NOTHING HAPPENS
© 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00
Typeset in Melior by Keystone Typesetting. Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page oftbis book.
Frontispiece: Eating and writing. Chantal Akerman in Je tu il elle (1974).
Frame enlargement. print courtesy of World Artists Release.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Chantal Akerman's Films: The Politics ofthe Singular 1
1 NOTHING HAPPENS Time for the Everyday in Postwar Realist
Cinema 21
Charting the Everyday in Postwar Europe 24
A Realism of Surfaces: Bazin and Neorealist Film 27
From Surface to Structure: Barthes, Godard, and the Textualization
of Reality 33
Beyond Cinematic Positivism: The Antirescue Cinema of Andy
Warhol 36
2 TOWARD A CORPOREAL CINEMA Theatricality in the '70s 42
The United States in Real Time: Minimal, Hyperreal, and
Structural 48
Quotation Reconsidered: European "Theatrical" Cinema 54
3 THE EQUIVALENCE OF EVENTS Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 65
Excess Description: Robbe-Grillet and Cinematic Hyperrealism 69
Bracketing Drama: The Other Scene 73
vi Contents
The Murder, and, and, and ... : An Aesthetics of Homogeneity 80
The Automaton: Agency and Causality in Jeanne Die/man 88
4 EXPANDING THE "I" Character in Experimental Feminist
Narrative 100
The Lure of Center in Rainer's Work: A Cautionary Tale 104
The Eroded Index: Liminality in Je tu il elle 109
An Alogical, Fitful, Evidence 112
"Here Is": Redundant Description 118
A Mock Centrality: An A-individual Singularity 121
5 "HER" AND JEANNE DIELMAN Type as Commerce 128
For Example, "Her": Godard and the "Natural" Sign 131
Jeanne Die/man: An Exceptional Typicality 140
6 FORMS OF ADDRESS Epistolary Performance, Monologue, and Bla
BlaBla 149
Epistolary Performance: News from Home 150
Talk-Blocks: Meetings with Anna 154
Postscript: The Man with the Suitcase and A Filmmaker's Letter 161
Whatis Wrong with Signing? A Filmmaker's Letter 166
7 THE RHYTHM OF CLICHE Akerman into the '90s 171
Eight Times "Oui": Singularity in Toute une nuit 173
Night and Day and Night: The Cycle Revisited 182
So Let's Sing: The Eighties and Window Shopping 185
Echoes from the East: Histoires D'Amerique and D'Est 192
To Conclude: It Is Time 204
Filmography 213
Notes 215
Bibliography 247
Index 263
Para meus pais.
Samuel Margulies e
Sonia Dain Margulies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began when I first saw Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 BruxeJles and was mesmerized by the hyperreality
of everyday gestures. My interest in minimalism and in the notion
of nothing happening in modern realist cinema was sharpened during Bill
Simon's dissertation seminar and later in a talk with Ismail Xavier (University
of Sao Paulo) who suggested I restrict my inquiry to this seminal
filmmaker ofthe early seventies.
In writing this book I again confirmed my closest friends' generosity. I
would like to thank Catherine Russell for reading this work in its many
shapes and for her perceptive and generous criticism. From Mark Cohen,
one of the world's greatest readers, I profit everyday. His demand that I do
my best always slightly surpassed in pressure his loving sympathy for my
desire to finish, and him I thank for the final form this book takes.
Several people deserve thanks for the roles they played in this book's
early stage as a Ph.D. dissertation in the Cinema Studies Department at
New York University. They are Stephen Donadio from Middlebury College
and Annette Michelson who facilitated my contact with Akerman and her
work by providing the opportunity for a first viewing of several of her
films in a seminar on Akerman in Middlebury in the Spring of 1987; my
thesis advisor, Bill Simon, for furthering my interest in cinema studies;
Robert Starn for his inspired and knowledgeable allusions, editorial comment,
and continuing friendship during all my New York years; Peggy
x Acknowledgments
Phelan for being a wonderful reader and for her valuable suggestions at
several points; and Richard Allen for his usual critical liveliness and love
of polemic. I am especially indebted to Annette Michelson for her incisive
comments and editorial suggestions. Finally. I would like to thank Paul
Arthur whose aesthetic and intellectual affinity with this project occasioned
wonderful and enriching discussion, the result of which is now
present at all levels of this book. His demands for clarity can only be
matched by his intellectual generosity and solid knowledge offilm and art
history.
David Frankel helped shape the dissertation and parts of the book with
his respectful editorial assistance, and I thank him for our discussions on
ways of concluding this book. David Jacobson helped provide the missing
link between Akerman and Jewish aesthetics. Toni Pipolo and Joyce Reuban
helped me edit "Eight Times 'Oui': Toute une nuit and the Rhythm of
Cliche," published in Persistence ofVision 8 (1990) and reprinted here by
permission. Babette Mangolte sat down with me to talk about Akerman,
and seventies performance.
I would like to thank a few friends who encouraged me to think of the
dissertation as a potential book: David James, Timothy Corrigan, and Dana
Polan made me feel part of the film studies community; David Desser
whose detailed reading ofthe work was crucial in its revision; and, finally,
the committee for the 92-93 SCS dissertation award, Claudia Gorbman,
Richard de Cordova, and Ellen Seiter who made me feel the book deserved
the extra work put into it.
I would like to thank the following people who facilitated my access to
Akerman's work. Lloyd Cohen, from World Artists Release, made films
and videos available for extensive scrutiny and later lent stills and the
prints for frame enlargements. Bob Rose (UCLA) and Michael Renov (usc)
provided the best conditions for the study of the prints and tapes in the
summer of 1987. Catherine Benamou, Maria Rosa de Castro, Ubirajara de
Castro, Aicha Franco, and Andrea Vaucher helped with the logistics of
research in Los Angeles. Akerman's distributor and producer in Belgium,
Marylin Watelet, helped me with information concerning tapes and films
produced in Europe. Metropolis, the distributor of Histoires D'Amerique,
and Lieurac Productions, distributor of D'Est, were also helpful. Richard
Pena, from the Film Society of the Lincoln Center, was unstinting in his
assistance and lent me a tape of Le Demenagement and stills from various
films. Wendy Lydell from International Film Circuit helped me with all
concerning Akerman's Night and Day. John Montague and John Venco of
New Yorker Films provided stills as well as the print of Jeanne Die/man,
Acknowledgments xi
23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles for frame enlargements. Bruce
Jenkins and Janet Jenkins were extremely gracious in providing me with
stills for D'Est and the catalogue Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's
D'Est, an invaluablE source. Renata Tonelli, from Hunter College, generollsly
photographed several of the frame enlargements seen in this book,
Arunas Kiriocacas photographed the frame enlargements for Toute une
nuit, and stills were also provided by the Cinemateque Quebecoise and the
British Film Institute. I .thank my editor at Duke University Press, Ken
Wissoker, for his initial insistence that I submit the book to the press. It
was a joy to work with him and with the professionals at the Pmss who
made this process all the smoother.
