DOWN THERE (Chantal Äkerman, 2006)

Interviewer: “[S]o many of your films have to do with travel and moving from place to place—”

Chantal Äkerman: “You mean nomadisme. Well, I’m Jewish. That’s all. So I’m in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.”

Traditionally, documentaries “document” external realities. In 2006, two major, masterful works, however, both using digital video, exemplified “interior documentaries” (as distinct from Stan Brakhage’s  “internal documentary” charting the birth of his child): Jon Jost’s Passages, from the U.S.,and Chantal Äkerman’s Là-bas, from France and Belgium. Both of these are intensely personal works that admit a high degree of abstraction; both are in-depth revelations of the state of mind of their creators. Both works are inexhaustibly beautiful and haunting.

There is, though, a fundamental difference between them: Whereas Passages centers on the loss of a child, the mangling of Jost’s individual life by an ex-partner’s illegal separation of him and their daughter, Là-bas reveals the intersection of Äkerman’s personal history and the history of a people. In a seaside Tel Aviv apartment where she is staying while teaching in Israel, Äkerman totes the latter as an integral, defining part of the former. At root, Là-bas is about the persistence of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish life, memory and imagination.

Äkerman achieves here stillness and quiet; her static compositions, in mostly muted beiges and browns, are mostly inside her temporary apartment, the camera quite often gazing out a window at those across the way or down below in the street. A mildly fluttering curtain slightly relaxes the boxed-in suggestion, the sense of Äkerman’s entrapment—and of our own sense of renting space in her psyche. Among the sounds that soothe the quiet are the chirpings of birds and the droning of airplanes, the latter doubling as repeated projections of Äkerman’s landing in Israel and our own “landing” in her mind.

Now and then there is another sound: the shrill trill of Äkerman’s ringing phone. Someone, concerned, is inquiring how she is; Äkerman does her best to be reassuring.

Äkerman ventures outside to go to the beach: a lovely visit. This respite, though, becomes fearful, retroactively, when Äkerman learns that the beach was bombed after she left. Much of Là-bas mines the idea of shifting perspective for the purpose of establishing this as the foundation for another idea. Airplanes seemingly landing might also be taking off; the title, meaning “down there,” refers to Israel from the vantage of Europe but also refers to the street below once Äkerman, herself, is in Israel. It might also reflect the view from a plane in flight. There are reviewers, though, who miss the point that whatever Äkerman’s shifts in perspective, she is always a Jew, and consciously so, and therefore constantly vulnerable.

Nothing happens. (The bombing—the most salient “event” in the piece—occurs offscreen.) Precisely. The static shots; the lack of plot: the “nothing” encapsulates the stillness that cloaks the turbulence of Äkerman’s historic identity. Existence is. Identity is. Äkerman’s Jewishness is. The formal rigor, contemplative aura, long takes, and near perfect stillness in Là-bas all correspond to its is-ness. Perhaps the work it is most like, again one using digital video equipment, is the phenomenal Five Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (2003), by Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, whose home base, like Brussels-born Äkerman’s, is, now, Paris, and whose tremendous onscreeen patience suggests the exquisite, clarifying pressure of eternity generating Wordsworthian “spots of Time.”

Under the pressure of Jewish history, both recent and prior, Äkerman employs a similar style. This style conveys her sensibility and spirit, particularly as her person—if you will, her image—is seldom on display in her minimalist mise-en-scène. When she is speaking on the telephone, we hear her voice but do not see her, and her voice is what we encounter in voiceover narration, where she may be sharing with us while not directly speaking to us. She is composing a diary as well as a “film”—something to help certify her bit of Jewish history. There is no telling what may happen to her, after all; who knows? Her modest record may count for something. Her sheer absence from so many frames—although in another sense she is “visible” everywhere—“embodies” the sense that she may “disappear” entirely, either by dint of diaspora, or worse. The calm of Là-bas distills, as it conceals, tension.

