Opera Jawa : The Times says it stinks

Opera Jawa (2006/Garin Nugroho/Indonesia) IMDb

First a rhetorical joust of journalistic quote encapsulation (if you can't nail the entire film in a single all-encompassed catchy phrase you're not a real critic, or at least your editor will not greenlight the review...) :

Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT) : "A colorful and confounding head trip, “Opera Jawa” is guaranteed to test the fortitude of all but the most adventurous viewer."

Olaf Möller (Film Comment, Cinema Scope) : "honest-to-God masterpiece of mad invention"

Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Chicago Reader) : "audacious, undeniably challenging, in fact downright mind-boggling avant-garde masterpiece (...) dazzling bolt from the blue - something to see and savor again"

Jesse Zigelstein (LA Times) : "A spirit of political protest surges through Opera Jawa, which acknowledges Indonesia's troubled past and explicitly dedicates itself to victims of violence, tyranny, and natural disaster. But the real revelation here is the film's formal daring, its almost excessive flood of metaphor, movement, and unfettered audiovisual expression."

Nathan Lee (Village Voice) : "a surrealist Indonesian pomo-folkloric/funkadelic musical–slash–avant-garde pop-and-lock revolutionary romance–slash–Hindu song-and-dance-installation art extravaganza. (...) let's just call it a nonpareil Ramayana boogie-down gong drum, with a tembang gamelan xylophone huzzah and super-tight moves on the wayang orang tip."

Jay Weissberg (Variety) : "A beautifully mounted musical epic combining traditional myths with contempo meditations on violence and social inequality, "Opera Jawa" is bold and innovative. But it is so chock-a-block with metaphor and over-decorated with artists' installations that it veers into the too-earnest waters of an ethnic fringe "happening" at Lincoln Center."

Rosenbaum is right, the NYT review stinks! It's not even a thought-provoking dissent against the film, it's just a lazy passive-aggressive disdain without any critical analysis.

The New York Times returns to its philistine roots
by Jonathan Rosenbaum (The Chicago Reader) :

"I've been reflecting lately that the film coverage these days in the New York Times (...) But then I read the ugly, xenophobic, tossed-off review of Opera Jawa by Jeannette Catsoulis in today's paper, and I realize that in some ways we might as well be back in the 60s, when a barbarian like Bosley Crowther was smugly ruling the roost. (...)
Catsoulis is slightly less direct about insulting almost 235 million Indonesians, but the implication that what she perceives as their quaint customs are all pretty hilarious seems to hover over her review. In both cases, the assumption appears to be that if you're fortunate enough to be a New Yorker, no further education or level of sophistication is necessary; if you're unfortunate enough not to be, the farther away you are, the likelier you are to be ridiculed with impunity."

And here is the faulty exhibit :

Unrest, a Love Triangle and Swinging Hips
By Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT, January 16, 2008) :

"probably the first [film] to open with a song about pig livers (...) Filled with shadow puppets, leaping villagers, animal carcasses and tinkly gamelan music (...) impressive contortions of Mr. Supriyanto, whose résumé includes Madonna’s Drowned World Tour and whose hips deserve their own paycheck. Dancing seductively on a tabletop, wearing a jaunty fedora and red cummerbund, he generates a magnetism breaching cultural boundaries"

This is typical of the "negative review" where the critic is out to mock a complex artistic project by ways of simplificative enumeration of disparate innocuous details that are far from representing the essence of the experience offered by this filmmaker. I don't know how relevant is the Madonna name-dropping... probably a zeitgeist ceal of approval necessary to bait the NYT readers. Otherwise they wouldn't listen...
Plus the stream-of-consciousness note-to-self quoting a line of dialogue (or in this case lyrics) out of context to ridicule the whole piece and give a deceiving impression of the ensemble :

“My sperm sparkles in the heavens,” he warbles, by way of a come-on. Oh, well, I never said he was perfect.

