Kristine Butler

University of Minnesota
butle002@maroon.tc.umn.edu

 

 

Chantal Akerman. “Bordering on Fiction: Chatal Akerman’s D’Est.” Walker Art Center, Minneapolism, Minnesota. June 18-August 27, 1995.

 

Chantal Akerman’s career as a filmmaker spans more than twenty-five years. Her cinematic oeuvre has explored and problematized theoretical questions of the visual and aural languages of cinema and their implications for cinematic representation, placing her alongside such Franco-European directors as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras, and Agnes Varda. Akerman’s filmography to date includes some thirty-two films, ranging from shorts to feature length productions, from documentary to narrative fiction; she has shot in color and black and white, from video to 16mm to 35mm. Throughout her career, Akerman has been consistently concerned with exploring, exposing, and stretching the limits of cinematic genres with a unique style of difference and deferral within repetition.

 

Akerman’s cinema is born of a certain perceived loss of the real, born of a critical look at the very elements that make up the cinematic medium itself. The cinema, drawn from the beginning toward the celebration of movement, has tended increasingly to exploit such developments in cinematic technology as make possible a “seamless” cinema, inducing ever more persuasively “realistic” effects through the pursuit of technological perfection in visual and sound reproduction. This drive toward seamlessness — a drive both aesthetic and commercial — led Jean-Luc Godard and other New Wave directors to react against the technical perfection, the slick “realism” of Hollywood, by, for example, abandoning directional microphones and carefully mixed sound tracks in favor of a single omni-directional microphone, and by employing a style of editing which would allow the editor’s work to show. As Godard’s work evolved, his style became a reflection on the cinematic process, filmed by an increasingly self-conscious apparatus that sought to expose, rather than conceal, the site of production. Though Akerman’s work is very different from Godard’s, she shares with him a concern for filming the movement of the apparatus as it constructs meanings, a movement that goes in both directions at once: forward toward the finished product and backward toward the conditions that made the vision of that product possible.

 

“Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est,” now enjoying a ten-week run at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before it moves to the Jeu de Paume in Paris, is in many ways a conceptual continuation of her earlier work in films such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), News from Home (1976) and Histoires d’Amerique (1988). The installation also represents a branching out for Akerman, in which she re-poses questions about the cinematic process and the construction of filmic documents through a different physical and ideational space. “Bordering on Fiction,” Akerman’s first museum installation, is a work which raises questions about the film itself as an artistic construction and the act of viewing such a construction.

 

Funded in part by the Bohen Foundation and Etant Donnes, The French-American Endowment for Contemporary Art, and conceived by Akerman, Kathy Halbreich (then Beal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and currently the director of the Walker Art Center), Susan Dowling (producer for WGBH Television), Michael Tarantino (an independent curator and critic), and later joined by Bruce Jenkins (film and video curator for the Walker Art Center) and Catherine David (then curator at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris), “Bordering on Fiction” represents a multinational collaboration on the coming together of the European community, and “the concomitant rise of nationalism and anti-Semitism.”¹ The installation itself consists of three integrated “movements” corresponding to the three galleries in which the exhibit is contained. Upon entering the first gallery, visitors are confronted with a darkened room where the finished version of D’Est, a 107-minute long feature-film shot in Germany, Poland, and Russia in three trips during 1992 and 1993, runs continuously. A second room holds 24 video monitors arranged into eight triptychs, all simultaneously playing different looping fragments of the film. The third gallery contains a single video monitor and a pair of small speakers placed on the floor, with Akerman’s voice reciting passages from the Hebrew Bible, mixed with some of her own writings on the film and the process of making it. As we the viewers move forward through the installation, we move conceptually backward through a deconstruction of the filmmaking process, both from the final product to the artist’s vision of the work, and from the technologically “finished” film to the scattered pieces of its sound and image tracks.

 

Akerman’s previous work shares affinities with what Serge Daney has called the “cinema of disaster”² — cinema that emerges from the desire to come to terms with, and the impossibility of finding language for, contemporary disasters such as the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. Like Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s collaboration Hiroshima, mon amour, and more recently, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Akerman’s D’Est treats themes of personal crisis in the midst of social upheaval, of disaster and its aftermath, as well as the personal and societal stakes of remembering and/or forgetting that upheaval. Watching D’Est, one has the sense of passing time, of waiting, and of the uncertainty born of daily life that continues in the midst of despair. Akerman focuses on moments preceding or following the events of daily life: she films people waiting in train stations, snowy streets at dawn, people walking, sitting in their kitchens, standing, waiting in long lines, quietly conversing. “All exteriors are places of passage and transit, traversed or occupied by an errant humanity laden with baggage and packages and heading toward an improbable destination.”³ Akerman has consistently focused on the events of daily life in her work, reversing the hierarchy of public and private, a principle which she considers specifically feminist. As she says about her 1976 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: “I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash come[s] higher, and I don’t think that’s an accident. . . .”⁴ In Jean Dielman, the repetitive and ultra-normal nature of a housewife’s daily routine opens out onto pathology. In Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), the filmmaker protagonist’s travels from Germany through Belgium to Paris take the form of a routine of waiting in hotel rooms and train stations, chance and planned encounters, and frustrated phone calls to her lover in Italy. This concern for the daily, for privileging the personal over the national or the political, is at the basis of D’Est as well, a film which focuses on the personal without a single named character, without narrative, but rather formally and compositionally, through examination of the film itself as both a theoretical possibility and a finished product, and the conditions that provide for its creation and reception.

