmaker had planned to adapt shortly before her death. Conrad (La folie Almayer) was born in 1857, Proust (La captive) in 1871, Colette (Akerman wrote an unpublished screenplay based on her novel Chéri) in 1873.

This is where we find the source of Akerman’s slow temporal whirlpools: this spiral of origins that she wrapped in the form of a coiled projection screen displaying her grandmother’s words in the installation Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide; the uchronia in La captive and La folie Almayer, which mix signs from different eras (and by which Akerman joins Manoel de Oliveira in his untimely modernity); the free associations caused by the extended shots in D’Est, Sud, De l’autre côté and Là-bas, each in different geographic areas but with the same tendency to turn the shots’ duration into the groundwork for an amplification of history. As the era of pogroms, of triumphant colonialism, and the expansion of the capitalist patriarchy, the 1860s and the late nineteenth century are like the final ghost behind Akerman’s body of work, but this is also the era of photography, of a new ontology of images, in other words of the feeling of the present and the presence of represented things and of their authentic connection to the real, which is at the foundation of Akerman’s art: the place where, through ‘obedience to the impression’, she created, as Baudelaire wrote, the ‘memory (…) of the fantastic reality of life’. ¹⁰

Cyril Béghin

The essay “Chantal Akerman: A modern Adventure” by Cyril Béghin has been written for and published in: Chantal Akerman, Passages. Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam and nai010 publishers Rotterdam, 2020.

(1) Chantal Akerman, Elle vogue vers l’Amérique, no date (probably 1974), first published, in part, in Jacqueline Aubenas (ed.), Chantal Akerman, Atelier des arts, Cahier no. 1, 1982.
(2) Marianne Lambert (dir.), I Don’t Belong Anywhere. The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (Brussels, Artémis Productions, 2015).
(3) Giorgio Agamben, The Adventure, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018).
(4) Ibid., 33.
(5) On the screen-interface in the films and installations of Chantal Akerman, see Giuliana Bruno, ‘Projections: on Akerman’s Screens’, in Anders Kreuger and Dieter Roelstraete (ed.), Chantal Akerman: Too Far, Too Close (Antwerp: Ludion, 2012).
(6) Raymond Bellour, ‘Être au cinema’ [on Là-bas], Trafic no. 62 (summer 2007), reissued in Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs, (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), 374.
(7) Op. cit., 33.
(8) ‘Désancrées’, interview with Chantal Akerman and Marie Losier, by Nicholas Elliott, Cahiers du cinéma no. 681 (September 2012), 32.
(9) Interview with Chantal Akerman by Cyril Béghin, press kit for La folie Almayer, 2009.
(10) Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, translated by P.E. Charvet (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 406.

Cyril Béghin is a french movie critic. He has written for Cahiers du cinéma from 2004 to 2020, and been a member of its editorial board from 2009 to 2020. He regularly writes for magazines, collective books and catalogues. Among other books, he has been the scientific editor of Jean-Luc Godard and Marguerite Duras Dialogues (Post-éditions, 2014), and he is currently working on a collection of all of Chantal Akerman’s essays and scripts, to be published by the beginning of 2024 (editions L’Arachnéen). He is also the collaborator of the performer and choreographer Valeria Apicella, and participates to her project puntozerovaleriaapicella, an independent art and research space in Naples.