At least Nathan Lee defends the film's achievements :

Freak Folk, Opera Jawa is the Indonesian morality musical of the year
by Nathan Lee (Village Voice) :

"Visually, the movie is a radiant folk fantasia, at once sophisticated and elemental, freewheeling and composed. Keenly observed naturalistic details segue into elaborate puppet nightmares (regional artists collaborated on the production and costume design); demonic pantomime mixes with proletarian breakdancing; erotic duets give way to egotistical solos staged beside a bloody slab of beef on a floor strewn with bright red candles in the shape of melting man heads. (...)
As do a maze constructed of coconut shells; an enormous ribbon of bright red fabric wound through an emerald landscape; a Javanese honky-tonk jam led by a fat man with tits nearly as big and impressive as his voice; and more—much, much, and marvelous more."

The last comment wasn't absolutely necessary (gratuituous and derogatory), neither was it gratifying the author of the review nor the auteur of the film. And at the end of the review, when you appreciated the fact he didn't even try to give a synopsis rundown yet he admits :

"yes, there is a plot, which I've avoided talking about since, having devoted all of my attention to gobbling up the sights and grooving to the music, I'm relying on Google to reconstruct what, exactly, this wondrous thing is "about""

More opinions :

SFIFF Capsules
by Darren Hughes (Long Pauses)

"Opera Jawa was simply an overwhelming experience for me. Full of images as powerfully imaginative as any you will find in Angelopoulos and late Kurosawa (I kept thinking of Ran), combined with a stunning gamelan score and dance sequences so strange and transcendent I expected Denis Lavant to make an appearance, this film has the effect of all great opera: it's epic, sensuous, and impossibly beautiful."

The most comprehensive and faithful rendition of the film in this lot of reviews is Jay Weissberg's at Variety.
Although he has some criticism about the content :

"No doubt there's more that a keen-eyed student of Javanese theater would catch, but even as it stands the identifiable symbolism winds up burying the characters, who have enough to say -- or rather, sing and dance -- without the need for such distractions.
Demonstrators with banners proclaiming "Down with exploitation!" are much too unsubtle a form of social commentary and just don't integrate into the rest of the story."

I think this is part of the musical genre (the title even says it's an opera, which is even more caricatural and archetypal, narrativewise). Symbolism is grandiloquent and characters are blatantly manichaean. This is all part of the lyricism of such overarching epics. We should take its message as a whole (without bothering with the continuity or relevance or realism of individual elements), as a giant and naive allegory (this is obviously a "popular street theatre" type of folkloric storytelling destined to the mass). If we only keep the love triangle without the symbolism, it's merely another melodrama.

Romney on the Contemplative trend

(This is a great article recommended by Celinejulie)

Are You Sitting Comfortably?
by Jonathan Romney, The Guardian (October 7, 2000).

Here are some highlights regarding CCC :

"The film in question was Satantango, made in 1994 by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr, and something of a legend among aficionados of painstakingly slow European art cinema. A film that long and that sombre is not likely to become an international art-house hit along the lines of Jean de Florette, or even to find a comfortable slot on the festival circuit. But Tarr's film has a reputation as something more than a lugubrious oddity of monstrous proportions - it is a powerful, visionary piece of cinema that creates its own stark world and keeps the viewer compellingly locked in for its duration.
(...) his most recent film Werckmeister Harmonies recently caused a stir at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where viewers received it as a genuine cinematic UFO. Filmed in Tarr's characteristic slow, analytically prowling shots, Werckmeister Harmonies is set in a desolate rural settlement where a violent communal madness is sparked by the arrival of a bizarre fairground attraction - the preserved body of a huge whale."

I've posted this snippet in the roundtable on CCC synopsis, as an exemple of a review that feels obliged to apologize to the reader/audience for the potential negative aspects of a contemplative film.

"Tarr is one of the film-makers named by Susan Sontag - in an article published in the Guardian in 1996 - as offering some hope for the continuation of cinema. Sontag was lamenting the death of cinephilia, the attitude that treats cinema as an exceptional art form, "quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral - all at the same time." In the 90s, Sontag argued, cinema had gone into "ignominious, irreversible decline", and great films would no longer be merely exceptions, but "heroic violations" of the norm."

