As a recent but devoted convert to her work, the news that filmmaker Chantal Akerman had died by her own hand hit me with an unexpected force, triggering a recognition that I tried, unsuccessfully, to disavow. Chantal\u2019s suicide felt intuitively unsurprising\u2014there was a clear precedent for this action in the emotional turbulence of her films\u2014and yet the fact of her death triggered a kind of involuntary referendum upon the experience of watching her films. What had I been seeing? The pressurizing fact of this death potentially imposed a brutal oversimplification onto the complexity of these artworks and, by extension, the person who crafted them, re-defining creator and creation in tandem. Fraught with this new fact, the knotted cords of her life and work risked taking on the seemingly inevitable lineaments of tragedy, a genre quite at odds with her astringent, sometimes comic vision.<\/p>\n
To be sure, a dynamic of submerged tension and violent release drives much of her work. A case in point is her early masterpiece \u201cJeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.\u201d In this overpowering film, shot in 1975 by an all-female crew when its director was only 25, often hailed as a landmark of feminist avant-garde cinema, we are confronted by the sheer extent of labor and care involved in a Belgian housewife\u2019s everyday routine, with Delphine Seyrig\u2019s steely performance as Jeanne holding our gaze for 200 minutes. We witness the occasional entrances and exits of the customers for the part time sex work that supplements Jeanne\u2019s full time house work punctuating her solitude with a rhythm of intrusion and departure. The camera stares implacably at the entirety of her life: for hours on end, we watch as beds are made, veal cutlets are cooked, water is boiled, customers are satisfied, the neighbor\u2019s child is looked after, and Jeanne\u2019s son is sent to school and sent to sleep. As these tasks unfold in an initially suffocating and finally revelatory real-time, Akerman refuses to cut away from the duration of care and refuses to soften its texture: crying babies and spoiled milk erupt like land mines in the path of an ongoing cycle of chores and obligations and small, guarded pleasures that define Jeanne\u2019s existence. Eventually, the stability of this life traumatically breaks open with a violent, decisive action that passes retroactive judgment upon the three hours of domestic \u201ccalm\u201d that precedes it, mirroring but also exposing the violence implicit in the sexed divisions of labor that created those routines in the first place.<\/p>\n
Stunned by the raw emotional power and strict formal control of this film, I had to see more, and worked my way backwards and forwards from that central statement across her catalogue of films. I became a boorish evangelist, convinced roomfuls of friends to sit and watch her films with me, smiled in the dark as they went from initial boredom and resistance to a gradual, grudging admiration for the clarity of her vision and on to ultimate admissions that what they had seen was art-making of a high order. When the news of Akerman\u2019s death on October 5th broke, puncturing my advocacy of the artwork with a stark reminder of the fragility of the artist, it wounded me in a manner that suddenly called into question the nature of what her work offers. Because they examine strong, even forbidden, emotional territory and frequently seem directly or obliquely autobiographical\u2014as in the presentation of the filmmaker\u2019s nude body (\u201cJe Tu Il Elle,\u201d 1974) or in the intimate revelation of her own family history (\u201cNews From Home,\u201d 1977)\u2014Akerman\u2019s films inspire not just formal admiration but a protective strain of fandom-as-virtual-friendship which cathects upon the virtual self offered up through these intimate gambits of risk-taking and disclosure. That that self\u2014but was that ever really Chantal?\u2014had now killed itself felt like a rebuke to the very existence that the work had bathed in light. As French sources disseminated information about the circumstances of her death, I took to an online forum to vent and process my mourning and posted the following on the day I learned of her death:<\/p>\n
The awful possibility (likelihood?) that Chantal Akerman killed herself is weighing upon me as I think about her work and her death, and wrestle with the human desire to force those into illustrative alignment so that the death somehow \u201cfits\u201d the work. There is a bad retroactive power that the fact of suicide relays onto the life it terminates and the work made within that space of potential before the cut-off point. Chantal measured her shots with the length of her own breathing, and the painful fact of the \u201ccut\u201d as that which ends the art and the life as a decisive choice might need some other way of looking and letting go.<\/p>\n