Finally I would like to thank several of my friends who, throughout
this long ride, helped with their love and knowledge: Bernardo Carvalho,
Richard Porton, Joe McElhaney, Steve Barnes, Ann Harris, Noa Steimatsky,
Michael Gitlin, Mary Lawlor, Nina Barnett, Giselle Lessa Bastos, Lu
Menezes, Eliane Steillhruch Keane. Jonathan and Eduardo Keane, Eduardo
Bia and Maristela Margulies, Bebel Aboim and Washington Dias
Lessa, Sara Grosseman Venosa and Angelo Venosa, and Samuel and Sonia
Margulies. In the United States and in Brazil they give me ground. To
Mark, who writes his own opus by my side, all my thanking love.
NOTHING HAPPENS
CHANTAL AKERMAN'S FILMS
The Politics of the Singular
Ihaven't triod to find (l compromise between myselfand others. I have thought that
the more particular I am the more I address the general.-Chantal Akerman, 1982
Chantal Akerman's films seem to alternate between containment, order,
and symmetry, on the one hand, and on the other a dry intensity that registers
as the reverse of restraint: lack of control, obsession, explosion. Akerman's
very first film, the short Saute ma ville (Blow up my town, 1968),
features the director herself, then eighteen, performing a series of actions
that alternate between clearly focused projects (cleaning, cooking, eating,
committing suicide) and excess-an uncontrolled mess. Saute ma ville is
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) run amok.
Akerman enters her apartment in Saute ma ville by racing the elevator
up the stairs while parodically humming a classical tune. Coming in
through the back door of a tiny studio apartment that is mostly kitchen,
she begins her domestic routine. Jeanne Dielman gets its structure from
this kind of routine; there, order is the mask for chaos. In Saute ma ville,
though, order and chaos coexist as strobic intermittencies in a jerky kind
of performance. Cleaning her shoes while wearing them, Akerman's character
continues her obsessive polishing until she has brushed her legs
black. Her furious attempt to clean the kitchen leaves clutter in its trail, as
a messy jumble of objects-all of them domestic cleaning tools, precisely
the signifiers of neatness and hygiene-stain the regime that she tries to
impose. In Jeanne Dielman, faulty timing replac(~s boredom with anxiety,
2 Nothing Happens
efficiency with clumsiness; in Saute rna ville, a similar lack of control
appears not as order's flip side but as its correlate.
Slurring the onomatopoeic words "Scotch, Scotch" in voice-over, Akerman
cleans, cooks, and seals the studio doors with Scotch tape. Fury and
determination reinforce the precision with which she performs these
tasks, yet the pattern she follows is peculiar: childishly clumsy, the same
gestures produce mess and tidiness simultaneously. For a while, the
viewer is enthralled with trying to sort one out from the other; there is a
pleasure in watching these fully finished actions, a result of the rapidity
with which mess and neatness seem reciprocally to wipe each other out.
The effect is heightened by the film's focus and attentiveness, which Akerman
imposes by the use of extended shots.
Through the stylized performance of her apparently purposeless, adolescent
gestures, and through the composure and symmetry of her framing
and an out-of-synch voice-track (in which Akerman laughs and singhums),
Akerman cleanses her narrative of anecdote and of psychological
overtones.1 The performance also has a presentational quality that dispels
dramatic development. Excess and order, the coupling terms of the
scenario, are simultaneously erased before the film's closure: Akerman
lights a match, blows some balloons as her voice over utters, cartoonlike,
"Bang! Bang!" She leans over the stove holding the bouquet of flowers she
brought from the street, turns on the gas, and holds the lit match. A freezeframe
ofthe scene, shot in a mirror, is replaced by black leader, over which
is heard the sound of an explosion.
Akerman has said that Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot Ie tou (1965) was her
first major cinematic experience.2 She claims that she "decided to make
movies the same night" she saw it, and that she later missed out on a lot of
good films by trying to find Pierrot Ie tou in them.3 Akerman entered
cinema as an autodidact. She was accepted to the four-year program ofthe
Institut Superieur des Arts du Spectacle et Technique de Diffusion, a Belgian
film school, but abandoned it after a few months to make Saute rna
ville, a thirteen-minute black-and-white film in 35 mm. She produced this
short independently by selling three-dollar shares on the diamond exchange
in Antwerp. To supplement the budget, she took clerical jobs.4
Saute rna ville was shown at the Oberhausen short-film festival in 1971.
Pierrot Ie tou ends with Jean-Paul Belmondo's doomed attempt to prevent
an explosion of dynamite. The idea of explosion that fuels Saute rna
ville seems borrowed from the general mood of unrestrained, unbounded
energy in Pierrot Ietou, a film of anarchic force which at its limit makes it
impossible to distinguish despair from gaiety, tragedy from visual effect.
The Politics of the Singular 3
Akerman shares this sense of unassimilated energy with Godard, and it
reappears throughout her work. She also shares with Godard, and with
Michael Snow and Andy Warhol, a purposeful lack of hierarchy between
the depiction of drama and the depiction of the surface of things. The
episodes of Saute ma ville, for example, are discrete, and joined by dissolves
they dissolve not only narrative but intentionality itself. And the
gestures are at once mundane and arbitrary, so that the passage from description
to drama isn't noticeable in terms of content. Two modes of
organization-one geared toward plot (fragmentary as it might seem), the
other a phenomenological approach to plot's "uneventful" backgroundare
blended.
During a lengthy stay in New York in 1971-72, Akerman came in contact
with the American experimental film scene. At Anthology Film Archives
she saw the work of Warhol and Snow, as well as Jonas Mekas's
diary films, which she has compared to "homemade cooking."5 She was
particularly impressed with Snow's La Region Centrale, which, she admits,
opened her "mind to ... the relationship between film and your
body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy. "6 In 1972
she began her long collaboration with the cinematographer Babette MangoIte
with two short films, La Chambre 1 (The room 1) and La Chambre 2
(the room 2), and her first feature, Hotel Monterey. These films show her
debt to structural filmmaking, and to Snow-a matter of making the image
waver between its "concrete/materialist" status and its "naturalist/representational"
one. Extended duration becomes the cinematic transformer
for a to-and-fro passage between abstraction and figuration.
In her proposal for a film of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel The Manor, as
she briefly explains her turn from avant-garde film to narrative, Akerman
refers to this oscillation between abstraction and figuration as a simple
matter ofgoing through phases:
When I made my first film ... I was interested not in style or form but
in saying something that was on my mind ... then I started to think
about style and form, and then only about them.... and then there
are phases ... as in painting. I passed through a phase in which it was
inconceivable to be "figurative" or "narrative"; you had to go through
abstraction. Now, with the conquest of the abstract, you can again
make either the figurative or the abstract. But this figurative will never
be the same again.7
The easy dialectical resolution of this account obscures the degree to
which Akerman's work holds the figurative and the literal, the dramatic
4 Nothing Happens
and the mundane, in unstable poise. In Akerman's cinematic strategies,
figuration is indeed "never the same again." Indeed Saute ma villeinaugurates
Akerman's characteristic oscillation between registers with an explosive
dissolution of orders. The film's leap from the personal (the "intentional"
self-annihilation by lighting a match over a gas stove) to the public
(the "blow up my town" of the title) figures her reach, which is both formal
and political. This least ambitious of Akerman's films suggests how
loaded her refusal to discriminate between registers can be.
Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday investigates
some of the effects of Akerman's strategic indiscrimination between
registers-the alternation between representation and abstraction in her
minimallhyperrealist style. More broadly, it looks at how modernism and
realism dialogically negotiate their respective terrains in cinema. Its title
is intended to suggest a dual ambition: to pursue what happens when
"nothing happens" in Akerman's films, and to offer an abridged genealogy
of the association between extended duration and the thematics of the
everyday in European postwar cinema. As it maps the social and cultural
panorama traversed by Akerman's films, the book traces the historical and
cultural contours of her concern to articulate the minor (the banal, the
underprivileged) and the minimal (in her antipsychological, sparse, dedramatized
narrative). I follow three main lines of inquiry: Akerman's
thematic concern with women and the everyday, her formal use of extended
duration and radical ellipsis, and her notion oftype.
In my inquiry into the issue of women's everyday existence, Jeanne
Dielman is the principal text. Akerman herself has described this film as
seeking to show what the ellipses of conventional narrative usually omitto
show the "images between the images."B To the extent that it analyzes
the relation between representation and reality precisely through attention
to these "leftovers" of conventional narrative, Jeanne Dielman is an
original, revisionist reading of a pervasive issue in the aesthetics of modern
realist cinema.
Akerman's phenomenological bent is in general accord with the addressing
of women's private sphere in early '70s feminism, for example
in documentaries like Janie's Janie, Three Women (1971), and Joyce at
34 (1972). These films, engendered directly by the feminist movement,
partake of the idea of transparency that is endemic in socially corrective
realist cinema: the belief in the cinematographic record as an automatic
guarantee of cinema's inclusiveness. Akerman's cinema departs
from them in its dry experimental style, sharing in the second-wave feminist
cinema's attempts to create films that are formally provocative at the
The Politics of the Singular 5
same time that they are politically engaged.9 Widely considered a crucial
feminist text of the '70s, Jeanne Dielman has been seen as providing
a radical alternative to traditional narrative cinema's representation of
women, and also to conventional cinema itself.lo The film's minimalist
structure and hyperrealist gaze redirect an energy found elsewhere in Warhol's
politics of indifference, an energy of relentless scrutiny that moves
toward the context of '70s feminist politics.
The film's force is based on an inversion: Jeanne Dielman undoes the
usual association of drama with emotional intensity, and of extended duration
and temporal distension with boredom. Almost classical in its construction,
Jeanne Dieiman works like a time bomb. The symmetry of its
shots (as in most of Akerman's films), the range of its color (the palette
recalls Flemish painting),ll the linearity of its story (the division into
successive parts, a first, second, and third day, and the resolute movement
toward closure)-all work to associate this movie with the classical
narrative and mild disjunctions of the European art film.12 Against this
frame of expectation, though, Jeanne Dielman painstakingly displays its
unconventionality-when, for example, a shot of a mundane kitchen activity
is held until the task is completed.13 At the same time, Akerman also
revises conventional analytic editing through radical ellipses and an absence
ofreverse shots.14
A reference in any discussion of feminist and women's film, Jeanne
Dielman is a paradigm of the much-desired alliance oftwo politics: that of
feminism and that of anti-illusionism. The film frustrates co-optation by
either ofthese discourses singly. It is the murder especially that causes the
split: for the modernist film critic, this resolutely fictive scene destroys the
perfect homology between literalness and fiction in the earlier domestic
scenes of cooking, washing, and eating. Although downplayed dramatically,
the scene effects a switch from the literal to the fictive, and intimates
the absolute necessity of drama-of a fictional, narrativized closure.
Claiming this necessity as political, many feminist critics see this break
with literalness purely in terms of content. The orgasm and murder become
the point at which the film attains rhetorical clarity.ls But this precision,
a feature of Akerman's work, needs to be considered carefully: it is
too easy to make her films seem to accommodate the kind of feminist
agenda typified by essentialist catch phrases that overpsychologize both
character and spectator. In this sort of reading, Jeanne is seen as suddenly
becoming aware of her position in patriarchal society,lS while the viewer,
with "voyeuristic fascination," witnesses "the mother's unwilling eroticization
and violent destruction of the surrogate father, her third client."17
6 Nothing Happens
Actually, as we shall see, the privileged status of Akerman's work in feminist
film criticism only accentuates the weaknesses of a mechanical inference
of politics from her formal practices.
Many critics have argued that Akerman radically reshapes our ways of
seeing. Perhaps one of the most interesting effects her work provokes in
these critics (myself included) is a temptation to reproduce her descriptiveness:
in an early article on Jeanne Dielman, for example, Janet Bergstrom
writes of a desire to "retell the plot step by step, as ifthe clarity ofthe
succession ofgestures and elisions carried with it an understanding of the
film's strength and its importance for feminist filmmaking. "18 Akerman's
literalness defies interpretation, inviting instead a descriptive impulse
resembling her own hyperrealist restructuring ofappearances. Her rendering
of the details of mundane activity is undoubtedly the key to Jeanne
Dielman's power.
The need to make this formal preoccupation a channel for politics, however,
seems to provoke a reduction of critical vocabulary. Much of the
writing on Akerman (with notable exceptionsp9 tends to shift from detailed
textual analysis to conclusions about her work's politics that seem
to come from somewhere other than the films themselves. In the more
articulate criticism, this "elsewhere" is usually feminist psychoanalytic
theory. In Nothing Happens, I try to clarify the pitfalls of such criticism.
After assessing Akerman's unique processes of display, for example,
most feminist commentary lingers on the trope of the reverse shot. The
"refusal to set up privileged points-of-view on the action by close-ups, cutins
and point of view shots" is certainly an important aspect of Jeanne
Dielman's spectatorial address.2o Particularly in mid-70s film criticism,
the absence ofreverse shots is a privileged mark ofrupture in the extensive
debates on classical cinematic narrative's techniques of spectator suture
and identification. (In an inverse way, however, this privileging credits the
priority of classical cinema.)21 In film criticism's mechanistic appropriation
of the psychoanalytic concept of suture, the reverse shot became the
formal means with which to bind the spectator's imaginary into the film's
diegesis. Hence Jeanne Dielman's refusal to "present us with the security
of the reverse shot of classical representation"22 was considered pivotal in
guaranteeing the "separateness of logics" of "two modes of the feminine:
the feminine manquee, acculturated under patriarchy (the character)' and
the feminist (the director) who is actively looking at the objective conditions
of her oppression- her place in the family. "23
The oblique address ofthe audience is indeed the most important effect
The Politics of the Singular 7
of the absence of reverse shots; but these conclusions seem to omit a more
detailed analysis of what one does see and how one sees it. What are the
effects of an uninterrupted monologue, or of an extended take'? And how,
indeed, do these effects relate to feminism? Nothing Happens answers
these questions through detailed analyses of Akerman's films. It demonstrates
how Akerman's combination of minimalism and hyperrealism inflects
her take on women and the everyday, and it strongly qualifies the
hitherto unproblematized linkage offeminism and anti-illusionism in discussions
of Akerman's contribution.