Anybody has a version of the full Sontag article?
The "death of cinephilia" is another can of worms, but she mentions the problematic reference to the "mainstream norm", just like Rosenbaum and Durgnat argued in the roundtable mentionned last month on this blog (Non-narrative film criticism).

"This may not hold true in all parts of the world - film language seems constantly to reinvent itself in Iran, and in the work of Asian directors such as Taiwan's Tsai Ming-Liang and Korea's Hong Sang-Soo. But Tarr is one of a very few European directors determined to work outside mainstream forms, and who still believe in cinema's potential to transform the viewer. These film-makers are not out to convey obvious messages, and in these pragmatic days, they risk coming across like mystics. But the keynote of their work is not woolly transcendentalism, but intrepid and rigorous formal invention."

I'm happy to see he cites the same auteurs we are grouping here at Unspoken Cinema, under the banner of CCC. :)

The antecedents of such cinema are the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, the almost forgotten Hungarian master Miklos Jansco, the German Expressionist cinema of the 20s, or the work of 70s German directors, especially Werner Herzog. This school of cinema refuses to spoon-feed us with ready-made experiences or easily recognisable beauty: the beauty in these films is easily mistaken for the ugly or drab. That would certainly account for the impatient, almost offended drubbing that British critics last week gave to Abendland, by the young German director Fred Kelemen - another of Sontag's favoured few, and a former student of Tarr's. "Bela and I share the same vision of cinema," Kelemen says. "We believe in time and not in speed - atmospheres and situations rather than stories."

... and the same precursors (see tentative genealogy here). So we're getting somewhere maybe. He emphasises like we do the opposition of this trend with "spoon-fed narrativity"!
"We believe in time and not in speed - atmospheres and situations rather than stories." This is exactly what we are talking about.
I've never heard of Fred Kelemen before though. Anyone here has seen his films?

Fred Kelemen (Frost, 1997) : "We are on a journey, very simply. We're born, we die and in between we have to make our way, and there's no way to stop. Even if you sit in your room and do nothing, time is passing and something is happening - which is a very big adventure."

Celinejulie cited this excerpt, and it echoes perfectly what Adrian Martin develops in his celebration of walking.

"Kelemen and Tarr may inhabit the absolute margins of European cinema but they are by no means alone. The science of long takes and landscape tableaux - as if the screen were a huge map to be unfolded - still flourishes in the work of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who has been refining his art of geographically spectacular slowness since the 70s. In Russia, Aleksandr Sokurov's pictorial finesse unequivocally follows Tarkovsky's mystical tradition: his muted, enigmatic miniature Mother and Son was a cult art-house success (although for my money, his follow-up Moloch, a chilly, anaesthetised political cartoon about Hitler's home life, is far more interesting).

Other pensive outsiders who fit the mould are the truly marginal Portuguese. For example, there is Pedro Costa, whose Lisbon junkie drama Ossos is one of the great overlooked films of the 90s. And surely the most waywardly unpredictable European auteur, bar none, is Joao Cesar Monteiro, who appears as his own roué-philosopher anti-hero in such demented, leisurely rambles as God's Comedy and The Hips of JW (about a mission to find John Wayne at the North Pole). It goes without saying that this cinema is very much prey to the vagaries of personal taste. It is possible to believe passionately in the virtues of slowness, alienation, the creation of a dream-like, hermetic reality - and still not be able to swallow the self-importance of a film like Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité, which would seem to fulfil all those criteria.

Kelemen admits that in the kind of cinema he practices, "it's always a question of openness, of state of mind, whether one enters into it or not - it can even depend on the day you see it." That is why many of these films are like messages in bottles, thrown into the ocean in the hope that the right viewer will see them in the right frame of mind. You could call it Castaway Cinema, and one of its most heroically strange castaways is globetrotting Lithuanian director Sharunas Bartas. Bartas's films include Few of Us, about a young woman's unexplained mission to Mongolia, and the baroque The House, in which a crowd of outcasts stage enigmatic indoor tableaux.

