Audio transcription
For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.
John Quackenbush 0:00
February 8, 2016. The Harvard Film Archive screened Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie. This is the recording of the introduction by HFA Director Haden Guest and Harvard faculty Giuliana Bruno.
Haden Guest 00:18
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. Thank you for braving the storm to be with us tonight, on what is a very sad and important event, a tribute to Chantal Akerman, whose death, tragically premature death, robbed cinema of one of its great, great voices, and also transformed this film that we're going to see tonight, No Home Movie, into Akerman's last film. As you'll see tonight, as you see when you see the film, Akerman's death also, I think, gives new weight and meaning to No Home Movie, which premiered just last August at the Locarno Film Festival, giving, I think, an even sadder resonance to the desolate landscapes, and the interiors of Akerman's mother's home, spaces that we come to understand both as kinds of interiors, emotional and psychological.
Akerman, as you may know, taught here at Harvard for two years. This photo that you see is taken here in the Carpenter Center. And she came here at the invitation of a dear colleague and friend, Giuliana Bruno, who's the Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Giuliana is going to offer some words about the film, about Chantal Akerman. She'll be speaking for about fifteen minutes. I’d like to ask everybody to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have. Please refrain from using them. Now please join me in welcoming Giuliana Bruno.
[APPLAUSE]
Giuliana Bruno 2:31
Thank you very much to Haden Guest and Harvard Film Archive, for hosting this tribute to Chantal Akerman, which I'm honored to be introducing. As Haden said, this is a very significant evening for us all, for Chantal taught here with us in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in 1997 and 1998, and we're happy to have this wonderful picture of her in front of Corbusier’s brick glass here with us this evening. She made a real impact in the program, with students and with faculty, and made many friends and lasting relationships here in Cambridge. I was fortunate to know her since the 80s, and she has personally much enriched my life and my work. Seeing all of you here tonight, despite the heavy snowstorm, I sense how meaningful she has been for all of you. And I want to thank you all for making such an effort to be present here this evening.
It goes without saying that Chantal Akerman is one of the most important filmmakers of our time. She has had tremendous influence in the world of cinema and beyond. What viewer of her wonderful film, Jeanne Dielman, has not been affected or even profoundly changed by the experience of watching this extraordinary film? With the minimal simplicity of precisely framed long takes, Chantal Akerman’s breakthrough film, made in 1975 when she was only twenty-five, exposed the strictures of women's time and space while creating a new cinematic language and a filmic longue durée. At age eighteen, Chantal had already made an explosive start with Saute ma ville, directing herself in 1968, shut away and alone in her apartment, blowing up rituals of domesticity, and in the end, blowing herself up, together with her home. Personally full of life and energy, but haunted by the dark spectre of severe psychic pain, Chantal began her fictional journey with a defiant act of self-destruction that would sadly come to be realized years later, when her life ended suddenly, last October, at age sixty-five.
Chantal Akerman has enriched our world through an extraordinary, ordinary journey composed of images of places, perceptively explored and executed within a formally rigorous esthetic. Cities, lands, and homes are intimately portrayed in her frontal long takes, which capture the passing of everyday life, especially that of women, as they intensify our sense of time, memory, and sense of space. Passing through doors, staring through windows, lingering in corridors, we’re led to explore sites of transit and separation, instances of cultural movement. The result is our own reflection on processes of displacement, transmigration, and diaspora as both exterior and interior passages. Chantal’s reflections on the space of interiority are particularly affecting, so much so that, in fact, they can become interiorized by the viewer. Her work is not just part of our cultural fabric, it is part of our intimate fabric.
Although Chantal Akerman is most celebrated for Jeanne Dielman, it is important for me to emphasize that she continued to experiment with moving images much beyond this film, and made many breakthrough works. The new filmic form she pioneered in the 1970s was inflected by European modernist cinema, and by her encounter with the structuralist paradigms of North American avant-garde artists such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton. An encounter with live performance is documented in her wonderful 1983 portrait of Pina Bausch, One Day, Pina Asked…, which I recommend you see, if you haven’t. It’s really wonderful. Most important, she moved easily between fiction and documentary, and exhibiting in art galleries.