No, it is not calm; it is poise that is fraught with anxiety in and around dreams of Jewish extinction that permeate the world. Perhaps the stillness of Là-bas ultimately reflects Äkerman’s desire to hold onto her loved ones, to her commitment to the departed, including the Six Million, and to us, who may be anonymously providing her, in her imagination, with some measure of refuge. However much her compulsive “nomadism” translates into aching restlessness, we at least are “fixed.” We represent a kind of home.

Là-bas is the most brilliant and overwhelming work by Äkerman that I’ve seen since her incomparable masterpiece, D’est (1993). It radiates humanity and inner strength.

Grand Prize (co-winner), Marseille Festival of Documentary Film.

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SUD (Chantal Äkerman, 1999)

On June 7, 1998, in Jasper, Texas, three white men offered a ride to a black man, James Byrd, Jr., in a pickup truck. White supremacists, they seized their quarry and tied him by his ankles with a logging chain to the back of the truck. For three miles they dragged Byrd, swerving from side to side. Byrd remained conscious most of the way but had one arm severed, and was ultimately decapitated, by the rough journey. The truck kept on, and the three whites deposited Byrd’s mutilated corpse at an African-American cemetery. Texas, as a result, passed hate crimes legislation, which in turn led to the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law on October 28, 2009.
     Belgian-born Chantal Äkerman, her generation’s greatest filmmaker, went to the south United States with the intention of discharging a debt to an American author she loved: William Faulkner. However, the subject matter of her planned documentary changed once she heard of Byrd’s ordeal and death. The result is Sud, meaning, South.
     The film is intensely personal—symbolically, autobiographical. The lovely opening long-shots might be capturing the establishing shots of the original film that Äkerman had in mind to make. Only, the buzzing sounds of both a power tool and an overhead airplane, disrupting the silence, disconcert.
     Keeping herself unheard and invisible, Äkerman records a black woman’s recollection of white-black relations and white spite once blacks drew draughts of independent spirit from the American Civil Rights Movement in the sixties.
      Äkerman’s observations and interviews culminate in a reënactment of Byrd’s journey, enjoined perhaps by his spirit, the camera watching the road slip by from the back of the truck.
     The silence is sacred. The darkness is iridescent.

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A COUCH IN NEW YORK (Chantal Äkerman, 1996)

Dr. Henry Harriston maintains a posh practice as a psychoanalyst in his spacious Manhattan apartment, but, lately, his heart hasn’t been in it. His “clients” have beseiged his confidence with their life-problems and neuroses, and his morose apartment-mate, Edgar the Dog, has taken to sleeping most of the time as though he, too, were a candidate for Henry’s couch. Deciding to swap apartments with a stranger to ward off a nervous breakdown, Henry advertises in Paris. He ends up in the messy quarters of Béatrice Saulnier, while she ends up with the dog and Henry’s clientele, who accept her as Henry’s professional substitute while he is “away on vacation.” Back in New York on the sly, Henry checks up on Béatrice, assumes a false identity, becomes her patient and falls in love with her, as does she with him. But neither possesses the confidence to ’fess up to his or her feelings, and the possibility of their coming together may slip away.
     Written by Chantal Äkerman and Jean-Louis Benoît, as if on a lark or, perhaps, a drunken dare, this film from the U.S., France, Germany and Belgium sparkles like a Lubitsch gem. In unfamiliar cinematic territory, director Äkerman remarkably turns out to be a fish comfortable in the water—much as wide-eyed, lovely Béatrice turns out to be a crackerjack psychoanalyst without an ideological ax to grind. Coached by Anne, her American dancer-pal who herself has undergone therapy, Béatrice repeats words that her client speaks and mutters “Yes!” every now and then, and of course lends a fully sympathetic rather than jaded ear. Even Edgar is perking up! But it is the budding romance between her and Henry that really got to me. Un divan à New York, warm, gentle, hilarious and wry, and a suspenseful matter-of-hope-and-hopelessness when it needs to be, is one of the most beautiful and compelling romantic comedies ever made. Ultimately, it sent this viewer’s spirit soaring. Attuned to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” the ending, in Paris, is a joyous beginning.
     William Hurt is an adequate Henry; Juliette Binoche, a sublime Béatrice. This character’s name, let me tell you, is no accident.

