Paris,
Next year will mark a decade since the death of Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker who combined film, art and writing to the point of taking her video installations, at least twenty times, to different international museums. In Spain, La Virreina de Barcelona gave him, until last April, an exhibition dedicated precisely to that aspect of his production, curated by its editor Claire Atherton (next year it will travel to Artium Museoa); In 2019, the Reina Sofía Museum and Filmoteca España hosted a retrospective of his films and we have also had the opportunity to contemplate his photographic and audiovisual projects at the Elba Benítez Gallery in Madrid: in 2014 a multichannel installation based on the superposition of concepts, those of the personal and the public, the testimonial and the autobiographical, childhood and adulthood, memory and observation. The emotional bases of Maniac Shadowswhich is what this proposal was called, we found them in Akerman’s family origins: her mother was Polish and Jewish, she was able to survive Auschwitz and the Belgian woman made her a central figure in her works, including that intimate and intense portrait of her and of stages, bedrooms, windows, shadows and sounds.
A couple of years after the debates sparked by the proclamation, by the specialized magazine Sight & Soundof Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels as the best film in history, the Jeu de Paume in Paris pays homage to the filmmaker and analyzes the possible resonances of her legacy at this time in an exhibition, “Travelling”, which also delves into the issues she never stopped delving into. : intimacy, loneliness, grief, social injustices, family heritage and the traces of history in the landscapes.
He was only eighteen years old when he began filming his first short, in his native Brussels (Saute ma ville1968-1970), in which he already anticipated those thematic interests; After finishing it, he moved to New York, where he interacted with several directors of the underground scene of the seventies tending towards experimentation; From them he perhaps adopted his contemplative approach to the environment, in both a physical and temporal sense.
Back in Belgium, the first feature he worked on was Je tu il elle (1974), with very personal echoes, to then establish his more or less definitive residence in Paris, although without cutting ties with Brussels, a city to which his work remained linked: a year after his move he would film the aforementioned Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brusselspraised even then for its absolute aesthetic purification and its feminist commitment. From that moment on, he delved into the exploration of the options of the image as a narrative path and the possibility of freely choosing genres in alternation: between drama and comedy they move. Golden Eighties (1985-1986) or A couch in New York (1995-1996); They are literary adaptations The Captive (1999-2000) and La Folie Almayer (2010-2011); and also filmed documentaries, such as Ainsi D’Est (1992-1993), South (1998-1999) and From the other côté (2001-2002), filmed respectively in Eastern Europe, the United States and Mexico. The latter could compose a trilogy around walls and borders and a less than optimistic anticipation of a future marked by disasters.
“Travelling” seeks to study Akerman’s films and audiovisuals in light of the different geographies that also shaped his life (from Brussels to the aforementioned border areas), from the kitchen to the desert; and also of the different emotional terrains present in its production, from the intimate to the collective and from mockery to pain. In addition to installations and films, some of them unpublished to the public and summoned here, therefore, as “living material”, the Jeu de Paume brings together documentation from the archives of its Foundation: set designs, notes of its intentions and photographs of filming; It is intended that they help the visitor understand the conditions under which he conceived his works, but also the importance that writing gained in them: we owe him texts such as night hall (1992), A family in Brussels (1998) or Ma mere rit (2013).
His sources of inspiration were plural, this documentation also demonstrates, but the notes always common to his proposals were radicalism and poetry. The tour opens with the installation Woman Sitting after Killingwhich Akerman created from the final sequence of Jeanne Dielman for the 2001 Venice Biennale. It consists of seven screens that, for seven minutes, offer seven loops of a close-up that could evoke a photograph, or a classic painting, but that those who have seen that work know that it captures Dielman after having committed a murder. He sits in the dark, at a table in front of the viewer, but does not look at him.
Regardless of whether the audience knows this reference or not, a kind of tension is generated between it and the images it sees: nothing suggests that this woman has just killed, just a little bit of barely visible blood on one hand. Jeanne, or Delphine Seyrig, breathes two or three times, moves her head as if she wants to relax her neck, and also her chair, which squeaks a couple of times. In just seven minutes.
From L’Enfant aimé either Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971), made In the mirrorpresented for the first time at the Mexican Tamayo Museum in 2007. The young mother played by Claire Wauthion looks in front of the mirror, names different parts of her body and comments on them out loud, while she delves into the documentary field D’Est, on the edge of fiction. In 1992, Kathy Halbreich, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Susan Dowling, producer at Boston radio station WGBH; and the art critic Michael Tarantino invited him to carry out a multimedia installation dedicated to the reunification of Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall (they would later be joined by Bruce Jenkins, curator of the Walker Art Center, and Catherine David, of the Jeu de Paume). She agreed, but she wanted to shoot a film first – as we see, a still constant starting point for her artistic projects – and she did so between 1992 and 1993: it was the aforementioned D’Esta documentary that soon became a cult work after its presentation in Locarno and Florence – the installation, D’Est, au bord de la fictionpremiered in 1995 in San Francisco.
His purposes were clear: I would like to take a big trip through Eastern Europe while there is still time. Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the former East Germany, even Belgium. I would like to film there in my documentary mode, bordering on fiction. Everything that touches me. Faces, streets, passing cars and buses, seasons and plains, rivers or seas, flows and streams, trees and forests. Fields and factories and more expensive, food, interiors, doors, windows, meal preparations. Women and men, young and old passing or stopping, sitting or standing, sometimes even lying down. Days and nights, rain and wind, snow and spring. And all this that little by little is transformed, throughout the trip, faces and landscapes. (…) I would like to record the sounds of this land, to make the transition from one language to another felt, with its differences, its similarities.
A Voice in the Desertthird part of the videographic installation From the Other Side (2002), consists of shots of views taken in the Arizona desert, between two mountains located on both sides of the border with Mexico. In this corridor, a hot scene of migration, Akerman planted a screen that projected the last sequence of the film From the other côtéin which the director narrates, as a voice-over, the story of a Mexican emigrant, alternately in English and Spanish.
This work was shown for the first time in 2002, at Documenta 11 in Kassel, broadcast live from Arizona. For the Belgian it was, in turn, the first time that art emerged before cinema: For the first time I had the idea of the installation before the film.
The piece that closes the exhibition is Selfportrait/Autobiography: A Work in Progresswhich draws on the previous installation D’Est, au bord de la fiction; of his films Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975), Monterey Hotel (1972) and Every night (1981-1982); and from the book A family in Brussels (1998). Unlike photography, cinema and writing understood autonomously, video installations could provoke – he believed – sensations similar to a cerebral concussion, due to their many possibilities in the treatment of space and time, and an attractive sensation of uncertainty. It was first seen at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.
Akerman barely differentiated between narrative and non-narrative film and video (it is about solving the same types of problems, in his words) and he never got rid of his cultural and geographical roots. Tremendously multifaceted, his work challenged filmic and vital conventions, started with scarce resources and seems to have been shot “at the drop of a hat”; It constitutes, as a whole, his intimate diary, but a diary marked by rigor.
Chantal Akerman. “Travelling”
JEU DE PAUME
1 Place de la Concorde
Paris
From September 28, 2024 to January 19, 2025
