Starts:
06:40pm, Thursday, 28 September 2023
Until:
08:30pm, Thursday, 28 September 2023
Venue
Cinema 1
Barbican Centre, Level -2
Silk St, London, EC2Y 8DS
Tickets
Standard:
£13.00
AF Members:
£11.00 (Please contact AF for promotional discount code)
Concessions:
£11.00
Under 18:
£6.00
Young Barbican:
£5
Tel (9am-8pm):
+44 (0)20 7638 8891
Introduced by filmmaker, curator and writer Adam Roberts, who – together with Joanna Hogg, through the project A Nos Amours – curated a complete retrospective of Akerman’s work in London between 2013-15, extended through an exhibition and handbook.
La Chambre
A 360° travelling shot captures the filmmaker in her cramped home, producing an intimate domestic still life and self portrait, through the structures of home and cinema. Movement and stasis combine as Akerman inhabits both an apartment and film itself.
Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1972, 11 mins
News From Home
In this landmark experimental feature, elegant long takes capture the equally dispassionate and seductive streets of 1970s New York City, as the unseen director reads letters sent to her, during her residence there, by her mother in Belgium – received, we might imagine, in Akerman’s Manhattan apartment of La Chambre.
Babette Mangolte’s vivid, searching images capture a 1970s Manhattan that seems oblivious and disinterested in her solitary camera. Fixed frames document a city in perpetual movement, offering vignettes of urban estrangement as a possible stand in for the director’s body and biography – or non-verbal responses, perhaps, to Akerman’s mother’s missives of domestic and family life. With no shots of interiors, just the street and public transport, a sense of alienation from the city, from home, and from the self, becomes tactile, a suggestion of perpetual displacement.
Produced after Akerman had moved away from New York, the film performs a meditation on physical and emotional dislocation and distance, using formal tools to relate the intimately personal. As the camera stunningly departs Manhattan on the Staten Island ferry at the film’s conclusion, Akerman bids farewell to the city, and a slice of her past.
Chantal Akerman, Belgium, France, 1976, 85 mins
Inside and Out, by Adam Roberts
(What follows contains spoilers)
Chantal Akerman first went to New York in 1971. There she saw experimental film works at Anthology Film Archives1 and The Elgin Theater2, including several by Michael Snow. Akerman often referenced these films. In Snow’s <--->3 an agitated camera pans back and forth, in an interior room; in Wavelength4 a camera slowly zooms from a wide studio view to a close shot of a photograph of a seascape that, by the end, fills the screen.
Akerman's own film La chambre (1972) was the first fruit of her encounter with New York, and surely inspired by Snow's structuralist film-making. It is a 360° pan, all the way round, three times in one direction, but then reversing to go the other way. La chambre was shot indoors, in an apartment on Spring Street, Manhattan, where Akerman was briefly living. It runs mute.5
News From Home came in 1976, shot during a subsequent visit to New York, after Akerman had astonished the world with her debut feature film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. New York's exteriors were now her subject: the public faces of its inhabitants, its open and shared spaces, its streets, pavements, diners, and transit systems. It closes with her camera aboard the Staten Island ferry looking back towards the city as it recedes into the hazy distance. While News From Home’s images appear as if they were shot with synchronous sound, the sound track was all recorded separately, fitted and mixed later, accompanied by Akerman herself reading letters from her mother, at home in Brussels: everyday intimacies in contrast with impersonal public spaces.
To begin on the inside.
In La chambre, Akerman scrutinises an interior, yet this is a scrutiny that is far from exhaustive. Leisurely panning might seem to give time to look properly - to check and even double check. Her camera grants time to study surfaces and peer into shadows, accruing fine and lovely textural detail. Yet much remains uncertain: the exact disposition of walls and positioning of furniture. I have tried, with little success, to draw an exact diagram of how things are in this place.
