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BOOK REVIEW:
IDENTITY AND MEMORY:
THE FILMS OF CHANTAL AKERMAN
(Southern Illinois University Press, 201 pp., $20 )
Edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
reviewed by MICHAEL ROWIN
It is almost impossible to speak of feminist cinema without speaking of Chantal Akerman. Her importance has largely been based on her Seventies work, in which she experimented with long takes and minimalist narrative in films such as Je tu il elle (74) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (75), brilliantly bringing together structuralist and Marxist-feminist strands of the avant-garde. These first two enormously influential features from Akerman were formally daring and topically progressive, confronting the conventional role of women in film history while suggesting new directions for a feminist cinematic language. Jeanne Dielman's startling, haunting climax, in which the title character commits an act of desperation, remains one of the most controversial moments in film history, seen by critics and filmmakers as either a cry of liberation or a reactionary compromise. Either way, Akerman's film undeniably represented a direct challenge to dominant filmmaking practice, provoking questions and arousing interest in the possibility of a woman's cinema.
In Identity and Memory, the American edition of the 1999 British book, ten prominent film scholars - including editor Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Maureen Turim, Ivone Margulies, Janet Bergstrom, and Judith Mayne - give concise studies of Akerman's work. Akerman's early features are covered, of course, but this anthology fortunately goes further, with essays on Akerman's unjustly overlooked later work. The pieces proceed through Akerman's many faceted-identity, as explored in her films: essayist (News from Home, 76); Belgian auteur, strongly influenced by the French New Wave (Night and Day, 91); post-modernist (The Eighties, 83), Belgian Jew of Polish decent (Meetings with Anna, 78, and American Stories/Food, Family, and Philosophy, 89); and lesbian (Je tu il elle and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels, 93). Most of the writers, in one way or another, touch upon Akerman's complex search for, and expression of, identity, as well as her preoccupation with recollection and history.
The most interesting revelations in these essays come from connections made between Akerman's films and discourses surrounding them, often not entirely obvious until illuminated. Jennifer M. Barker sees in News from Home - a Chris Marker-like documentary in which letters written to Akerman by her mother serve as the narration for a visual survey of New York - a radical reframing and cinematic restructuring of urban space from a personal, corporeal vantage point in contrast to the "mere grid of lines and curves and intersections" mapped out by city planners. Just as Akerman in Jeanne Dielman methodically filmed the everyday routines of a housewife that are usually elided in mainstream cinema, so did she, in her next film, pay attention to the rhythms and lived experiences of the modern metropolis, the ongoing relationship between structures and the people who use them. Catherine Fowler traces the aesthetic and subject matter of Akerman's All Night Long (82) - a more conventional and romantic, but nonetheless challenging, middle-period work - to a particularly Belgian artistic tradition, including René Magritte's surrealism and filmmaker André Delvaux's magical realism, thereby directly confronting the common but mistaken assumption that Akerman is a French director (based largely on the simple fact that most of her films are in French) and further illuminating the intricate forces at play within Akerman's unique national and social position, and thus her cinema.
Despite two blind spots - in relation to Akerman's short films, including her early, hardcore structuralist experiments, and her more recent documentaries and critically hailed Proust adaptation La Captive (00) - Identity and Memory is impressively comprehensive, addressing the broad reach of women's studies and feminist film theory in the new millennium. As the first true collection of essays devoted to Akerman, it opens up the auteur's work for the newcomer, while casting light on hidden corners of it for the enthusiast. Fitting that this anthology creates a labyrinth, a mosaic around the films of an artist with, as Margulies writes, an "identity outside of notions of fixed boundaries, in nomadism."
- MICHAEL ROWIN
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