In a commendable attempt to restore to the feminist pantheon works
whose feminist qualities were repressed when they were co-opted by other
critical tendencies, B. Ruby Rich rejects the various readings of Jeanne
Dielman's feminism as a subsidiary effect.24 Through a renaming maneuver,
she rejects the adjective "hyperrealist" for the film-first, because of
the term's relation to "the tradition of cinematic realism," which "has
never included women in its alleged veracity"; and second, because "the
comparison with superrealist (or hyperrealist) paintings obscures the contradiction
between their illusionism and Akerman's anti-illusionism."25
Rich's cleansing operation also rejects the qualifier "ethnographic" for
Akerman's work, since that name designates "a cinema ofclinical observation
aimed at objectivity and noninvolvement," while Akerman obviously
intends an engagement between Jeanne and the female spectator.26 Having
refused the hyperrealist and ethnographic labels, Rich concludes that
Akerman's "invention of new codes of non-voyeuristic vision" has gone
unnamed.27
My disagreement with this epithet purge has to do with the nature of
Rich's protectionism. First, no formal strategy can be essentially feminist,
anti-illusionist, or politicaL Second, the retreat from those classifications
doesn't necessarily help us understand Akerman's formal and political
integrity. There is no doubt, for example, that Akerman's work is, broadly
speaking, anti-illusionist; her use of extended duration, provoking a radical
separateness of actor, camera, and spectator, clearly departs from the
transparency ofclassical realism according to the Hollywood formula. But
given the hyperbolic quality of Akerman's referentiality, her work doesn't
need to be defended from being co-opted by realism. On the contrary, the
alienating force of the work's hyperrealism is enough to place it alongside
other progressive currents ofrealist cinema. And the term "hyperrealism,"
at the same time that it inscribes Akerman's work within the history of
cinematic realism, also qualifies its relation to that history. Similarly, the
8 Nothing Happens
comparison of Akerman to an ethnographer is not to be discarded, for an
understanding of the ethnographer's ideas of objectivity and distance enriches
her work.28
To counter the panic in seeing names appropriated by "the enemy," I
suggest a historicization of Akerman's relation to these terms. In chapter I,
for example, I investigate Akerman's relation to ethnographic practices,
showing how, as her cinema questions realist representation, it thoroughly
recasts such notions as visual anthropology's ideal of a fixed camera's
record of everything that occurs at a particular site. Akerman's work forces
a series of questions: does real-time representation assure a truthful record?
How is one to interpret its differing effects in different bodies of
work-the projects of Warhol, Colin Young, and Akerman herself, say?
Does the degree ofdetail in her depiction ofa fictional housewife achieve a
representative value equivalent to that of a documentary film's record of a
parade of actual housewives? If Akerman's hyperrealism is in some respects
a simulacrum of objectivity, does her cinema force a revision of the
very terminology that seems so adequately to name a different cinema?
Nothing Happens sets Akerman's work on an epistemological plane that
intersects, but is not restricted to, that of feminist theory and practice. An
underlying agenda of the book, for example, is to problematize the wornout
opposition between realism and modernism in cinema. Feminism's
early '70s concern for a particularized body, I argue, gives Akerman's cinema
a realist, representational impetus; her minimal hyperrealism can be
inscribed, then, within the history of progressive social realism. To further
rehabilitate representational cinema, and elucidate its compatibility with
modernism, I question the traditional alignment ofmodernist cinema with
the politics of anti-illusionism.
When I first came to write about/eanne Dielman, it struck me that Andre
Bazin's description of Italian neorealism, in particular of Umberto D's
episodic narrative, could be applied almost word for word to Akerman's
film. What Bazin calls a true cinema of duration has in fact been radically
reconsidered twice: once with Warhol, a second time with Akerman.29 To
address the import and specificity of Akerman's minimalist treatment of a
woman's everyday routine through real-time shots, chapter 1 of Nothing
Happens establishes the different cultural and historical determinants
that shaped other filmmakers' treatment of banality and description. This
interest in recording phenomena ranges from a voracious totalist impulse
to render all ofreality visible (in neorealism, observational cinema, etc.) to
a selective refiguration of visibility. With Warhol's cinema this refiguration
goes beyond the positivism of practices like neorealism, cinema ve-
The Politics of the Singular 9
rite, direct cinema, and observational cinema to engage the spectator's
body, inaugurating what I call a "corporeal cinema." Warhol's antiromantic
stance toward representation, and the ambivalence that infects his images
through his programmatic lack of distinction between original and
reproduction, place his work in a postmodern ethos.
Chapter 1 also discusses how, in some directors' hands, the everyday is
associated with a descriptive impulse that supposes no gaps within the
filmic texture. This "realism of surfaces," advocated by Bazin, Cesare
Zavattini, Roberto Rossellini, and others, I place in the context of the
mid-1940s and 1950s association between phenomenology and existentialism.
"To see rather than to explain" is the implicit motto of this analogical
realism. Later, this confidence in the photographic record is countered
(but not necessarily superseded) by a structuralist emphasis on language
and a systematic suspicion of referentiality, a position represented by
Jean-Luc Godard's anti-illusionist cinema, by Henri Lefebvre's sociological
inquiries into the commodification of the everyday, and by Roland
Barthes's semiological investigations into the myths of the photographic
image. This second take on the referent-a "realism of ideas"-corresponds
to the textualization ofreality exemplified in structuralism and the
Annales school of the '50s and '60s.
From this sketchy history of cinema's concern with the everyday and
with duration, Nothing Happens selects two filmmakers particularly relevant
to a discussion of Akerman's work: Warhol and Godard. Throughout
this book, these directors' differing strategies signal two aesthetic alternatives
within a cinematic evaluation of referentiality. Furthermore, their
films from the early and mid '60s are paradigmatic of the concern to link
the mundane with the political. On the one hand, Godard asserts a complex
equality of major and minor themes, according political relevance to
both through a melange of French urban everydayness and a disarticulation
of the Hollywood-style narrative. On the other, Warhol's films use
extended duration to establish an equality between representation and
reality. Through a uniform texture and a fixed stare at a single event or
object, they drain out "meaning," promoting indifferentiation as a political
and formal strategy.
At the core of Godard's and Warhol's subversive gestures is a dismantling
of the idea of hierarchy-a general refusal to differentiate among
styles, genres, themes, etc. Distinctions between "low" and "high" style
become meaningless. This deconstruction ensues from the filmmakers'
strategies ofrepresentation, which are indebted respectively to pop art and
to hyperrealism. In art, the first gesture of this kind was surely contained
10 Nothing Happens
in Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, which Warhol's serial silk screens extend,
injecting representation with sameness and banality. Akerman's
work, on the other hand, gains its force from its hyperrealist understanding
of the lack of distinction between image and reality (see chapters 2 and
3), as well as from the specific banality-that ofa woman's quotidian-that
it chooses to transfigure.
Akerman's exaggerated focus on the representational aspect offilm gives
her work a polemical relation to Godardian anti-illusionist cinema, with its
conceptual and self-referential aspects, right from the start. After the severe
indictment of figuration in experimental film of the '60s and early '70s,
Akerman's work came in the context of a return, with a vengeance, to
referentiality. Her hyperrealist cinema challenges the primacy modernism
accorded to language. Moreover, the wavering between literal and figurative
registers effected by duration in News from Home (1976), Jeanne Dielman,
D'Est (From the East, 1993), and other films creates a spectatorial
engagement radically distinct from the Godardian direct address.