The timing of the death of Chantal\u2019s own mother having been followed so swiftly by her own death looks suspicious. It triggers speculation in me as a fan of her work, an ugly longing to align my own speculative thought-experiments and private interpretations of the art that she made with the imagined real life of an exemplary artist. Will the fact of this death mean that we collapse the humor and beauty in the work in favor of a retroactive judgment that what we were seeing all along was predictive, proleptic, a symptom of \u201cdepressive realism\u201d, a symptomatic inching towards the very liberation-through-destruction that was already in place in her very first film \u201cSaute Ma Ville\u201d? Or is all of this terribly sudden, recent, and rooted in a tightly specific timing, an unreachable point of decision, an impulse to which was given momentary but permanent surrender?<\/p>\n
Did Chantal kill herself out of a desire to remain connected to her mother? Did she feel that she was not permitted to survive her mother? Did she feel a tremendous relief at the death of her mother because now she could do something that her mother\u2019s survival had barred: namely, take her own life? Or did she kill herself out of guilt as a way of punishing herself for the very relief that the death of a parent might have brought? What do we make of someone with her obvious gifts and celebrated artistic success, in short, someone with her genius, ultimately refusing the mandate of survival? Is there a way to de-pathologize the urge to die? Can we afford to do that? If we can\u2019t, what are we afraid of within ourselves that we disavow through the abjection of the self-killing of others?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Driven by these questions, I watched many of her early films again, and tried to wrestle with this need to align her death with her work. I held a kind of vigil in which Chantal\u2019s work became a space to reflect upon the contrary forces in play within her films: belonging and separation, approach and retreat, movement and stillness, and, ultimately, life and death. Given the timing of her mother\u2019s death and Chantal\u2019s own suicide, \u201cNews from Home\u201d in particular took on an uncanny new force. As we hear Akerman read out loud the letters that her mother writes from Belgium, we are shown the human beings and built environment of New York City, and gradually intuit the framing scenario of Akerman\u2019s abrupt departure from the very home that claims her in these epistolary assaults, and, by extension, the intractability of the mother\/daughter bond. The little loops of imbrication between the mother\u2019s affect and the daughter\u2019s are immediately apparent in the language of the letters, whose almost unbearable intimacy finds a foil in the broad panoramas and busy spaces of urban 1970s New York.<\/p>\n
The first letter, which enters after several minutes of traffic noise and shots of cars and passers-by, makes the hailing force of the parental bond instantly legible:<\/p>\n
Dearest child, I received your letter and hope you\u2019ll write often. [\u2026] I think you\u2019re happy in New York, so we\u2019re happy too, even though we do miss you. When will you be back? Everything\u2019s the same here, but Sylviane\u2019s home with the flu, and I\u2019m not very well. My blood pressure\u2019s low, I\u2019m on medication for it. Today\u2019s my birthday, and I feel sad. It\u2019s a quiet, boring Saturday at the shop. For my birthday we\u2019re just having dinner with friends. Your birthday\u2019s coming up. You know I wish you all the best. Write soon. I\u2019m anxious to hear about your work, New York, everything. A big hug from the three of us. We think of you always. Your loving mother.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In a brilliant stroke of conceptual judo, \u201cNews from Home\u201d overlays the sound of highly charged private emotions onto the vision of wide open public spaces, tilting Belgian words against American images. This contrast of sound and vision aligns the characters of the film with rival media: as we hear the Mother\u2019s hopes that her \u201cdearest child\u201d will find a job, will become famous, \u201cwill have everything that you want come true\u201d, the bleak, drab and abandoned spaces that Babette Mangolte\u2019s camerawork shows us wryly registers the unlikelihood of these hopes, and their crushing weight as pressurizing imperatives that dog the frame. Chantal\u2019s silence, her refusal to let us hear her responses, seems to be a kind of masochistic toll she pays for the cruelty implicit in her act of rendering her mother\u2019s private letters accessible to the viewer. Those letters, rife with passive-aggressive accusations (\u201cwe are not angry that you left without saying a word\u201d), are left to hang there in mid-air above New York, but these constant bulletins about sadness, exhaustion and sickness offer their own eloquent testimony as to why a twenty-year-old girl might feel that there was no way to ask for permission to leave her Holocaust survivor parents in the first place.<\/p>\n
