Charlie Chaplin, Woman: Remembering Chantal Akerman, 1950-2015

"Charlie Chaplin, woman," she wrote of Saute Ma Ville. "Charlie Chaplin (that's me)." But she was her own. And we are still trying to accept the news that the renowned and incomparable filmmaker, writer, artist, and friend Chantal Akerman has passed away at the age of 65, much too young; it is unfortunate that major outlets like The New York Times have unfairly drawn our attention to any "boos" of her latest film, No Home Movie, one of many recent works devoted to her mother "(always my mother)" and currently playing at the New York Film Festival. In fact, the rumor is that the outburst came from one person, who tends to dot Locarno with such behavior, and that the screening was a success. Dennis Lim makes the point well here, regardless. "I assure you, she did not give a shit about your fucking boos."

Last night was the opening of the film. In an emotional introduction, NYFF curator Kent Jones and critic Amy Taubin announced free screenings of both Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, both on Friday. "It's very important to say that up until a couple of weeks ago Chantal was planning on coming," said Jones, and that the filmmaker was proud of No Home Movie, despite the emotional toll it is said to have taken.

In a statement on the festival's website, Jones writes:

I can only write about Chantal from ground level, which is as I remember her. I certainly won’t pretend that we were close. We saw one another infrequently over the years, corresponded now and then. But the first time we met, we connected. I’m sure that many others made similarly quick and intense connections with her.

Chantal was direct, tough, and emotionally extravagant. She was small in stature but she commanded a room with her fatigued stance, her grand and sometimes wicked smile, her wild rough-grained voice, and her eyes. The eyes had it. I’ve rarely looked into a pair of eyes so bewitching.

He is right about that connection. Meeting Chantal after her 2013 reading at The Kitchen as part of the installation Maniac Shadows (to relay the evening would take another post entirely--she read from the memoir of her mother, Ma mère rit, to an unsteady audience), I nervously asked if the book was to be published in English. She drew from her cigarette and looked slightly outside the circle of friends and artists around her. "Who are you?" "Corina..." In a characteristically husky, accented voice, an honest efficiency: "Do you want my phone number?"

We corresponded and met sporadically over the next two years, as I've slowly attempted to get the book to print in the States--and sometimes we didn't. Rushing to the front door of MoMA. "I'm sick," she emailed. "May I bring you anything?" "I don't want you to be sick also." Or to meet for oatmeal at Le Pain Quotidien (she preferred it to the probably cloying French bistro a few doors down): "I am at my storage unit all day!" "Oh! All right." Or, "I am in Mexico, kisses." And within these unforeseen gifts of time--I'm suddenly wandering Chelsea with nothing to do, with no Chantal--I'd indulge my tendency to identify, as I am often late, or prone to hoping to be left alone. "I'll get up in a minute." The old child. How often I wanted to tell her I understand. And when we do meet, she is so completely present. She is, even, a delight, as I'm sure many can attest. Pitching my ideas to her, she'd brush the papers away, consummately less interested in the spiel than the person, and lower her sunglasses to meet my eyes. "But where are you from, what is your story." I talked about my mother. I said I am a poet. Later, we talk about Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Isabelle Huppert, her students' screenwriting, translation. We're about to leave for dinner. Her pink pajamas beneath her clothes. "I am wearing my pyjames!" "No, you're not!" "No, look!" Eventually her arm around my waist, saying to her friend as we are on our way out of their shared apartment, all three of us women standing head to head by the door in a goofy closeness--do we have all the books we need, do we have her keys: "I like Corina, yes." It's all inscribed. We'd have a cigarette after dinner, standing on either side of the pay-phones in front of a restaurant, blocking the sidewalk, the same size. "When did you start smoking?" I'd ask. "When I started writing."

I liked her too, very much. I owe any sense of her person to the minutiae of our encounters, few and far between as they were--anyone who has seen her films knows that space is never vapid--moments in my experience confirmed now by the countless reflections turning up, their mutual affection and shock a unique type of comfort. There is still so much to read, to watch, to be reoriented by.

A few I'd draw you toward:

Richard Brody's "Postscript: Chantal Akerman" at The New Yorker.

Her work is recklessly, freely personal, and she came before the audience that day in order to have a personal discussion in public. In a few harsh phrases, Akerman changed forever the way I think of—and approach—events onstage. She made me think about what I say and, with her emphasis on the intimate, the sincere, and the spontaneous, made me not overthink what I say.

