Chantal Akerman (review)

In this meticulously researched study, Marion Schmid offers acute attention to the films of Chantal Akerman. She speaks aptly of 'the predominant view of Akerman as a "difficult" director of interest mainly to an elite of professional film critics, academics and "intellectual" film viewers' (p. 13). Against this, Schmid's study makes a case for Akerman as a brilliant, engaging, committed film-maker whose work is notable and exemplary for its 'social, ideological and ethical ramifications' (p. 13). Schmid treats Akerman with due seriousness, making a case for her alignment with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Hélène Cixous, and Marguerite Duras. This case rests on an appreciation of what Schmid describes as the various artists' '"brooding", circular enquiries' (p. 13). Such modes in Akerman's work Schmid treats with infinite patience. The volume is beautifully organized into sections: 'The 1970s: Anatomy of an Avant-garde', 'The Golden 80s: Performance, Parody, Identity', 'The Archaeology of Suffering', and 'Love and Intimacy in a Post-lapsarian World'. These sections respond to trends in Akerman's work, yet do more than this in offering a clear sense of the depth, resonance, and interrelation of its separate movements. The volume is strong on avant-garde cinema, setting Akerman in the context of the American avant-garde, as well as locating her with relation to Godard, Antonioni, and others. Schmid also responds generously to Akerman's more carnivalesque offerings, remaining alive to their echoes of other concerns in her works. Writing of Golden Eighties (1986), for example, Schmid reminds us: 'Beneath its baroque effervescence and apparent light-heartedness, [the film] raises profound questions about the nature of love and desire, the destiny of memory and the experience of trauma' (p. 83). Perhaps the most significant contribution of the volume is in its treatment of Akerman as documentary maker, notably in her four connected films (recently released on DVD in France), D'Est (1993), Sud (1999), De l'autre côté (2002), and Là-bas (2006). Schmid breaks new ground in her comparative analysis of these films, her consideration of their various incarnations in installation form, her charting of their very particular aesthetic with focus on the quotidian, and their careful moderating of sound, vision, and time. It is here that the politics of Akerman's aesthetic choices, the force of her focus on territory and threshold, in Eastern Europe, the American South, the US-Mexican border, the Middle East, becomes evident. Yet Schmid demonstrates too the ways in which Akerman's politics stretches from the heritage of a post-Holocaust world through to the intimacies of mobile, nomadic sexual identities. Schmid writes with tenderness for her subject, in her evocation, for example, of the 'warm hyper-real colours' of Nuit et jour (1991) and the enwrapping 'strongly haptic quality of [its] shots' (p. 131). She is wonderfully attentive to film syntax, to literary and cinematic allusions, yet never lets these distract her from the questions about suffering, fragility, and haunting with which the films contend.