The abstraction of Akerman's work-the disjunction between text and
image in News from Home and thE) first part of Je tu iJ eJJe (I you he she,
1974), the systematic framing in Jeanne Dielman, the compositional symmetry
in all of the films, the serial structure of Toute une nuit (All Night
Long, 1982) and D'Est-contrasts with the filmmaker's precise, phenomenological
recording of information. The minute gestural shifts in the behavior
ofJeanne, Anna in Meetings with Anna (1978), and Akerman herself
in Je tu i1 e11e; the faces and corridors in Hotel Monterey; the clothes,
crossroads and people's ways of lining up in D'Est-all suggest definite
cultural and social contexts. Within the minimalist mise-en-scene and
under the camera's fixed stare, specific profilmic elements become heightened
foci: the sound of footsteps, soapsuds, a reddish wrapping paper. The
effect is more than a feeling offormal estrangement: the sharpened materiality
of cinematic elements such as light, pattern, and color suggests the
"existential" materiality of a character's environment. In short, the strategies
of defamiliarization that make Akerman's work an anti-illusionist
metacinema are best understood as instruments of referential focus.3o
This focus is of course qualified: Akerman's hyperrealist images and
minimalist seriality promote a referential instability that is a sure mark ofa
poststructuralist practice. Yet Akerman's hyperrealism needs to be distinguished
from the demise of referential truth effected in postmodernist art
through procedures of citation and mise-en-ablme. Her hyperbolic referentiality
precludes the kind of questioning of language that is apparent in
both cinematic modernism (where it has a moral tone) and postmodern-
The Politics of the Singular 11
ism (where it has a cynical one). Rather than depending on quotations and
allusions, or invoking the endless recession of the frame, Akerman's cinema
operates in the borderline of the cliche. By insisting on the banalboth
"natural" and textual-it elicits a new content.
It is true that Akerman's hyperrealism invokes a deconstructive stance
in terms of narrative. As Jeanne Dielman simulates the causality so often
addressed in a certain politicized feminist rhetoric, for instance, it accumulates
the qualities ofa domestic melodrama. Despite such sirriulacral
effects, however, Akerman's hyperrealism is not wasted on the myths of
representational origins, nor are the references it mobilizes neutralized in
a game of endless relativity. Instead, her cinema steers its referential directions
toward an alternate representation. Much like Warhol's not-soindifferent
in-differentiation (in his series of silk screens on disasters as
much as in his mortification of commodified personalities), Akerman's
decentering tactics foreground a legible and significant content. At the
same time, the films don't make "truth" a theme in the way that antiillusionistic
practices inherently must.
A more nuanced view of the relations between realism and modernism
necessarily involves a distinction between antinaturalism and antiillusionism.
In chapter 2, then, I explore the artistic background for Akerman's
post-Godardian sensibility and minimallhyperrealist aesthetics.
Akerman's use of real time and her detailed visuality are related to art
movements such as minimalism and photorealism (superrealism, hyperrealism).
In cinema, they connect to Warhol's work, and to structural mini-
malism.
Akerman's affiliation with a nondidactic strand of European modernist
realist cinema establishes the contours of an aesthetics of homogeneity.
Characterized by a hyperbolic privileging of linearity, Renaissance perspective,
and a homogeneous texture, this second-degree realism appears
in the work of, among others, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, and Rossellini
(in his historical films). These directors' films may incorporate novels,
plays, and documents within their diegeses, and I discuss these processes
of layering as an alternative to the aesthetics ofheterogeneity represented
in the cinema of Godard and Yvonne Rainer.
One ofthe main effects ofthe aesthetic of homogeneity is the equation of
different cinematic registers within an apparently uniform texture. A detailed
discussion of Jeanne Dielman in chapter 3 shows how the film's
equivalent representations of both dramatic and nondramatic events (of a
necessarily fictive scene-a murder-and everyday chores such as cooking
or washing dishes) not only constitute Akerman's main subversion here,
12 Nothing Happens
but attain a surplus inadequately accounted for in the feminist critique.
My analysis of the links between these defamiliarizing techniques and
Jeanne Dielman's theme of obsessive compulsion questions reductive,
content-oriented readings of Akerman's film-those "murder-of-the-manas-the-elimination-of-patriarchal-repression"ol
readings, which at root
honor the idea of a single, cause-and-effect master plot.
In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman isn't trying to supply a transparent, accurate
representation of a fixed social reality. Inscribed in the layered
processes of her hyperrealist style is evidence that, for example, the
housewife-prostitute Jeanne is a construct, with multiple historical, social,
and cinematic resonances. Akerman's work, I suggest, is an engaged
variety ofrealist representation, a historically grounded form that is, in the
best tradition of feminism, an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman."32
It is in this spirit that she has expressed her distance from an essentialist
feminism: "I think it is poor and limiting to think of my films as simply
feminist. You wouldn't say ofa Fellini film that it's a male film.... When
people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only
one way for women to express themselves."33 In another interview she
stated: "I won't say I'm a feminist film-maker.... I am not making women's
films. I'm making Chantal Akerman's films. "34 This confession of
auteurism is to be seen in the light of early feminist criticism's frequent
deflation of individualism to promote the collective.35 Akerman flatly rejects
such generic discourse, and its modes of the "universal" and the
"exemplary." Her refusal of the role of "feminist filmmaker" indicates
an acute awareness of the "project of a transhistorical and transcultural
feminist aesthetics of the cinema,"36 and a resistance to being made its
exemplar.
Akerman's resistance to neatly fitting "natural" (female, lesbian) or programmatic
(feminist) categories is part of a cultural history that provided a
theoretical alternative to the corrective impulse inherent in cinema's earlier
essentialist realism. One manifestation of this history particularly
helps to contextualize Akerman's formal politics: the debates about representing
the underrepresented, specifically women, that grew out of the
convergence of feminism and the French and the American New History
of the early '70s. These debates, centering on the issue of representativeness,
allow us to understand how Akerman stands in relation to a generic
feminist program.
My discussion of this debate must confine itself to a few European developments
tangential to Akerman's feminist perspective. The Annales
school's historiographic concern for the minor, studies of power by Michel
The Politics of the Singular 13
Foucault and by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the feminist pressure
for inclusiveness, and the attempt both to define the feminine and to escape
such definitions-these are some of the elements in an argument that
is neither linear nor total. The reduced scope of my discussion in no way
reflects the complexity of the '60s and '70s' philosophical and historiographical
arguments on social representativeness. It may suggest, in fact,
the urgent need to theorize and historicize anti-essentialist, politicized
visions in cinema, a project addressed in the British theoretical journal
ml!and by the social and film theorists quoted here. My analysis of Akerman's
films, I hope, is a contribution to this discussion.
The French historian Arlette Farge has discussed how, in the late '60s,
"women's history" "joins forces with the history of mentalities and anthropology"
in their common attention to the neglected, their constitution
of "historical subjects" out of "figures hidden from history. "37 The feminist
awareness of how women's visibility had been suppressed was transferred
to the New History as a sort of political amendment. Carlo Ginzburg
and Carlo Poni, for instance, acknowledge that it was no coincidence that
the new microhistory "often chose as its object of study the themes of
the private, the personal, the lived, those same themes that the feminist
movement so strongly privileges ... because women are undoubtedly the
group that paid the greatest price for men's history."38 In this same rectifying
perspective, Farge both recognizes that feminism and the Annales
school share a program and indicts the school's near-total failure to address
"the questions that were elsewhere being asked about women." The
"distance of Annales with respect to such intellectual and ideological
effervescence," she claims, "is consistent with its general stance: it has
always preferred methodological innovation to militant engagement."39
The New History'S methodological innovations, however (as much as its
thematic agenda), are hardly antithetical to militant engagement; indeed
they are basic to an anti-essentialist feminist history.4o As they mobilized
economic, social, geographic, intellectual, material, and other criteria to
read the past, the annalistes were constantly reminded of the different
temporalities of the phenomena that make human history.41 In its utter
suspicion of a positivist, factual history, the school was able to map new
realities in the gray areas left by the available record. Its search for a more
complete, more thorough history led it to consider the vested interests
obscurely revealed in the historical data, the social and power structures
that at given points produce certain discursive realities and not others.