As the film progresses, the juxtapositions of image and letter come to figure the affective force-field between mother and daughter with increasing slyness. The twin imperatives of \u201cI\u2019m counting on you to write\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t work too hard\u201d are paired with a shot of a woman sitting on the sidewalk in a chair, her arms folded, staring straight into the camera. Is this a case of contrast or correlation? Does she take on the solidity and judgmental gaze of the implied yet absent Mother? Or does she constitute a riposte and alternative to her? As the letters progress, the hectoring rhythmic pattern of endless love and endless criticism is foregrounded; the ceaseless patter of family occasions that are \u201cwithout you\u201d harps upon the damage inflicted by Chantal\u2019s absence, a gesture amplified rather than undercut by her follow-up observation: \u201cSorry that I ramble, what matters is that you\u2019re happy.\u201d Read in a deadpan by Chantal, we can draw our own conclusion about the relationship between the happiness of the daughter and the void imposed upon the mother by that absence, indeed by that very happiness. The message is clear: your happiness hurts me. You have placed yourself before me. The more the letters say \u201cI want you to be happy, I don\u2019t want to be a selfish mother\u201d, the more aware we become of the burden of that impossible demand. If Chantal goes away from home in order to be happy, then the mother is unhappy; if Chantal returns, the mother can finally be happy, but only if she believes that the return is precisely Chantal\u2019s own innermost desire, a scenario that the sheer fact of the departure, compounded by all that time spaced between always-too-brief letters, already belies. The result is an endless duel, a zero sum game.<\/p>\n
At the film\u2019s arguable \u201cclimax,\u201d we have the deliriously comic experience of the noise of the subway literally drowning out the voice of the letters, a surge of sound that creates a perceptual community of the viewer with Ackerman as we are forced to side with the present fact of New York and against the absent presence of the mother. This is followed by a hush of silence, as if the violence of the burial of the mother in the turbulent surge of noise triggers a kind of reflexive syntax of guilt, a reconsideration. Over time, the mother\u2019s demands accumulate and complicate each other, in the process expanding her role from comic foil to something more open-ended. \u201cYou never write about how you\u2019re really doing\u201d is tethered awkwardly to the demand to write more, and we sense that for these two the truth will always hide behind what is said, what is written, what can be shown, and in both directions.<\/p>\n
This brings me back to the question that haunts me since learning of her suicide: did we, as we watched Akerman\u2019s films\u2014some of us for hours, some of us for decades\u2014ever intuit how she was \u201creally doing\u201d? Must the false aura of knowingness wrought by biographical closure color any such pleas for access now? Inescapably tied yet irrevocably distinct, the artist and the artwork overlap in a uniquely tense manner in Akerman\u2019s oeuvre, as \u201cNews From Home\u201d makes clear to devastating effect when viewed now in a doubly posthumous aftermath. At its elegiac close, the camera basks in a long shot off the Staten Island ferry as it pulls out into the harbor, scanning the downtown Manhattan perimeter and across until mist and clouds come to cover the tops of the World Trade Center. As the towers are drowned in white, the insistent cry of gulls and the crash of surf buries the continual sound of engines pressing on beneath the surface. A ten-minute single shot, it\u2019s harshly beautiful, demanding, and poised. These towers, so imposing in their iconic doubling and in the spacing of their separation from each other, take on a certain totemic force as stand-ins for the mother and child whose dialectic of relation and non-relation has unfolded for the viewer and listener over the preceding hours. Seen in the wake of her mother\u2019s death and Akerman\u2019s own final decision, a primary loss is redoubled into present grief. Yet this also affords an opportunity in the present through which to refuse the retroactive capture of Akerman\u2019s work as only ever the prolegomena to personal tragedy. Surrendering the virtual bond of connection through fandom to an artist we may never have known in the first place, we might affirm instead the delicate balancing act of Akerman\u2019s enduring work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Drew Daniel<\/strong> is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University and one half of the electronic group Matmos. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats<\/em> and The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance<\/em>, and is currently writing a book about self-killing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a recent but devoted convert to her work, the news that filmmaker Chantal Akerman had died by her own hand hit me with an unexpected force, triggering a recognition that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":1984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","category-sexualities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1983"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1987,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1983\/revisions\/1987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}