Space here is unfolded, like an origami model, rather than laid bare by means of establishing shots. We are shown how the space is lived in: its store-places, its places to cook, its places for sitting, its place for sleep and dreaming. This is apparently structuralist filmmaking - without concern for narrative, in denial of reverse angle, close-up and the like - but Akerman's interior space is also a shifting and strange place, a series of appearances and disappearances, where recesses, cupboards and drawers are undoubtedly replete, filled with more than we can see, as present as the apple we see Akerman holding. The awkward corners and lines of sight spiral around, as if we were exploring the inside of a snail's shell, discovering deeper intimacy at every turn, becoming ever more enclosed, ever more interior. The folds and contours of this interior are non-Euclidian, like a Möbius strip, where to arrive again at the beginning is to arrive at a familiar and yet strange place.
This panning camera is not a search for the geography of a measurable space, instead it finds the shape a body has made in its living space, how it has made itself comfortable. We discover that which is familiar, while what seems impossibly hidden becomes less so. This turning of the view does not lose as it finds, in mimicry of the ephemerality of being, but instead its reiteration is reassuring: nothing here changes. Despite the shock, when the direction of the pan reverses, in this private shell, time does not - cannot - unravel. Here, space is indestructible.
What of the exterior and public places of News From Home? Here are streets, often deserted, in unloved parts of New York City.6 Here are subway stations, cafés (peered into from the outside), street corners, and intersections. Cars come into view only to disappear, people pass, or idle until they are gone. In a subway train travellers pause before dashing for the doors. A public face is not a private face; to be out in the open is to be exposed.
The visible world of the exterior is necessarily incomplete, with what disappears, or passes out of sight, seizing the mind. When a car passes from view, or subway door closes, we are made aware of what is lost, and dwell on it. Outside we are vigilant, looking for what we cannot see, or what we see but do not notice. Again and again, Akerman's shots reveal erasure, to make cinematic palimpsests.
Outside is the obverse of inside. Out of doors, in the city, near and far are equivalent, because one place is the democratic equal of any other. In a city all uses and possibilities are open - each place potentially as meaningful to one as to another. Even if Akerman made her shots on other days altogether, nothing would be any different because these views are but places (opportunities) for something to happen. The meaning of a public space is suspended in readiness for anything and everything. The open places of the city are in a steady state, where narrative is (to use Norman Bryson's term) helpless.7 If the director calls ‘Action!’, narrative should be prompted, but not here. These street doors and windows are shut, closing off what lies within. Journeys begin and end out of sight, lives lived always elsewhere. Even sound can be out of synch or fade out unexpectedly. Actions are never completed, looks unreturned. In the public spaces of the city all is contingent, in perpetual suspension.
What of the intimate murmur of the sound track, that Akerman has said was inspired by psalmody? These are readings of letters sent by an anxious mother to an absent daughter. Against the urban images, the presence of this voice and these letters, outdoors, seems out of place. Yet the voice reassures, even if short on expression, having an effect on what is seen. For me, the murmur brings attention to the precision, the duration, and care taken in the framing of Akerman’s images. And such framing reveals places as contexts, as recesses or stages, in or on which something may be placed, conscripting the city as a frame for still life, for the display of private things, for the calming of the flux and Brownian motion that such a city presents. An apparently blank urban canvas is thus revealed in a warm domestic register, a mother's presence having restored the possibility of dreaming. Just as a baby reaches out into the world, so this film is able to reach out.
La chambre and News From Home oppose interior with exterior, small-scale with immensity, human proportion and reach with the drama of collective anonymous achievement. Yet each defines the other, for without a place of shelter the outside is not conceivable.8 The outside world is a place of contingency, rootlessness, of destination rather than origin. The interior is a matter of rootedness, repose, dreaming, a reminder of a human self. Akerman's interior reveals cupboards and secret places in which to safely stow things away - out of mind but close at hand all the same. Her exteriors are looked out at from her snail's shell, her mother murmuring in her ear. It may be that all exteriors must be viewed from such a place. In this pairing of films, we discover our exteriors may be discovered provided we have an interior from which to make our journeys.
Footnotes:
1. At the time located in Joseph Papp's Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street. It would move in 1974 to 80 Wooster Street 2 Now the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue
3. aka Back and Forth, 1969
4. 1967
5. Akerman tried out a sound track, but discarded it
6. As they were in the 1970s, when New York City faced bankruptcy, and crime and decay seemed insoluble
7. Bryson is writing about still life, but Akerman's street views surely qualify? Norman Bryson: Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Reaktion Books, p61