These poetic and exceptionally mysterious pieces are closer to art video than narrative cinema. His latest film Freedom, featured in the forthcoming London Film Festival, is again a wordless affair, of figures in a North African landscape and events replaced by images - crabs falling out of a bag, sand blowing across arid plains. One of the few British screenings of Bartas' work was provided by Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, who pro grammed it in a recent season at the ICA. "It's almost like having a conversation with someone," McQueen says. "It's in real time, it takes a long time to finish a sentence, but you go through the whole process, and there's this result, the pay-off, and you think - yes!"

The work of these rare, rejected but vital castaway directors can't easily be defined in terms of where it comes from, how it is made, or even how slow it is. That would account for the challenge, and the unusual rewards, of this very subjective cinema, a cinema that practically psychoanalyses you - and if you're lucky, cures you of your Hollywood-induced traumas."

"Landscape tableaux", "a huge map to be unfolded", "art of geographically spectacular slowness", "pictorial finesse", "muted, enigmatic miniature", "enigmatic indoor tableaux", "wordless affair", "events replaced by images"... these are inspirational phrases for a (positivist) contemplative film criticism.
He even defines this trend by "the virtues of slowness, alienation, the creation of a dream-like, hermetic reality"!

And the name he proposes is "Castaway Cinema", what do you think?

Fiant on contemporary mutic cinema

Continuation of : The Root of Mutism
My notes on Antony Fiant's essay in Trafic, which first made me believe in CCC. This is a virtual manifesto for Contemporary Contemplative Cinema! I wanted to post it at last year's Blogathon, and I barely make it before this one ends... I wish it was translated in English somewhere and accessible online.


Des Films Gueule de bois (hangover films)
Notes on the mutism in contemporary cinema
(by Antony Fiant, Trafic #50, 2004)

"Not being submitted to the dictatorship of speech, being able to give in to the stream of images and sounds representing heterogeneous worlds, gives faith again in the art of cinema in this context of serious scepticism over its capacity of renewal. (Antony Fiant)"

Antony Fiant realized all the recent films he loved had all one thing in common : mutism.
According to him, the domination of speech pushes aback the cinematic form and the use of sound. Definitely against theatre and literature, these filmmakers get in touch with the fundamental cinematic language of the primitive silent films.

Sharunas Bartas and Pedro costa justify the absence of words in their films by their poor skills at scriptwriting the dialogues. The contemplative value of images is opposed to the informative value of speech.

Bartas : "My cinema always functions on the principle of rejection instead of accumulation."

Abdykalkov (on a scene from The Chimp, 2001) : "this scene had to be silent because truth was in mutism. Thanks to this silence, the protagonist soars and become a real man."

The 6th generation of Chinese filmmakers refuses visual sophistication and aesthetism, they use non-actors and very simple dialogues, just like Italian neorealism.

Wang Chao (Orphan of Anyang, 2001) : "I wanted a camera that simply records situations in reality. To me, to depict a given space, it's to reveal two types of times: the time we can see in the frame and the time outside of this frame. What I care about is to represent both of these times."

The mutism of Tsai Ming-liang's characters is both the independence of the filmmaker and the affirmation of his characters. their silence will always tell more than the musical interludes [which are sometimes criticized as a populist device in The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005)]. What Time is it Over There? (2001) reaffirms with brilliance the pertinence of a cinema of incommunicability.

Placing the spectator inside a time-space block from the very beginning of the opening sequence, Blissfully Yours (2002) gives us a responsibility toward a raw reality, a truth of the world. The spectator must find his own distance, and accept not to find answers to all questions. There is no more crutches to walk us through from A to B. This exceptional opening sequence is like jumping on a moving train and trying to catch up with the missing reel. this film begins right into the mundanity of a slice of life without introduction of the characters, without exposition scene.

