Chantal Akerman Exhibit at the Jeu de Paume
written BY fiona FORTUnATO
“I make art with a woman who does the dishes”
At the exhibition of her work at the Jeu de Paume museum, the immersive installations are conducive to the contemplation that Chantal Akerman would have wanted to evoke from interaction with her work. Her experimental content of film was revolutionary. Previously, the main object of most distributed films would have been to entertain the audience and not to feel overly long, uncomfortable, or dull. The object of many of her films was to feel just that. She wanted the audience to partake in the internal lives of women feeling their outside pressures and the monotony of everyday life or routines. Effectively, Akerman would take pride in the sometimes dull subject matter, characterizing it as “I make art with a woman who does the dishes”.
Chantal Akerman was born in Antwerp, Belgium on June 6th in 1950 and died on October 15th 2015 in Paris, France. Making over 40 films, she was one of the most influential European directors of her generation. Her work is radical not in any entertaining sense, but in the manner in which it can highlight loneliness, repetitiveness, and the pressures of the exterior world upon women. Descending from Polish Jews who settled in Belgium after fleeing the holocaust, Akerman was heavily affected by her family’s tragic past. She was particularly affected with regard to her mother, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and never spoke of her experiences. While Akerman dealt with her own mental health struggles, coupled with the silent weight of grief carried, but unexpressed, by her mother, she expressed how it translated into her work: “How, from my history, or because my mother never said anything about the camps, probably, all my work comes from that [...] It comes from a kind of hole that I needed to fill and that I went looking for through films, and words, and people, and that I’ll probably never manage to fill, and that’s what will keep pushing me to work.”
Her first major inspiration to make films came after watching the movie Pierrot le Fou (1965) directed by the French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. She would go on to make films herself, and by the time she was 24 years old, Akerman had directed two feature films using teams almost exclusively of women. In an interview from 1975, titled, “C’est quoi, un cinéma au féminin?” (“What is a feminine cinema?”), that took place during the Women's Film Festival at Gaumont Rive Gauche, three female directors and an actress discuss the place of women in contemporary cinema. Amongst the attendants is Chantal Akerman, Delphine Seyrig (who played Jeanne Dielman), Marguerite Duras, and Liliane de Kermadec. The french novelist and playwright Marguerite Duras in discussion with them stated, “Je pense que le cinéma des femmes fait partie du cinéma différent. Le cinéma différent est par définition un cinéma politique.” (“I think that women's cinema is part of different cinema. Different cinema is by definition political cinema.”) Akerman agreed with this conclusion, an opinion that is evident in much of her work on subversive subject matters like female depression, and non glamorized/sexualized female prostitution.
The first room of the exhibition set up a projection on one wall and seven televisions at the other end of the darkly lit hall, each playing the scene of potato peeling in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975). In this scene, multiple views of the same subject effectively captures attention while showing monotony and repetition of peeling potatoes in silence. The significance of this scene with Jeanne who is simultaneously a widow, a housewife, and part time prostitute, depicts temporal realism, domesticity and routine. More televisions in the next, much larger, room show a documentary-style aspect of Akerman’s filmmaking, from when she was asked to capture scenes of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
After this introduction to some of her work through projections and television installations, the following rooms were more interactive with books, headphones, letters, screenplays, stills, projections, and a timeline of her life and work circling the room. The archive room effectively allowed the visitors to feel her evolution over time from her teenage introduction to film, to some early works, like her short film Blow Up My Town (1968), and later on in her career as she experimented with her style. She would move to Paris at 18 to continue her early career before visits to New York that would have a profound influence upon her as she joined other experimental filmmakers in New York City during which she began regularly visiting the Anthology of Film Archives.
Akerman’s first feature length film was the feminist, avant-garde, Je Tu Il Elle, which was shot in 1974 after initially being written in 1968. A revolutionary film that analyzes the isolation following a breakup, it was largely based upon her own depression. The film explores isolation and longing for connection, sexuality and same sex desire. She described that “if I’d shot it at that time, I would have made a film about an anecdote, but the intervening six years permitted a dramatization, and using myself as an actress was part of that dramatization…I have an active life and seem to have made a definitive entry into the adult world with a smile, but I think that inside all of us, something remains of that momentary scream that we’ve stifled in order to play society’s game.” Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975) was the second feature film she wrote and directed. Adapting a screenplay to Dielman’s character, Akerman made use of the monotonous life of the widow who with the responsibilities of a mother must prostitute herself out to make ends meet, to show the internal world of a woman under stifling emptiness and outside pressures.
In addition to interview-style short films like Dis Moi (1980), Akerman explored documentary filmmaking installation work in the United States, like her piece, De l’Autre Côté (2002). While her work is most often experimental, it is not confined to a specific genre or subject matter. De l’Autre Côté deals with the outcome that Mexican migrants face as they are expelled back across a mountainous desert area of Arizona after unsuccessfully attempting to cross the United States border.
Chantal Akerman explored various genres and formats including fiction, documentary, installations, and written word. A year after the death of her mother in 2014, she took her own life, but her impact upon the film community is still palpable. She drew upon the overlooked aspects of daily female life, extracting what she found to be interesting, fundamentally breaking from the archetypal mold of women and female expression in an industry predominantly occupied by men.