This "corrective" disposition might be summed up in the deliberate use of
the plural in the title of the Annales school journal since 1946: Annales,
14 Nothing Happens
Economies, Societes, Civilisations-according to Jacques Le Goff, Lucien
Febvre and Marc Bloch always insisted, "'First the plural, men, not
Man'-this abstraction."42
The variant of gender was incorporated later, as a consequence of feminist
pressure. But in this corrective program's next logical step. gender
itself was also questioned. Developments in feminist studies in the '80s
proposed the incorporation of other identity variables, such as race and
class, as an antidote to the suspicious category "women," which came to
be seen as a euphemism for "Western middle-class white females." On the
other hand, as Denise Riley warns, if all these differences come to rest on
an unquestioned, ahistorical category of "women," one misses perceiving
that "the history of feminism has also been a struggle against overzealous
identifications."43
The corrective attempt to measure the achievements of women's history
usually supposes the possibility of a transparent description of a woman's
a priori reality. Joan Copjec suggests how one might avoid this approach:
"The oppressive notion of 'woman's oppression' ... is replaced by detailed
descriptions of the practices that bring a particular category of
woman into being, exclude her, make her visible, invisible, valuable, redundant,
dangerous, etc." Copjec points to the alternative proposed by the
feminist journal mlf: "Dreaming [of a total revolution) is replaced by
intervening-one by one-in practices that can only limit power, never
totally deny it."44 When the category "women" is "referred to the more
substantial realms of discursive historical formation,"45 when intervention
is limited to the sites and activities specific to a particular person's life
and work,46 then it becomes possible to envision a nontotalizing revolutionary
praxis.
This new way of thinking the permeability of social and individual, of
theory and practice, is traceable to the experience of 1968.47 It is with
the daily grassroots-level struggles ofthat time, and with the demise ofthe
notion of a representative consciousness, that the need to analyze the
pervasive mechanics of power is acknowledged. Intellectuals, "agents of
consciousness," are revealed as complicit with the very power they claim
to negate in others' names. The "universal intellectual" who embraced the
"universal cause of the proletariat" is summarily dismissed. Instead, the
intellectual must "fight against the forms of power there where one is at
once the object and instrument. "48
Foucault did much to theorize the new micropolitics, arguing that the
dissemination of power through all spheres of life and discourse means
The Politics of the Singular 15
forgoing the notion of a controlling social power. It also means that practices
understood as politically neutral and without interest in fact share in
the status quo and must be considered active. For Foucault, power is not
limited to the "evils of commodification." Although his writings constitute
a radical attack on humanism, they have had a salutary effect in
activating a sense of individual responsibility in social affairs. To acknowledge
personal politics as no less a forum of the struggle for power
than an international trade battle demands the dissolution ofthe comfortable
split between "we the victims" and "they the power."
Catherine Gallagher's essay "Marxism and the New Historicism" fleshes
out the links between the New Left, the Annales school, Foucault, and
feminism to expose another important nerve in the question of realism in
cinema: the notion of representativeness. Akerman's approach to type
takes this issue to task. The relations between personal or private and
collective or public interests become singularly important in cultural or
political activities that claim to represent "true" reality, as do the feminist
enterprises in historiography, media, and everyday life.
Akerman's understanding of the representational links between private
and public adds an important twist to the feminist motto "The personal is
political." Her interest in the minor is not restricted merely to representing
it; her project may show traces of feminism's well-intentioned corrective
realism but cannot be reduced to it. Indeed the term "minor" can be applied
to her aesthetic in the same way as it is to Kafka's (and Beckett's) in
Deleuze and Guattari's book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.49 Akerman
recognizes some of her own formal preoccupations in the qualities
Deleuze and Guattari locate in Kafka: the dryness of language, the lack
of metaphoric association, the composition in a series of discontinuous
blocks, the interest in putting a poor, withered syntax and a reduced vocabulary
at the service of a new intensity. She too is interested in deterritorializing
culture, in a minor use of a major language, in the collective
aspect any minority expression attains.50
Akerman exemplifies the minor through the letters sent by her mother
and read aloud on the soundtrack of News from Home: "When you see the
letters of a mother, like those by my mother, who is not a writer, who is not
an intellectual, it is a subculture.... there is no place within artistic
things for this kind of expression."51 Her Meetings with Anna also follows
Deleuze and Guattari in that she posits Anna's nomadism and celibacy as a
form of freedom from both social and aesthetic norms, as a rejection of a
single culture. "Since she is nomadic she is not an owner, and celibate she
16 Nothing Happens
can either be related to others or be alone. Being alone, outside any system,
belonging already to another world," Anna represents "a way of being
ahead ofher time that prepares our future, a sort of mutant. "52
Deleuze and Guattari use women in a quasi-metaphoric way, suggesting
the "becoming-woman" as a process of liminal identity. Akerman cannot
privilege quite the same process of multiple deterritorializations (Gregor
Samsa's "becoming-animal" in Metamorphosis, for example, involves a
simultaneous movement away from the fixed identities of both man and
animal),53 in the face of the feminist demand for placement and the exercise
of identity, a borderline status may be an undesirable position. But
Akerman seems to feel that her politics of the singular are perfectly described
through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of deterritorialization
and minor literature. Her work exhibits not only the formal qualities they
find in Kafka but the same sense that formal concerns are indissociable
from the articulation of a new content. Nothing Happens considers the
alternate conception ofthe subject that this new content/form involves.
Akerman has several times quoted Deleuze and Guattari on how, in a
minor literature, the characters assume an immediate, nonhierarchical
relation between small individual matters and economic, commercial,
juridical, and political ones.54 One needs to examine how Akerman's desire
to represent an individual as immediately traversed by politics and
history matches her intuitive refusal to embrace a "raised fists" kind of
feminism.55 Let us briefly trace the relevance of Akerman's insistence on
her difference from feminism to feminist representation. The indissociability
ofthe social and the individual would seem at first to be at the very
base of a familiar feminist rhetoric. Parveen Adams and Jeff Minson convincingly
argue against a surface analogy.56 In "The 'Subject' of Feminism,"
they suggest how the prevalent feminist position is in fact informed
by the opposite notion-that of the separateness of the social and
the individuaJ.57 Adams and Minson show how this notion leads to the
idea of a purposive, "interested" individual, that is deeply complicitous
with an essentialist vision of women (and of the subject). And "whether
the subject is conceived as author or effect [of a realm of values] matters
little," for "the presupposition ofmale 'values,' 'power' and 'interests' ...
merely takes social forms as the theater in which already known effects are
played OUt."58
Akerman engages the implicit moralism of such "theaters" in formal
terms. To the extent that her characters rehearse a novel relation between
the social and individual, her writing of them reflects precise historical
and cultural pressures: both the feminist demand for identity and the
The Politics of the Singular 17
simultaneous post-'68 suspicion of master narratives, of totalizing explanations
and systems. Clearly indebted to feminism, Akerman's formal politics
just as significantly arise from an intellectual position that refuses to
claim the authority to speak for others.59 Her "mutant being" is colored
with the '70s' distinctive mistrust of universal representativeness. Discussing
Anna's unresponsiveness to Heinrich's account of his life after
World War II in Meetings with Anna, for example, Akerman states, "She
listens to his speech in its difference, its strangeness. She would seem
much more humane if she had made any gesture to efface, reabsorb the
difference."60 Akerman's care not to efface difference is promoted through
a peculiar form of address: the use of"talk blocks," dialogues so distended
that they work as monologues. The respondent's silence and the lack of
reverse shots displace the reaction onto the audience.
