Salute Your Shorts: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies

Photo courtesy of the Criterion Collection

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Last year, Criterion released the long-awaited—by certain cinephiles, anyway—Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles on DVD. Chantal Akerman’s works have long been inaccessible outside of the occasional retrospective or museum exhibition, and Jeanne Dielman was in some ways the crowning jewel of her works. But as a follow-up to that, Criterion has released a set of the rest of her films from the '70s on its Eclipse line, which document the growing artist’s skill and vision and help illustrate the project she was working on for Jeanne Dielman—why it’s such a landmark film despite consisting largely of three hours moving between rooms and switching off lights.

How “Saute ma ville” interacts with Jeanne Dielman can be read about here, but during the seven years between the two films Akerman certainly didn’t keep still. At that point in her life, only 18 years old, she was already travelling around the world looking for what was next. Her follow-up, “L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée” ("The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman”), however, was not a success, at least by her standards, which left her somewhat bereft of direction. In fact, this is the only completed movie made solely by her during the seventies that’s missing on this set of DVDs, meaning that she likely did not wish it to be considered with the rest of her works.

At this point in time, she phoned up photographer/cinematographer Babette Mangolte in New York and left for the states to meet up with her. Akerman showed “Saute ma ville” to Jonas Mekas in New York and regained a lot of her self-confidence due to the wonderful reception of her “Chaplin film.” Babette happened to be friends with a lot of the formalist filmmakers working at the time, so soon Akerman found herself with that crowd and her films at the time reflect this, even though before then she was completely unfamiliar with their works—in fact, she was inspired into filmmaking not through the American formalists but rather by the French New Wave.

So what is structural-formalist filmmaking? It’s important to define, because that movement and the way Akerman twisted it took it to the next level are some of the reasons why she’s an important filmmaker. The formalists (or “structural-materialists”) were a group of avant-garde filmmakers working primarily in the late '50s and '60s on movies that foregrounded basic elements of film, including directors like Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas . An example of this would be Michael Snow’s “<--->,” generally referred to as “back and forth,” which is literally about a camera moving back and forth until eventually the movement is so fast that the image begins to blur.

Akerman’s first movie in New York is in many ways a typical formalist film. In “La Chambre,” a camera rotates to the left around an apartment at a steady pace. Lying in one corner of the room is Akerman, who upon each revolution is doing something different, whether lying in bed, licking an apple, etc. After the third revolution, the camera passes Akerman but then unexpectedly switches directions. This returns to one of the main interests in formalist filmmaking, that the unexpected can be formally driven rather than narratively driven yet still be just as interesting. Whether or not it’s a camera move or a person shooting someone, the suspense can be the same.

“La Chambre” is an interesting enough piece of formalist art, but is ultimately very derivative of the rest of the movement. Chantal was yet to have her real voice, and the film is more of an interesting curiosity for fans of Akerman’s than it is a self-contained work. It does foreshadow Jeanne Dielman, which also follows a strict formal structure several times before breaking down, but “La Chambre” is motivated by nothing more than film itself—characters are still largely left out. The way the camera in “La Chambre” is motivated by a person is the only sign that she’s stepping away from the movement and ultimately more interested in the lives of people than in the apparatus of film.

Following “La Chambre,” though edited and shot almost concurrently with it, came “Hotel Monterey.” This movie followed the same formalist strains as before, but applied them to a real location, stepping outside of a fully controlled studio or apartment and taking film into where people are. Because of this, it’s a kind of odd mesh between an avant-garde formal experiment and a verite documentary, which seems like it shouldn’t be possible but is achieved here nonetheless. Akerman and Mangolte move a camera slowly up and through a welfare hotel in New York, documenting both the spaces people live in and the ones they briefly or never pass through. The hour-long film was shot entirely in one night and does a lot with camera moves and spaces, but not too much with the actual people on-screen, who for the most part are gone after the first 10 minutes. The film was about framing and the effects of interior spaces on our lives, but like “La Chambre” is mostly of interest for people looking for the roots of Akerman’s style here. Her style still looks to interiors as both prisons and relief and has stuck to long takes, but this form of documentary was mostly an experiment that she’s since moved on from.

At this point, Akerman returned to Brussels (where she was originally from) and worked on her first feature film. This was a step beyond formal experiment for her and embodied the question of how do you make formalist filmmaking interact with narrative cinema? Je Tu Il Elle (I,You, He, She) was her first attempt at this, and while not entirely successful, it’s still a very beautiful, at times quite moving picture. Starring Akerman herself as Julie, the film’s first third focuses on Julie alone in her room lamenting her lost love. She writes letters to him or her, eats sugar out of a bag and mopes around without leaving her apartment for several days. On top of all this is a narrator who narrates the action before events happen, after events finish and, on occasion, completely contradicts what we see on-screen. After this third, Julie sets out on the road, hitchhikes with a trucker, the two have sexual relations and he ends up telling her his life story. Finally, she meets up with her ex-girlfriend, and after some tense moments, the two make love for ten minutes in mostly one long take.

Not only is the film’s arch-structure so strictly divided, but scenes themselves are shot using the types of repetition and eventual play on repetition that came from formalism. In the first segment, these repetitions are largely meant to be forms of Julie’s neurosis and inability to cope with her situation. This in turn repeats itself with the truck driver and eventually the lesbian love scene, each in turn focusing on formal repetitions. These formal patterns tell the film’s story rather than its very minimal narrative, making it an attempt at telling a story as much as possible through style.

Je Tu Il Elle doesn’t quite succeed, but Akerman’s follow-up, Jeanne Dielman, managed to do exactly that. In a way that seems almost impossible, it bridges the gap between narrative and structural formalist cinema by following the repetitions of a character and putting those into film terms. Again, Akerman sets up a pattern, but in this case the pattern is a woman’s life and the way she keeps herself stable by ignoring her problems in favor of repetition. When the repetition breaks down, in this case it’s not a breakdown of filmmaking and surprise merely by technique, instead it’s an illustration of the torment of Jeanne’s life. This is the magical bridge that Akerman managed to cross.

The Eclipse set contains two other films, News from Home and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, which are worth checking out as well, both made after Akerman’s breakthrough. The two show different directions that she would lead her filmmaking in the future, always avant-garde but nonetheless now her own person. Still, despite the roughness of these first works, the set’s more than just a historical curiosity and has bold things to say about both life and film.