In the mid-1990s, Chantal began to engage in an extended field of film-based installation art, in an early stage of the cultural movement that drives today's filmmakers and artists to exchange roles and work increasingly between media. The position Chantal Akerman holds in this expanded field of imaging is unique, for she was able not only to move back and forth between different kinds of cinema and moving-image installation art, but to interchange these modes of presentation. While she made work specifically for gallery exhibition, she also showed or installed her theatrical films in gallery spaces, generating a dialogue between artistic languages and modes of presentation. Her style of long durational filming, punctuated with minimal or even casual action, transferred incredibly well from within film theater to the art gallery. It resonates in a way with the performative, subjective, roaming style of imaging that has come to inhabit our digital screens. Her itinerant way of filming was especially suited to the peripatetic mode of reception experienced in the art gallery, where visitors interact with screens that can enhance displacement, as well as forms of encounter and liminality. Chantal worked with multiple screens in Now, a resounding five-screen projection of traveling shots through desert landscape that was shown right before she died, at the 2015 Venice Biennale. She also experimented with the scale of the screen when conjuring the large futuristic Turner-like canvas in Nightfall in Shanghai in 2007, and when imagining a panoramic screen of flâneurs in Femmes d’Anvers en novembre the same year. Screens were interestingly featured in To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, which she made in 2004, a two-part installation in which the pages of a diary, with inscriptions by the artist’s grandmother and mother, were transformed into diaphanous screen fabric.
One of her most interesting experiments with art installation is the way she transformed the feature-length film D’Est in 1993 by having it take up residence in twenty-four separate video monitors. She arranged sequences of interiors in exterior triptychs, as if installing paintings of still-lifes and landscapes in the space of the art gallery. Here, as elsewhere in Chantal’s work, screens ultimately become a storage space for a mnemonic itinerary transformed into a moving cultural archive. Chantal Akerman’s screen is a porous material that mediates an intense sense of projection, a relationship between inside and outside, physical and mental space. Her traveling dwelling in material space forms a psychogeography. And it involves a particular form of spectatorship. With her characteristic frames fixed, as if to seize any motion that enters within them, the filmmaker, in wonderful films such as to Toute une nuit, or Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, constructs a geometry of passage, and a relational form of screening that empathetically includes us, the viewers.
Typically, in her cinema, including No Home Movie, the film that you are about to see, the camera position is not centered on character identification, but tends, rather, to move independently, remaining steady in time to observe space. It doesn't ask us to pry, but simply to witness. We’re made to exist in the space, and are invited to stay and stay over time. This being there, in time, involves us and makes us [?UNKNOWN?] psychically, going beyond mere attendance towards a more intimate engagement. Refusing all forms of voyeurism, and reaching for a closer spectatorial position, the work finally allows us to become participants. In this way, a visitor to Chantal Akerman’s world can even become sensitized to her own position within it. The placement of her camera sometimes indicates even where the author stands physically, because it includes the measure over a slight height. It is a position that marks her presence there, never so close as to interfere, and never so far that her presence as a fellow traveler is felt. From Chantal Akerman’s screens or projections, then, an experience of Einfühlung emerges, a feeling into the space of both landscape and streetscape. A sense of material space is enhanced by her careful architectonic or shot composition.
Here, even a pure formal arrangement, like a totally empty frame, can convey an affect. As an atmosphere unfolds in slow time and slow space, we can absorb what's in the air, and share in a mood. Chantal’s work is indeed about this particular affect, a psychic atmosphere that transpires on the surface of things. Shot in what I would ultimately call a distant intimacy, her images are formally arranged to allow for the kind of reserve that's needed to engage real empathy. They enable, that is, the kind of analytical detachment, the form of screening necessary to create empathy.