In "The Pajama Interview," co-writer of Almayer's Folly Nicole Brenez writes that Akerman is a "person of immense vulnerability, to gauge the extent that she offers herself to others, provided they do not represent power of any sort, whether political, economic or symbolic; a creature capable of the most extraordinary gestures, small and large alike." Also inclued here is a self-annotated filmography. "Chantal Akerman (in Lettre d’un cineaste), 1984. A rose is a rose is a rose, but it’s not an apple." Her description of La Captive, her film adaptation of Proust's Volume 5, really a portrait of Albertine: "La Captive (The Captive), 2000. Yes." Yes (it is one of my favorites). Brenez: "We can infer that your never asking for anything, of being content with so little, even depriving yourself – that this structures both your relationship to the world, and a style that’s characterised primarily by asceticism." Later:

NB: You transformed this existential asceticism into a style, this rigorousness into minimalism.

CA: Maybe. I made something of it. But it always means remaining secondary, never fighting for my films enough, never claiming a ‘social’ place for them, compared to many other directors. How could a child come to tell herself these things? What had someone gotten through to me, that I’d internalised so much? I can’t explain it. When I was little and my parents would go out, I never cried. When my sister was born, my mother said, ‘Chantal’s not jealous’. So you internalise it, and you’re proud of not being jealous. In all my emotional relationships, I’m not jealous, so I can keep proving this decree, which was more powerful than it would have been if it were issued as an order. My psychoanalyst tells me, ‘You’ve accumulated so much rage, it could explode’. I’m scared of killing someone if it comes out. Everything is tied to the war and the camps; as a little girl, I had recurring nightmares, two that recurred the most often. In the first, Hitler was perched up on a giant chair in a camp and the Jews were playing violin with clenched smiles, like something out of Pina Bausch, making a circle. In the second dream, there was nothing to eat, and so people were being eaten. They were going to hang us, my mother and me, from butcher’s hooks. I was so little and I managed to run away. At my house, I found my mom again, but only felt guiltier for having saved myself. Where did it come from? At my house, I’d hear the word Läger, ‘camp’, a lot in Polish, I must have surmised what had happened to my mother in the camps. But she never said anything, or almost never.

I was so scared to go to sleep, I asked my mom to repeat ‘Bonne nuit, Chantal’, ‘Goodnight, Chantal’, until she had found the right tone for it. I’m not complaining about all that; I hate people who are complainers. I’m just telling it to you.

NB: While making such stripped-down work, you must have found some models, in particular Robert Bresson.

CA: I came to Bresson late, when I was around 25, after the Nouvelle Vague. Bresson is also a great materialist. The priest’s ear in Diary of a Country Priest (1951): in my whole life I’ve never seen such a great ear, I stared at it endlessly. This is why ‘Catholic filmmaker’, ‘Jewish filmmaker’, ‘woman filmmaker’, ‘gay filmmaker’ – all these labels have to be thrown away, that’s not where things really happen.

Lincoln Center Film Society curator and writer Dennis Lim held a conversation with Akerman a few years ago on her most famous work, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, made with an all-female crew at the age of 25: "'It’s not very modest of me, but I’m still so proud I did it at that age,' she said in a telephone interview from her home in Paris. 'A lot of it came unconsciously,' added Ms. Akerman, who is now 58. 'When I wrote it, it ran like a river.' What she produced was less a script than 'a nouveau roman book,' she said, a fastidious account of her heroine’s every action. 'Delphine Seyrig complained that there was so much detail she didn’t have to invent anything.'”

In her book Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday, Ivone Margulies writes that Akerman deliberately chose Seyrig "because she brought with her all the roles of mythical woman that she played until now. The woman in Marienbad, the woman in India Song"--channeling Seyrig's public resonance and inflecting the space with a stylized alienation, an affectlessness that can be taken, initially, as the character's personal difficulty, thus "corroding naturalism from within." "By creating for her protagonist the precarious position of embodying both agency and automatism, Akerman manages to respond both to the cliché (Jeanne as victim/heroine) and to its overthrow."

The Village Voice has posted PDFs of articles by B. Ruby Rich and J. Hoberman upon the release of Jeanne Dielman in New York in 1983. Akerman was not yet widely known in the States, despite her (now infamous) time spent here in the early 1970s. "Imagine a distributor for Chantal Akerman. And write them a letter."

David Hudson at Fandor has done a tremendous job of collecting words from all over the internet.

Mubi's contributions. "We spoke to Chantal Akerman just over a month ago about her new film, No Home Movie, a moving tribute to her mother. Earlier, Ricky D'Ambrose shot a video interview with the director, and Darren Hughes spoke to her about her Joseph Conrad adaptation, Almayer's Folly. We did not speak to or about her nearly enough."

Indiewire lists eight films you can stream (rent/buy) online, including One Day Pina Asked (2014), her documentary on choreographer Pina Bausch; and From the Other Side (2012), its focus on illegal immigration on the borders of Arizona.

In recent documentary De Cá (From Here), filmmakers Gustavo Beck and Leonardo Luiz Ferreira sat Chantal Akerman down (on a red pillow) for an hour-long conversation--they've graciously made it available to watch.

"Is there anything you want to do yet?"

"Fly."

At top: Portrait d'une paresseuse (1986).