In addition to this oblique address of the viewer, Akerman avoids the
pitfalls of totalizing representation by making her characters present gendered,
individual singularities in tension with an implied category, a collective
entity. This tension lies at the basis of her representation of type.
The subject of type has been neglected in film studies, but the analysis of
how an individual assumes a collective identity is crucial to understanding
the sociopolitical thrust of modern realist film. The nature of a film's
protagonists is one ofthe work's most socially telling aspects.
Akerman's protagonists have qualities with precise cultural and historical
meanings. Although their behavior is conveyed by very stylized techniques,
they consistently invite psychological decoding, as though their
singularity were amenable to correction, or at least to diagnosis. Yet they
are not meant as clear, positive examples; they undermine the "universal"
representations, the generic types, found elsewhere in cinema. Jeanne Dielman,
for example, short-circuits a paradigmatic representation of domestic
work, just as Je tu il elle does of lesbian lovemaking. The eccentricity
of the exceptional, "strange" protagonists in Meetings with Anna,
Jeanne Dielman, and Je tu il elle has a clear function: their peculiar behavior
challenges the notions of generic type that would corroborate an
essentialist vision.
Akerman's tilt toward the pathological in constructing her characters is
a tactical move, then, a matter of expressing a different relation between
the private and the collective. Alongside her films' stylistic clarity and
formal coherence, her characters' compulsive behavior is unsettling in its
irreducible difference. Their pathologies are her way of avoiding generic
attributions. Anna, Chantal/Julie, and Jeanne assume a liminal status, a
nonfixed identity, their contact with or friction against spaces or other
18 Nothing Happens
performers creating transformative dissonances. Modernist cinema tends
to try to void its characters of their individual psychologies; Akerman's
characters, I argue, go beyond the neutralization of individuality present
in constructions of allegorical or "average" types. The question underlying
her novel conceptions is that of creating a potentially plural representation
that nevertheless does not attempt a totalized status.
In chapter 4 I explore how films that distance themselves from the essentialism
of the feminist documentaries of the early '70s deal with feminism's
enduring demands that they represent the collective. An example
of the more theoretically inclined phase of feminist filmmaking is the
work ofYvonne Rainer, whose attempt to short-circuit the personal I relate
to theories of the subject deriving from deconstruction and Lacanian theory.
Akerman's Je tu il e11e, on the other hand, responds to the issue of
representativeness by creating a purposeful indeterminacy in relation not
only to the positions of character, author, and director but to that of a fixed
sexual identity. Performed by the director, the film's protagonist condenses
several functions within a single body, generating an instability of
address and a truly decentered identity-an "a-individual" type.
Chapter 5 compares the notion of type in Akerman's cinema to the modernist
fragmentation that frames Juliette/Vlady/Her in Godard's Two or
Three Things I Know about Her. Godard makes the housewife/prostitute
the basis for a semiological and moral questioning of "naturalness"; Akerman
presents the same figure in a more complex light, piling up layers of
signification that include but are not restricted to the feminist reading.
Nothing Happens discusses how this duality of registers is inscribed in
Akerman's hyperrealist characters and mise-en-scene, and how her style
partakes formally in a suspicion of master narratives.
Avoiding back-and-forth dialogue, Akerman's films taint the conventions
of naturalism by problematizing one of its ingrained assumptions:
that the characters will mediate between text and spectator. Chapter 6
discusses the monotone quality, the use of platitudes, and the oblique
address of the audience in Akerman's verbal texts. Jeanne Dielman, Meetings
with Anna, News from Home, and Je tu il e11e combine different modes
of address: letters, monologues, descriptions, storytelling. In Akerman's
texts, tone and rhythm intensify at the expense of content. This chapter
also investigates how Akerman deals with issues of signature and authorship
in the made-for-TV Man with the Suitcase (1983), the video Filmmaker's
Letter (1984), the respective postscripts to Meetings with Anna
and News from Home. My discussion is intended to clarify how selfpresentation
can be inflected by the supposition of a diffuse, generic au-
The Politics of the Singular 19
dience, and how Akerman problematizes authorship by the use ofher own
physical presence.
Chapter 7 takes the issue of type in another direction, investigating
whether the use of multiple characters, story lines, performers, and scenes
in Akerman's later films generates or precludes the formation ofstatistical,
sociological categories. I explore Akerman's antitotalist bent through a
study of her use of cycle, repetition, and cliche in Toute une nuit, Un Jour
Pina a demande (1983), Histoires d'Ameriques (American stories/Food,
family, and philosophy, 1988), Night and Day (1991), The Eighties (1983),
Window Shopping (1986), rai faim, j'ai froid (I'm hungry, I'm cold, 1984),
and D'Est. And I relate her use of seriality to filmic modes with more
totalizing ambitions-to ethnographic film, to the "city symphony" genre,
to experimental road movies. Akerman's use of fragmentation and cliche
(pop songs, soap opera structure) in her musical films appears here as part
of a dialogue with postmodernist aesthetics.
I conclude with a discussion of Akerman's theme of the impossible
choice, in her short film Le Demenagement (Moving in, 1992). In Night
and Day, Akerman suggests the possibility of circumventing the natural
cycle (day followed by night), as well as the choice of a lover: Julie, who
goes from one lover by day to another at night, does not sleep. The film's
outcome supposes a form of personal victory for her-a nomadic, nonattached
way of life. But what the film makes even clearer is how this construction
of a deterritorialized life depends on the alogical formulations of
Akerman's dialogues. My discussion of La Demenagement's verbal conundrums
furthers an understanding of how the protagonist's rejection of
choice reflects Akerman's formalliminality.
Akerman's extended takes, radical ellipses. dialogue-qua-monologues,
compressed actions, and abrupt cuts are no formal play. Her stylized, concrete
mise-en-scenes defy ideal figurations. Akerman delimits scene and
obscene not only in her choices of what to elide and what to represent, but
in her insistence on the materiality of her performers. As I shall demonstrate,
it is the stylized quality of her representations and her exaggerated
focus on material bodies-both cinematic (sound, texture) and physical
(the performers)-that defines her corporeaJ cinema and her particular
status in the realist-modernist paradigm that Nothing Happens sets up.
