The Belgian-born film-maker Chantal Akerman died in Paris last month at the age of 65. According to Le Monde, she took her own life. Shocked obituaries have appeared all over the world, with the result that many more people now know about Akerman’s death than her life’s work, which is extraordinarily diverse, original and inventive. Her filmography includes adaptations of Proust and Conrad, conventional comedies starring William Hurt, documentaries, biopics, travelogues and political essays, as well as wildly radical departures such as the film that made her name in 1975, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a mesmerising portrait of a young widow turned prostitute frequently described as a masterpiece of European cinema.
No doubt there will be lifetime surveys to come, although the ICA has only just finished screening 40 films over two years. In the meantime, there are plentiful DVDs and YouTube clips. But these mainly present her cinema films, rather than the strange and pioneering visions Akerman unleashed in art galleries down the decades, seven of which are now on show at Ambika P3 in a gathering that is beautiful, intimate, bleak and very nearly overwhelming.
If you have tears, prepare to shed them in front of the very first film in the gallery, made when Akerman was 21. In the Mirror shows a young girl inspecting herself in the looking glass. We see her from behind, as well as from the front in reflection. It is the classic disparity. She sees somebody with no waist, awkward ears, too small a head and too many blemishes, as she declares; we see a ravishingly beautiful young woman. The viewer is filled with tenderness for this child who can scarcely see how lovely she is in all her ruthless self-criticism, asserting “her right to be the author of herself”, to quote the 70s rhetoric. The inner-outer split grows increasingly poignant.
It is a short piece for Akerman – a few minutes, compared to Jeanne Dielman, which unfolds over more than three hours. But the subsequent films here amount to a prolonged immersion in the lives of untold women. In Shanghai, as dusk falls, waitresses begin their ceaseless circling of the city’s cafes, passing to and fro in the sickly glow before Akerman’s locked-off camera. On the sidewalks of New York, immigrant street sellers, surreptitiously viewed through a doorway, somehow keep their spirits up as the world walks on by. In Arizona, on the Mexican border, a huge screen shows what amounts to a haunted road movie – Akerman’s car streaming through the desert to a place with no name, which neither the film nor the wetbacks she is commemorating on the soundtrack will ever reach. It is a meditation on all those nameless migrants who would one day clean the houses on the other side if only they hadn’t suddenly, and mysteriously, disappeared. Nobody ever makes it home.
The narrative voice in each case is Akerman’s own – lyrical and low, casting its own kind of music over these enthralling observations of other people’s lives. She is more than director, more than auteur, frequently appearing in her own scenes. In some profound sense, each work is a self-portrait by other means, shot through with a burning appreciation of life – and a fierce sense of death, most piercingly that of her mother.
Nelly Akerman survived Auschwitz, and the relationship between mother and daughter, precious and deep, turns upon that anguished miracle. Nelly never speaks of it, Chantal always wonders about it; and they do eventually come at it very obliquely in Akerman’s No Home Movie (with its double meaning), in conversations recorded in the older woman’s Brussels flat in the months before her death.
That is a cinema film; at Ambika P3 you can see Maniac Shadows, a five-part installation that incorporates fragments from both women’s lives, juxtaposed with a wall of photographs showing women on the tube, in the restroom, in the lobby – strange places where they are neither at work nor at home: a no woman’s land. And in another room (metaphorically, as well as literally) is the filmed portrait of Nelly: an old woman now, waiting for the cleaning lady to come but not quite sure if it is today or tomorrow that this will happen, struggling to answer the telephone, to read, move or converse; a woman living in a vagueness she can no longer gather into any meaning, structure or purpose. It is a tremendous and harrowing portrait, Akerman’s voiceover caressing her mother’s fragile shadow on screen.
And the accompanying photographs gradually take on another significance, apparently imitating the vagaries of memory. Here was something (or someone) important at that very snapshot moment, its meaning now lost. What on earth was it that mattered so much?
Maniac Summer shows Akerman alone in her Manhattan flat, extremely anxious – or is it the film that shudders with nerves? Time is ticking away on screen. It August 2009, 8pm and the artist is smoking incessantly. Barack Obama appears on television, blinking, uncertain, not yet presidential. Street scenes show an eerie underpass, cars flashing past in the growing dusk; while the camera in the flat remains static, like another piece of furniture.
In the park, in black and white, there is a sense of anticipation, a frisson something like the breeze shivering through the grass in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. Then the scene shifts into colour and the fear increases. All of these works are concerned, to some degree, with different kinds of film stock, colour, angle and technique – with picture-making at its most formal, but also dramatic. Akerman is capable of filming net curtains, lifting slightly, as if they were weeping.
One of the most famous works here, D’est (1993), is a 24-strong assembly of monitors showing figures from her travels through Eastern Europe. Men and women wait by the road, black forms in the fog, or huddle with their few possessions in the dim-lit underground. Visions of figures trudging through white winters, as if in war or its aftermath, pass across these screens.
It is an argument against uniformity – each face is held by our eyes, looking back at us in turn – but Akerman’s words are almost more compelling. If you didn’t know her work, you might think this was a fiction, a Beckett narrative accompanied by pictures. There are only two things, she says – life, and not.
Akerman’s final work, NOW, was an extreme departure: five screens showing the desert hurtling towards and around the viewer, to a soundtrack of pure but muffled violence. In the chaos of rumbling, shooting, shattering noise, the ear struggles to pick out birdsong above the raging horror. Variations of speed, stock and colour suggest vast worlds in themselves, and the trauma to eye and ear is overpowering, although not a single word is spoken.
In D’est, Akerman talked of trying to create what was for her a primal scene – a flickering between life and death, the instant before being snatched from this world. There is no doubt that she achieved it here.