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JE, TU, IL, ELLE (Chantal Äkerman, 1976)

The occasion of Belgian-born Chantal Äkerman’s “I, You, He, She,” made when Äkerman was in her mid-twenties, is a romantic breakup that has left Julie, played by Äkerman herself, in a state of emotional chaos. However, Äkerman’s voiceover locates the images sometime in the past; in the present, Äkerman/Julie’s voice is calm, low-keyed and deliberate, and the discrepancy between the images and the sound of her voice suggests a subtle conflict of realities with which most of us can readily identify: our attempts to impose order on past experience by imputing to the time of crisis already a sense of order that may not have existed at that time. We delude ourselves into an ongoing sense of control by projecting our current sense of it backward in time, revising our autobiography in the direction of an image of ourselves that we wish to maintain—an image of ourselves that may help to stabilize us in the present. We counteract by refuting contrary evidence of what we dread: our vulnerability; a lack of control over our own lives and, indeed, over the universe. What we see in Äkerman’s remarkable black-and-white film is the reality that Julie is working over in her mind.
     What that we see, then, is this young woman doing? Moving about what no longer is a bed that she is sharing with someone—and, in the process, eventually removing the offending mattress and sleeping instead on the hard floor. Painting (she tells us) her bedroom green, perhaps creating, as it were, new growth. Copying six times a love letter she has written to create an orderly week’s calendar—an imaginative attempt to reverse the breakup of her routine. Eating—whether it is flour or sugar, compulsively munching on something out of a small, crumpled paper bag, just to occupy as well as feed herself.
     Other characters enter into the action, and we see, nearly whited out, feverishly energetic sex between Julie and another woman—like most sex, somewhere betwixt reality and regions of spirit and the imagination.
      Äkerman, Eric De Kuyper and Paul Paquay wrote the script. Whether shut-in or on the road, the film is dreamily cinematographed by Bénédicte Delesalle,Renelde Dupont and Charlotte Szlovak. Phenomenal: in the dark at night, when Julie, alone indoors, is dogged by her shadow, we see, or think we see, the two of her—woman and shadow—come together, commune, face-to-face, lips-to-lips, each passing into the other. The heart pauses at the silent beauty of it all.

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GOLDEN EIGHTIES (Chantal Äkerman, 1986)

Shoes quickly go every which way across part of the floor at a Parisian mall called The Golden Fleece; but the viewer’s heart jumps when one pair of legs half-leaps. A reference point is the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), but there the two pairs of cross-cut shoes belong to men, not women, and they audibly click when one brushes against the other onboard a train. In Chantal Äkerman’s Golden Eighties (a.k.a. Window Shopping), faceless shoppers live separate lives; each is out on her own.
     Intertwined lives: most of the film’s action involves people who work at or own businesses at the mall. Young persons are wrapped up in romantic complications as they feel their way through adolescence; Monsieur Schwartz, who with his workmate wife, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, brilliant, gorgeous), owns a men’s clothing shop, worries about France’s weak economy and his declining sales. Jeanne reassures him that things will pick up. The couple is Jewish. (Äkerman herself is Jewish.) They are the parents of restless, impulsive Robert, who when rebuffed by Lili, the girl whom he loves, proposes marriage to a girl he hasn’t even dated. Half-leaping, Mado directs her acceptance not to Robert but to gathered girls who work at the mall; later, she walks in on her fiancé and Lili making love after-hours at the mall. Meanwhile, Jeanne is being pursued by someone from her past: Eli, who as an American soldier liberated her death camp during the war and fell in love with her. Now Jeanne’s feelings for Eli reawaken, urging her to betray her spouse as her son, unbeknownst to her, betrays his fiancée.
     Have I mentioned that Golden Eighties is a musical? Characters sing (poignantly)—perhaps Äkerman’s hommage to Jacques Demy.
     Dark, lilting, soulful, ironical.