Fiant cites Jean-Louis Comolli (Images Documentaires #44, 2002) about Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room (2000):

Vanda is always filmed in stationary shots, with a distant camera, never too close, that doesn't decompose into obscene details, that doesn't look for "dramatisation", "signification" or "storytelling". There is nothing to say, nothing to tell, nothing to "show".

João Pedro Rodrigues (about his film Fantasma, O - 2000) : "I wanted the film to have a palpable dimension that is found in Silent Cinema. In Griffith's films, or Stroheim's, we smell the earth, we smell the wind. There is a belief in image that is replaced by speed today. But it's the power of the bodies from Silent Cinema that I want to find back, without being able to explain it."

These filmmakers mentionned in the article (Bartas, Abdykalykov, Omirbaev, Jia Zhang-ke, Wang Chao, Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong, Denis, Dumont, Iosselani, Costa, Rodrigues, Suleiman, Ceylan and also the newcomers not cited : Reygadas, Sissako) propose a poetic approach of reality, a genuine gaze onto the world.
They represent and transfigure reality through detours and back lanes : contemplation (Bartas, Apichatpong...), fable (Iosselani, Suleiman...), chronicle (Omirbaev, Jia Zhang-ke...) or nostalgia (Abdykalykov...). They all accentuate the sensory rather than the narrative. This cinema expresses a certain art of suggestion through renewed images and sounds, setting us free from the empire of speech.

And this experience can only take place in the movie theatre, not in front of a TV set. Mutism forces us to reconsider the images and pay attention to the sound. It saves cinema from the free-for-all of today's audiovisual media.

Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman

This is an article Adrian Martin sent for publication in the blogathon :

Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman
(Notes from an unfinished essay, 1998) by Adrian Martin

Godard: "The drama is thus no longer psychological, but plastic ..."
Antonioni: "It's the same thing."

(Cahiers du Cinéma, 1964)

There is a film history, as yet unwritten, of walking. Several releases of the late ‘90s have contained some impressive strides – Chow Yun-Fat silently entering a room, shot from behind at a low angle and in slow-motion, about to do his efficient killing work in The Replacement Killers; or Pam Grier as the heroine of Jackie Brown, whose every determined step takes her closer, pushes her deeper into the space of a murky intrigue. Hollywood's neo-romantic comedies still make use of the crowning walk that, after a flash of mental revelation, transforms itself into the handy, frantic, last-minute dash to retrieve a departing beloved.

Further back, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made the purposeful walk of their heroine a major motif of I Know Where I'm Going! (1945). Today, directors as different as Nanni Moretti (Caro Diario) and Sandrine Veysset (Will it Snow for Christmas?) regularly make a small-scale, poignant spectacle of those moments when people encounter each other in the street while out for a stroll, or huddle under a piece of plastic while scrambling through the rain.

But perhaps the cinema's greatest poet of the act of walking is Belgian-born Chantal Akerman. Her characters cover the gamut of all possible variations on this gesture. They march in straight lines and wander in circles. Their humble two-steps, in the right, artificial context, can become performance art, or song-and-dance. Sometimes they are like the celebrated flaneurs who found the hidden wonders tucked away in the coves and corners of the everyday; at other times they drudge along like automatons, at the bidding of their daily grind; occasionally they are accompanied by tension, even menace.

Akerman's integral, non-fragmented way of filming these walking figures – whether leading the way in front, following along on a lateral path (her signature shot), or standing stock still as they disappear into the distance or darkness – always stresses the steps made, one by one, and always registers the cityscape that lays down a path for these characters and the world of varied sounds that envelops them. Akerman's distinctive walking shots also emphasise the time it takes to traverse even a small distance. It's a curious, very modernist form of suspense – one that Jean Rouch immortalised in the long-take experiment of his contribution to Paris vu par ... (1964), on which Godard commented: "Seconds reinforce seconds; when they really pile up, they begin to be impressive".

