Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'Chantal Akerman Collection: Les Annees 70''

You must be waiting for things to happen/ Expecting something to happen/ But nothing ever happens

The Feelies, "Original Love"

In the early films of Belgian-born director Chantal Akerman, "nothing" is what is happening all the time. Except when something does.

Right here, a little over three hours into 1976's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, after we've watched Jeanne (incredibly incarnated by Delphine Seyrig) cook, knit, buy groceries, "entertain" gentlemen, and so on, in a series of largely static shots with no reverse angles, we are about to see "something" happen. That something will be recorded with the same still dispassion that every other putative non-event in the film has been recorded with.

The final minutes of 1978's Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna, the most conventional of Akerman's dramatic films up to that time, are structurally identical to those of Jeanne Dielman: a decisive encounter with a male is followed by the intense contemplations of the titular female character. Here Aurore Clement's Anna fails to stimulate Jean-Pierrre Cassel's Daniel. She then, returning from a series of travels, lies alone listening to her answering machine messages. (Jeanne just sits at her kitchen table after her decisive moment.)

The images at the beginning of the post are from News From Home, Akerman's 1976 kind-of documentary, made up of static shots of Manhattan, where she was living at the time. Some of the shots are 100 percent silence, others have street noise. Intermittently throughout, Akerman reads the letters her mother wrote her from France, often entreating her to write. The footage often look like potential second unit work for Goodfellas. I mean that as a compliment.

Then there's 1974's ju tu il elle, in which Akerman, as, we suppose, the "je" of the title, binges on sugar, hitchhikes, watches an episode of "Cannon" in a diner with her ride (again, no reverse angle, only a single mesmeric shot of Akerman and Niels Arestrup sitting at a table, looking up at a television, the soundtrack telling us what's on), fools around a bit with said ride, and finally gets to her girlfriend's place, and makes love to her girlfriend (Claire Wauthion) like, well, a wrestler.

What does it all mean? It's feminist, we're told; obviously, because Akerman's a female director making films about oppressed or frustrated females; it's structuralist, or post-structuralist, we might be told in a film class. My own feeling about Akerman was that her work was a sort of punk rock—DIY, defiant, new without even trying to be new, just because of its very existence. She was a sister to Poly Styrene, Lora Logic, The Raincoats, all those musicians, avant le lettre. The putative quietude of her films contrasts with the racket made by X Ray Spex et.al. but to me the sound and visions all said the same thing, That's finally what remains the lure of Akerman's '70s work, collected so very beautifully in this five-disc Cinephiles Classique set with copious extras and early shorts, all looking and sounding great, which I commend to any who want an undiluted dose of the siren call of thoroughly uncompromised cinema. Akerman would go on to more conventional but powerful work—I think her 2000 Proust adaptation Le Captive is the most trenchant and mordantly hilarious exploration of sexual jealousy since Raging Bull—but this is the stuff that still starts the most passionate arguments, casts the most challenging spell.

Comments

[Tram]

I love, LOVE Chantal Akerman. While I won't burden Akerman with marked, collectivist modifiers (it's unfair in a post-auteurist landscape), there is something quietly subversive about Akerman's sensuality onscreen. It's the simple little, erotic gestures in her films that get to me. In many ways, the Akerman oeuvre is comparable to that elusive peephole in Genet's Un Chant d'amour. Long live the avant-garde!

Anyway, I would love to rent the DVD collection, again, if given the opportune chance. Wept buckets during the first viewing of News From Home. Would love to relive that experience again.

[Holly Miles]

Never seen an Akerman film, but I would like to. Heard nothing but positive things about Jeanne Dielman. I like the idea of "Static Cinema." I've been trying to get people to watch my 20 minute film set in Los Angeles, scored with songs by Gun Club, but everyone tells me that "nothing happens," and I couldn't disagree more. Static shots of Bodybuilders and Bimbos and Cars cut to "She's Like Heroin" is my idea of bliss.