Arts Publications

In her own time

ArtForum, April, 2004 by Miriam Rosen

Eight years, two long fictions (and one seven-minute short), two feature documentaries (and one video "mise-en-scene" for public television), three installations, and one novella after Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman came into the world, the filmmaker's self-portrait remains uncannily faithful to its subject. Not because the works repeat themselves but, on the contrary, because each one is the product of a Sisyphuslike attempt to explain the inexplicable, to find the definitively missing links and fill in the irreparable gaps. An effort that, like the peeling of potatoes in Jeanne Dielman, the endless waiting lines in D'Est (From the East, 1993) or the deportation of "dirty" immigrants in De I'autre cote (From the Other Side, 2002), is common to her "story" and ours.

At our interview last February, there was no dog--we met at the Paris office of Paulo Branco, the producer of La Captive (1999) and her new "musical tragicomedy," Demain on demenage (Tomorrow We Move), which premiered in France last month--but as in her self-portrait, Chantal Akerman, dressed in a dark jacket and pants, came into the room and sat down directly in front of me. In the succession of "attempts" to talk about her work that followed, what came out--with difficulty--reinforces the impression that in fact each film, each installation, each book could be called Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman. The interview was no exception. And that's the truth.--MR

MIRIAM ROSEN: Your Centre Pompidou retrospective lends itself to an overall view, but it's not easy to find an angle from which to approach your work. All of a sudden, I thought of the notion of the frontalier, the border crosser or, perhaps better, border dweller. What's interesting about this is not solely geographical, because you're always on the border between various domains of creativity, various genres, various media ...

CHANTAL AKERMAN: That's so vast.

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MR: But everyone finds something different in your work, which doesn't quite fit together as a whole--and yet, you're a single person.

CA: Yes, one poor little person!

MR: And that's why this notion of "border dweller" interests me: That is where you touch down.

CA: Actually, you should write about me without speaking to me. That would be better. It's true, I made From the Other Side, which is, of course, a documentary about Mexicans crossing the border. I've made plenty of things that had to do with that. And one could say that I'm on the border between so-called experimental film and narrative film and that I travel from one to the other. And I'm here, but I could be elsewhere. But I've already spoken about all that.

MR: Texts are everywhere in your films. This goes back to Je tu il elle, with the text that you write in the bedroom while eating sugar.

CA: Yes, because Je tu il elle was initially a short story.

MR: Did you plan to publish it?

CA: No, it was for me. And afterward, I wanted to make it into a movie, but it was written as a short story, not as a screenplay. Les Rendez-vous d'Anna [1978] was also written as a text, not as a screenplay. And Nuit et jour [Night and Day, 1991] was a short story at first. Afterward, I developed it into a screenplay.