Why this attention to walking? For Akerman, the act provides a precious physical continuum, an unhurried bridging between realms: her characters literally cross the space that separates the factuality of everyday life from the fantasy and intrigue of fiction. As for Wenders, Godard or Philippe Garrel, a story is often synonymous with a catastrophe in Akerman's cinematic universe – cued by an unforeseen glitch in routine, a high heel that slips on the pavement, some excess or dissymmetry in the known patterns of life. So walking can also provide a safe way back for her characters, an Ariadne's thread back to some precarious state of stability. By means of this stepping in and out, Akerman provides a mirror for own activity as spectators, as we negotiate the illusions and lures of narrative.

Such walking is also emblematic of the tone and tenor of Akerman's filmic universe: time and again she stresses that she aims to place everything – the mundane and the dramatic – onto the same, non-hierarchical level, producing the effect that Ivone Margulies calls a 'hyperrealist everyday'. This matter-of-factness – this flatness, even – finds its indelible image in the sudden ceasura of the otherwise musical Golden Eighties (1985) when, in the final shot, Mado (Lio) steps for the first time outside of the stylised shopping mall set into a Brussels street, and receives dry advice from her parents about getting on in the world rather than the crowning verse of the anthemic song left hanging from the previous scene, "When Love Comes Along".

Walking, too, becomes integral to Akerman's take on modern sexual relationships in films including The Meetings of Anna (1978), All Night Long (1982) and Night and Day (1991). So many of her films interrupt the blessed solitude of a stroll with the joy or terror of a rencontre. Sudden and unexpected liaisons with strangers can sometimes lead to withdrawn, hyper-defensive, near-catatonic states in her work: the heroine of The Man with the Suitcase (1983), played by the director herself, retreats to a small room for weeks and makes it her home, her sanctuary and her increasingly cramped surveillance-base. The sexual politics of these bad encounters, first sketched in her minimalist, experimental narrative Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), can seem familiar and depressing enough: bruised sensitive women crave a room of their own, while the men they run into are scary, brutish, mysterious, driven creatures.

For all that, Akerman is also a romantic – of a peculiarly cool, modern, unsentimental sort – and the walk-by encounters in her cinema are also full of the music and magic of chance, hope, yearning. However, trying to pinpoint the emotions in Akerman's cinema – where they come from and how they work – is a risky business, full of traps. Some exegetes of Akerman have taken a Brechtian approach to this aesthetic problem raised by her work: for Australian critic-artist Laleen Jayamanne, for instance – taking the measure of the curiously cool, decentred acting in Akerman's oeuvre by way of Bresson, Michael Kirby's theatre theories and Barthes on “The Dolls of Bunraku” – it is self-evident that "the concentration is on the gesture/action. Any emotions take care of themselves".

Approaching Akerman's films through what her characters do, say and feel is the first trap her work sets – more so than with most filmmakers, even those gentle maverick-independents like Werner Schroeter or Jacques Rivette with whom Godard fondly groups Akerman in his videotape Scénario du film Passion (1982). There is a playfully 'impersonal' aspect to her films, a kind of postmodern update on the merry-go-round of life ethos immortalised by Ophuls and Demy – witness the first shot of Golden Eighties, which shows a woman turning from a kissing one lover to kissing another, hidden just off-screen; or the alliterative trio of Night and Day, with Julie drifting in a sleepy haze back and forth between the beds of Jack and Joseph, and Akerman's mise en scène repeatedly filming the bodies of the different men in exactly the same poses and from the same angles, as if in the thrall of a Neitzschean Eternal Return.

Such indifference to or subversion of the strict boundaries of personal identity recalls the light philosophic credo of Gilles Deleuze, when he speaks of the need to grasp the power of percepts and affects and incorporate them into our conceptual thinking: "Percepts aren't perceptions, they're packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them". In this sense, Akerman continues the tradition of exploration inaugurated in cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni – for whom, in Roland Barthes' tribute, "dramas are equally psychological or plastic". Antonioni's description of his pictorial style in The Red Desert (1964) anticipates the look and feel of Akerman's universe: "The abstract white line that enters the picture at the beginning of the sequence of the little grey street interests me much more than the car that arrives: it's a way of approaching the character in terms of things rather than by means of her life". In Akerman, such 'things' become the conductors for delicate emotions.