 

In all of Akerman’s work there is a quality of filmic composition that is almost musical, akin to such composers as John Cage or Steve Reich. Like Cage and Reich, whose musical compositions are based on a principle of difference and repetition, Akerman’s filmic compositions exist to be varied in time and in space, while retaining certain grains of the original “theme,” as a sort of fluctuating loop. D’Est exists on a principle of deferment. Built on a system of formal and thematic oppositions that seem fairly simplistic — exterior vs. interior, day vs. night, summer vs. winter, silence vs. noise, crowds vs. individuals, long vs. short sequences, fixed vs. moving cameras — the film, instead of presenting a binary composition of conflict and resolution that one might expect from a documentary, presents ruptures, frustrated attempts, and deferred resolutions.

 

About her reasons for making D’Est, Akerman writes:

 

Why make this trip to Eastern Europe? There are the obvious historical, social, and political reasons, reasons that underlie so many documentaries and new reports — and that rarely indulge a calm and attentive gaze. But although these are significant, they are not the only reasons. I will not attempt to show the disintegration of a system, nor the difficulties of entering into another one, because she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preoccupations. This undoubtedly will happen anyway; it can’t be helped. But it will happen indirectly.⁵

 

D’Est, though it is ostensibly “about” the fall of the Eastern bloc, renounces the authoritative voice of the documentary, eliminating the voiceover and narrative structure which would typically weave through and connect the various moments. What we have instead is a continuous montage of images and sounds, which lends to the installation a sense of obsessive repetition and looping, the sound often existing as a counterpoint to the image, rather than as its complement. Intentionally, voices are not “selected” by the recording and mixing apparatus for our ear to hear as if “naturally.” The camera moves slowly, deliberately, in lateral movements, not stopping to focus on anything, not making exceptions, filming people, buildings, cars, empty spaces, trees with the same impartial eye. Akerman recorded the sound for the film live, then remixed it in its entirety; often the sound is the dominant element of the sequence and exceeds the image and its duration. In addition, the sounds themselves are often startling in their lack of immediate “relevance” to the image: the seemingly paradoxical nature of their presence or absence relative to the image track, relegates the sound to function as “noise” or interference. The viewer is thus led to question the origins of these sounds, as well as of the images themselves, to which the sounds both do and do not respond.

 

The apparatus is thus an integral part of the film, impossible to ignore. The effect is troubling, taking the spectator/listener out of a position of passivity associated with the “natural” or realistic pairing of image to sound, of lips to voices, of objects to the sounds we associate with them. The viewer must either be frustrated in his or her attempt to focus, stop, develop a story, or else must allow for the camera’s refusal to weave, out of these disparate parts, an easy, coherent narrative. The camera’s “choice” of movement, which seems arbitrary at first, eventually exposes the arbitrary nature of any narrative one could choose to recount: certain shots or frames seem to be echoes of other, past narratives, testifying to the depth of our own investment as viewers in the cinematic tradition and the expectations that we have as consumers of different types of visual media. Thus D’est, while questioning the primacy of the image and the subservient, verifying nature of the sound track, and exposing the medium of film in its mechanical composition, also questions the production of discourse about Eastern bloc countries in the aftermath of the Cold War, in post-communist society, through the media, and the spectator’s consumption of the products of these discourses.

 

Akerman’s cinematic style is uniquely suited to the demands of a museum installation as a space made for wandering. In her past work, she has developed a film language in which the lateral movements of the camera suggest the wandering of a subject at once spectator and participant. D’Est, though it is certainly informed by Akerman’s cinematic work, is not simply a film, but an event: the very personal movement of each museum goer, who walks, sits, looks or does not look, listens to out-of-sync noises and dialogue, leaves or does not leave, echoes the movement of the installation itself; we as an audience are caught up in the waiting, the absence of knowing when, or if, something will “happen,” as the notion of “happening” itself comes into question.

 

“Bordering on Fiction” opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on January 18 for a three-month run. Following its visit to the Walker from June 18 to August 27, it will make successive stops at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, October 23-December 3; the Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles/Vereniging voor Tentoonstellingen van het Paleis voor Schone Kunsten Brussel in Brussels, December 14 to January 10, 1996; the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany, April to July 1996, and the Ivam Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, September to November 1996.

Notes

 

1. Cited in Halbreich and Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, published on the occasion of the exhibition (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1995) 8.

 

2. See Serge Daney on écriture du desastre in Cine Journal 1981-1986 (Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinema, 1986).

 

3. Catherine David, “D’Est: Akerman Variations,” in Halbreich and Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, 61.

 

4. Halbreich and Jenkins, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, 51.

 

5. Cited in Halbreich and Jenkins, 20.