Chantal Akerman, le patron

Akerman in Je, tu, il, elle, 1975; image cribbed, with grat­it­ude, from Only The Cinema

About 12 years ago I was at a mod­est cock­tail party—bare office space and bottles—commemorating the hanging-up-the-towel of a vet­er­an indie film pub­li­cist. I was in a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger, an older woman who had con­nec­tions in some New York dis­tri­bu­tion circles, or some­thing like that, and the name Chantal Akerman came up, and I was taken aback to see the woman sneer. “She’s not a dir­ect­or any more,” the woman con­tin­ued. “She’s a gal­lery film­maker. She makes install­a­tion films.” This took me even fur­ther aback. Although I had not been able to keep up with Akerman’s work in an entirely steady way over the years, I con­sidered her an artist­ic and, yes, polit­ic­al hero, and bey­ond that, I actu­ally act­ively enjoyed all the work by her that I’d been able to see. In oth­er words, a fan. And no mat­ter what the dis­pos­i­tion of her career at that time, there was no reas­on to dis­miss her. That idea held and con­tin­ues to hold.

I found her latest movie, now her last, No Home Movie, a spec­tac­u­lar exper­i­ence. Spectacularly try­ing, in a sense; it won’t do to describe it as a return to her “raw” film­mak­ing mode of the late six­ties and early sev­en­ties, as the medi­um here is digit­al video rather than cel­lu­loid, and Akerman, as a mas­ter of cinema, is bra­cingly aware of the mul­ti­valent ways in which the medi­um is the mes­sage. There are a large num­ber of stat­ic shots in No Home Movie, held for long peri­ods of time, in which the main point of visu­al interest seems to be in the video appar­at­us try­ing to decide just what the white bal­ance of the image ought to be. The film, a doc­u­ment­ary of sorts, addresses the death of Akerman’s moth­er, or, rather, the pres­ence of Akerman’s moth­er ulti­mately opposed to the absence of Akerman’s moth­er; the movie’s title, No Home Movie, could just as well be No-Home Movie. It hit me hard in part because of my own per­son­al exper­i­ence this year. But it’s also hard-hitting as an aes­thet­ic and philo­soph­ic­al mark­er; far from being a film that’s under-directed, as one crit­ic who didn’t care for the movie observed, it is a vir­tu­al treat­ise on film­mak­ing choices—especially film­mak­ing choices that are expli­citly related to human mortality.

Human mor­tal­ity: Chantal Akerman’s death, age 65, was announced this morn­ing, as No Home Movie is about to be screened to the pub­lic at the New York Film Festival. As I write this, dif­fer­ing account of the cause of her death are cir­cu­lat­ing in French and British newspapers.

Obituaries will invari­ably cite her break­through fea­ture Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du com­merce, 1080 Bruxelles, made in 1975, abso­lutely one of the Great Films and a true exper­i­ment­al movie because it put the­ory into prac­tice in meld­ing the struc­tur­al­ist film with a more expli­cit nar­rat­ive than had been applied to it up until that point; and the movie can still pro­voke fevered argu­ments. It’s hardly her only Great Film though. I’m still besot­ted by her 2000 La Captive, a modern-day Bad Romance extra­pol­ated from an epis­ode in Proust.  I believe it remains the greatest of screen adapt­a­tions of Proust in part because if the liber­ties it takes with the source mater­i­al, liber­ties that enable Akerman to more fully engage the psy­cho­lo­gic­al and philo­soph­ic­al unique­ness of Proust’s work and explore time through purely cine­mat­ic means. (And yes, I hold Ruiz’s Time Regained in high esteem, but its approach to Proust is entirely dif­fer­ent in that it engages the whole idea of “Proust” as an object for the pur­poses of a not entirely unser­i­ous cine­mat­ic pas­tiche.) It’s also a very mord­antly funny film; the sexu­al jeal­ousy of its lead char­ac­ter is no less mani­ac­al and tox­ic than that of Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, but its artic­u­la­tion is so restrained and refined as to evoke a dif­fer­ent kind of mor­ti­fic­a­tion. I also often go back to her early auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al films, the “raw” stuff; her New York land­scapes of 1976’s News From Home are indelible, haunt­ing. One takeaway from 1975’s debut fea­ture Je, tu, il, elle is the inab­il­ity to ever watch Cannon the same way again. And that, my friends, is the only funny I can make in the face of this awful news that one of the most vital film­makers of her or any oth­er age (I think Lena Dunham owes as much to Akerman as she does to Nora Ephron) is gone far too soon.