The stylistic correspondence between Akerman and Antonioni is not exact.
Yes, there are – abundantly in, for instance, The Meetings of Anna – the architectural vistas, the sites that linger for the camera before and after the intrusion of human beings, the geometric arrangements of point and line, the painterly fields of colour (the light browns and blues of Anna’s hotel room bisected by her red jacket). But there is not the same labyrinthine, baroque penetration of a cinematic, scenic space as in Antonioni. Akerman’s aesthetic began as, and remains, a hard edge construction. From an amalgam of Warhol, Snow, Godard, the painter Edward Hopper and other influences, she developed a style based on “the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy”. (This quote is from the splendid book Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s D’Est, eds. Kathy Halbreich & Bruce Jenkins, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1995.) Akerman's cinematic manifesto, in this regard, is of course Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the closest thing to a modern classic she has signed.

In Akerman, the tenacious sense of duration, of ‘time taking place’, is married to a penchant (rigorously adhered to for virtually her entire career) for pictorial frontality – not only in static frames but in her famous signature lateral tracking shots (usually accompanying those beloved walking figures). The ‘over the shoulder’ shot-reverse shot system is alien to an Akerman film; mise en scène is created by the movement of a character out of an initial two-shot, into a completely new and unseen portion of space (interior or exterior). And naturally, the pictorial disruption to eyeline matches and so on that results (in 70’s film theory-speak, the definitive refusal to suture) reinforces the prevailing sense of (as Meg Morely once put it) a “circulation... cut short”, an “impossibility of dialogue, both between the characters on screen, and between the spectators and the film”.

Akerman’s style is typically called minimalist, but that description is a little dry, because it can miss the special, minute kinds of narrative and pictorial tension in her images; and above all the crisp, tangy, priceless sensuality of her style. Bodily sensations, the rhythms and expansions and contractions of time, energies of all sorts, human or non-human – these are all so palpable in her cinema.

But the careful research of plastic forms, and the giddy, free-floating emotions they can trigger, is not merely a theory-driven abstraction or a structuralist materialism for Akerman. The shotgun combination of modern cool and nostalgic, romantic longing is a crucial feature of her artistic sensibility. Akerman internalizes and projects in her art, as if it were her destiny, a vision of the 20th century world citizen: displaced, nomadic, rootless, “people as blurred (indéfinis) as myself”, as she said when recalling for Camera Obscura magazine her experience as a runaway young Belgian landing in the Soho of the ‘70s. Time and again Akerman’s art returns to this primal, core moment of personal indefinition: at the start of Histoires d’Amérique (American Stories, 1988) she narrates the parable of successive generations who progressively forget the location of a specific tree in a particular forest where they must go to say the words of a long lost prayer ...

Akerman does not entirely reject traditional characterisation, or conventional paths of character development in her films, just as she does not reject traditional narrative or storytelling (Histories d'Amérique, for instance, is purely a film of oral storytelling). What Akerman likes to show are characters who are in the process of becoming themselves, who are not quite all there yet, who are somewhat unformed. Her most directly autobiographical film, Portrait of a Young Girl in Brussels at the End of the 60s (1994), captures very beautifully such a quality of being unformed and potential when one is young. And there is something both terse and deeply poignant on the final mode of self-portraiture that this filmmaker settles on as the only kind acceptable in the last seconds of her made-for-TV collage Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1996): "My name is Chantal Akerman, I live in Brussels – that's true. That's true".

© Adrian Martin 1998/2008

• Published in Spanish in Chile in the book "¿Qué es el cine moderno?" (2008) with other articles by Adrian Martin
• Spanish version online at La lectora provisoria
  

On Pointing the Camera

"Before familiarity can turn into awareness, the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be, it will now be labeled as something unusual." - Bertolt Brecht

cross-posted to Chained to the Cinémathèque