This particular sense of “screening” is materialized in films such as Là-bas, which I find particularly interesting. In recent years, Chantal increasingly explored her Jewish identity and family history, and Là-bas chronicles her sojourn in Tel Aviv, with an act of screening space that makes ambiguous and even conflicting feelings of belonging clearly felt. She refused to represent any site of traumatic history directly, shooting the film mostly from the interior of an apartment. She allows us to see the outside world only through blinds that are made of loosely woven reeds. A screen partition is constructed to form a delicate physical boundary between inside and outside, enabling layers of history and of memory to sift through. The screen fabric offers Chantal the shelter she needed over there, down there, to look out and see inside herself. Over time, then, the screen becomes a textural space that retains complex forms of projection within its very fabric. The material of the screen projects the filmmaker’s viewpoint and fabrication of intimacy. It is tailored to hold Chantal’s particular version of empathy, a position of distant proximity. We emerge into the world in her cinema, only to look inward; we remain inside to look out. In this way, we plunged into the depths of a psychic subjective space and even into personal history. Regardless of the distance we have traveled, the journey of discovery inevitably turns out to be an inner journey, one of self-analysis. We recognize this particular chamber. We know this curtain world, filtered through the screen of the installation of Là-bas, for we have been asked many times to dwell in this room. Moving through the architecture of the interior, in films such as Saute ma ville, La Chambre, Je Tu Il El, and even Hotel Monterey or Demain on déménage, we have experienced a textural geography of interiority, through a scene both familiar and familial.
A sense of familiarity invokes the familial because Chantal’s inner explorations in film, as in writing, are haunted by the maternal. Chantal’s mother, the subject of her 2013 memoir, Ma mère rit, is present even when she's not there at all, as in her wonderful film, News From Home, from 1977, where the visual chronicle of the filmmaker’s life in New York City is tied to the sound of her mother's letters. Concern and care, in Chantal’s world, also reveal that her mother's traumatic history lives inside her daughter, who must often struggle to exit her imprisoned world. This experience is a familiar scene in psychoanalytic terms. Such representation of the ties that bind mother-daughter, and of a chamber turning into confinement, the complex nuances of an oikos, touch an inner generational chord. And so even if one was not fortunate enough to know Chantal personally, as I did, this inner vision can feel familiarly close. It is as if this woman, this artist, had the ability to relay experiences that come from a place of reflection that's inside all of us.
Despite the various media, or locations they employ, whether in the cinema or in the art gallery, as we step into any of Chantal Akerman’s many chambers, we access rooms of projection that envelop us empathetically. For in these chambers, we sense the depth of an intimate experience that finally we can share. Resting on the border of the screen or projection, this particular “feeling into” the space can become a mutual boundary to cross. And thus, safely positioned at a distance, we, too, can engage on our own perilous history of projection, a voyage to, and a view from, home.
Until, abruptly, Chantal’s journey reaches an end, with No Home Movie, the terminal film that you're about to see. In a final chronicle of women's lives, interior scenes in her mother's Brussels apartment are intercut with moving desert scenes shared with her gallery film, Now. Chantal documents her mother ailing and dying in her presence, even in virtual presence, as Skype is used not simply as a way of communicating, but finally, making a film where ultimately there will be no more distance. In this way, she renders the time of aging as it is, not as it is usually shown in movies. Caring for one's mother is here an everyday occurrence, a quotidian worry, even a tedious experience made of daily chores, constant care, and watching, watching. One waits for that meaningful conversation that might shed some light on the traumatic family history and afford some release, but in vain. In this personal documentary, time flows as it does in real experience, not as a series of events, but as inexorable flux. In the end, after her mother has died off screen, Chantal herself exits the scene, leaving an empty room behind. In film, as in life, that chamber can no longer be inhabited. Chantal’s last film was not a home movie, but there will be no more home to look into. The door of the familiar exploratory chamber has been shut forever, for her, and in some way, for us. Luckily, we still have her films.
[APPLAUSE]
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