In her own time

Almost thirty years after Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles earned its twenty-five-year-old director a central place in the history of feminist cinema, the Centre Georges Pompidou is mounting a major survey of Chantal Akerman's work. In anticipation of both the forty-film Beaubourg retrospective, which opens on April 28, and the Paris premiere of Akerman's newest film, Demain on demenage, Miriam Rosen spoke with the Belgian cineaste about her place in contemporary film culture.

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Static shot, interior, day.

Frontal view of an airy, white-walled, white-curtained apartment furnished with worktables and chairs (three each), computers (two). A shaggy dog enters smack in the middle of the frame, tail to the camera. As he takes his place front left, a slight, dark-haired woman in a dark jacket and pants enters and sits down on the chair front right.

Such is the beginning of Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1996), a first in the history of the venerable French public-television series Cinema, of Our Time, each installment of which had been--until then--one filmmaker's profile of another. As Chantal Akerman (the woman in the chair) explains at the outset, since the directors she suggested had already been filmed, she proposed a self-portrait "with the idea of making my old films talk, of treating them as if they were rushes that I'd edit to create a new film, which would be my portrait of me." However, she goes on, the producers wanted her not only to appear on-screen but to talk about herself, and "that's where the problems started."

Medium close-up. By way of solution, Akerman offers a series of halting "attempts" to discuss her work--or rather, to read the bits of text she has written around and about it, punctuated by fade-outs and ultimately presented in the third person because (as in the long Jewish joke she tells about a man so incapable of vaunting the merits of his cow at market that a neighbor has to do it for him) she prefers her films "when somebody else talks about them." In fact, the only movie she mentions is Jeanne DieIman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the two-hundred-minute chronicle of three days in the life of a widowed Brussels housewife turned part-time prostitute which brought the twenty-five-year-old director to the attention of art-film and feminist circles. Rather, after a fleeting reference to her intrepid beginnings in Brussels at the age of eighteen and the early years with practically no money and no audience, she enumerates what the "good cow salesman" would point out: "language, documentary, fiction, Jews and the second commandment ... frontal images." And the fact that she was born in Belgium in 1950, that her parents were Polish Jews, and that "her cinema is totally impregnated with that." And her persistent struggle to escape these (and other) categories.

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Close-up. The story of her maternal grandmother's deportation to Auschwitz, of her paintings, which were lost, and of her diary, which survived.

Static shot. Interior, night. In a "last attempt" that follows some forty-five minutes of unidentified excerpts from a selection of her work to date, the filmmaker (now seated in an armchair) states: "My name is Chantal Akerman, I was born in Brussels. And that's the truth. That's the truth."

As Akerman initially envisioned, the films--fifteen of them presented in nonchronological order, like a vast audiovisual stream of consciousness--are left to do most of the talking. They talk, for example, about immigration and migration, from the Eastern European Jews of her grandparents' generation in Histoires d'Amerique (American Stories, 1988) to her own discovery of New York in News from Home (1976), stylistically marked by the experimental cinema of Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas but accompanied by her mother's letters from Brussels (which Akerman herself reads in voice-over). They talk about coming of age, from the "tragicomic burlesque" of her first film, Saute ma ville (Blow Up My City, 1968), and the early sexual questioning of Je tu il elle (1974), both of which feature Akerman as the young woman in question, to later versions of same in J'ai faim, j'ai froid (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold, 1984) and Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des annees 60 a Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the '60s in Brussels, 1993). They talk about music and dance, in a remarkable montage of sequences from the avant-garde Toute une nuit (All Night Long, 1982); Les Annees 80 (The Eighties, 1983), which was literally a dress rehearsal for a musical comedy in progress, Golden Eighties (1985); and Un jour Pina m'a demande (One Day Pina Asked Me, 1983), a stylized documentary on Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. And. of course, they talk about time and memory, composed and recomposed in static shots and frontal images, in a constantly expanding and overlapping repertoire of experimental films, dramatic features, musical comedies, and documentaries. And ultimately about the tension between the continuity of the shots and the subjects and the discontinuity of the history underlying them.