Godard once provoked Akerman by saying that while she always referred
to her filmmaking in terms of inscription and writing, he used terms
more appropriate to cinema and photography, such as "develop," "show,"
and "record." Akerman's answer is telling: "You say that there aren't im-
20 Nothing Happens
ages already inscribed and I say that yes there are images already inscribed,
and it is exactly under those that I work: over the inscribed image
and the one I would love to inscribe."61 Nothing Happens traces the shift
from showing to inscribing-from the recording impulse of neorealist aesthetics
to the subversive energy ofWarhol's minimal/hyperrealist production
of simulacra. Godard's modernist phenomenology is undoubtedly an
important link in this shift, which reflects a move away from a beliefin the
anteriority of reality, a move toward representation. Indeed one need only
think of Godard's fascination with Henry Fonda's face in Hitchcock's The
Wrong Man in the '50s, and ofhis pop sensibility in Breathless and Alphaville
in the '60s, to note the cultural and historical shift that in the late '60s
and '70s would lead to Akerman's and a few others' corporeal cinemas,
where the neorealists' or direct cinema's romantic investment in reality
is intercepted by the ineluctable knowledge of film's representational
nature.
This double-layered cinema allows only inscription. It is not an idealist
cinema; though utterly ascetic, it prizes materiality. In this cinema, in fact,
the quality ofpresence wavers precisely because ofits materiality, because
of the excess produced in it by hyperbole and redundance. The radical
figuration of this excess is the American experiment with real-time representation:
Warhol's films are the signpost to a corporeal cinema in which
the concreteness ofboth the filmic body and the bodies represented eludes
the very Idea ofMateriality. At the same time that text is perverted by tone,
and that gesture is doubled by dialogue, the works of Rohmer, Dreyer,
Bresson, and Akerman create an extramateriality, a surplus I call, for lack
of a better term, "theatricality." The term emphasizes that this cinema
works its principal effect on the ever fragile link between artifice and
nature-the figure and body ofthe performer.
Akerman's contribution to this antinaturalistic corporeal cinema involves
the blunt, unavoidable acknowledgment of a gendered body. A
woman's gestures are simultaneously recognized and made strange. Our
attention turns to a different pace, a different rhythm, and it remains for us
to determine where this distinction lies. It is finally the dry intensity of
bodies traversed by the mechanisms of cinema that moves me, and moves
me toward the singularity proposed by Chantal Akerman's films.
1 NOTHING HAPPENS
Time for the Everyday in Postwar
Realist Cinema
Thus the most realistic ofthe arts shares the cammon lot . .. reality must inevitably
elude it at SO/lW point.-Andre Bazin'
The everyday is platitude. ... but this banality is alsa what is mast important.
It brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity and as it is lived . .. it escapes
every speculative formulation. perhaps all coherence. all regularity.-Maurice
Blanchol2
"Nothing happens": this definition of the everyday is often appended to
films and literature in which the representation's substratum of content
seems at variance with the duration accorded it. Too much celluloid, too
many words, too much time, is devoted to "nothing of interest." The precariousness
of this extremely relative defin!tion is more than a matter of
taste. If the word "boring" has little critical value, after World War II the
phrase "Nothing happens" becomes increasingly charged with a substantive,
polemical valence.
In the immediate postwar period in Europe, as social reality became a
concrete experience of subsistence (as opposed to the more immediate
life-or-death concerns of the war years), the everyday seemed a more-thanworthy
subject. The quotidian of De Sica's or of Zavattini's neorealism,
characterized by the discovery of heroism in anonymous, urban, lowermiddle-class
and white-collar protagonists, is, however, quite different
from the quotidian of Rossellini's Louis XlV. And it also differs from the
22 Nothing Happens
quotidian distilled from the answers to the loaded existentialist query,
"How happy are you with your life?"-the question that Rouch and Edgar
Morin ask in the series of interviews in their Chronicle of a Summer
(1960). My interest is in the way some filmmakers negotiate the link between
the banal or quotidian and the political, and in the shifts in discursive
ground that allow for such different approaches to everyday life.
Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, of
course, figures as a major text in any consideration of the modernist approach
to the quotidian. The label "Nothing happens," often applied to
Akerman's work, is key in defining that work's specificity-its equation of
extension and intensity, of description and drama.
The inscription of subject matter neglected in traditional film tends to
involve a corrective thrust, a setting straight of the image bank: if conventional
cinema contains too few positive images of women and ethnic or
other minority groups, it becomes the realist filmmaker's task to represent
these groups. The inclusion of such "images between images" begets a
spatio-temporal, as well as moral expansion ofcinema.
The interest in extending the representation ofreality reflects a desire to
restore a phenomenological integrity to reality, or to dig up some covert
causal or psychological motivational structure. Haunting the interest in
a repressed or unrepresented reality is the idea of a hidden totality. It
seems intrinsic to the "corrective thrust" of realism, then, that the effort
should fall prey to a form of essentialism. Realist films entail more than
a "documentary" record of reality; as we analyze them, it becomes clear
that they seek adequacy in two main functions: first, to act as visual,
aural analogies with perceptual reality, and second, to fulfill a notion of
representativeness.
This second notion (addressed in my discussion of type in chapters 4
and 5) relates most directly to the prescription that any event or character
presented will have a social dimension. The requirement complicates
matters interestingly in confronting the inevitable reduction implicit in
any filmic representation: how is one to represent a general idea, collectivity,
or moral through the always indexical and particularizing powers of
image and sound? This question (theoretically and practically addressed
by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and expressionist and cinema novo
filmmakers, among others) becomes especially pertinent when the director
wants to avoid making association and symbolic leaps, and to fend off
an impulse toward allegory-as in, for example, the version of realism
represented by neorealism, and in the films of Warhol and those of Akerman.
What is of interest for us here is the way that a consideration of the
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 23
"images between images" can shape a transformative realism as well as an
alternate notion of type, invalidating the essentialist question of a reality
prior to representation.
The emphasis on dramatic equivalence between major and minor events
that Bazin finds in neorealism" directly recalls the formal structure of
Jeanne Dielman. Given the obvious disparities between films such as Umberlo
D (1950), organized by the conventions of analytic editing, and
Jeanne Dielman, which resolutely avoids point-of-view structuring, one
has to account for the particularities of contexts ('50s humanism and '70s
micropolitics, for example) and styles (social melodrama and minimalist
narrative) that set these dedramatized cinemas apart. While both projects
equate the mundane and the dramatic, they can easily serve radically
different agendas.
Typical of neorealist attention to the marginal discourse is a certain
idealism. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman disables romantic connotations by
giving to the mundane its proper, and heavy, weight and by channeling the
disturbing effect of a minimal-hyperrealist style into a narrative with definite
political resonances. Her attention to a subject matter ofsocial interest
is literal-fixed frame, extended take-and so stylized as almost to be
stilted. In this way, she denotes the idea of display itself; her cinema
focuses hyperbolically on what Cesare Zavattini claimed as the main requirement
of neorealist cinema-"social attention."· Indeed, in Jeanne
Dielman this focus is quite extreme. Hans Jiirgen Syberberg, Godard,
Roberto Rossellini, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, among
others, have all interpreted the demand for "social attention" as interchangeable
with a temporal filmic focus on a single scene, situation, problem;5
but the relentless frontality of Akerman's display of "social attention"
stilI surprises.
Along with extended duration the quotidian is undoubtedly the signifier
par excellence of the realistic impulse. The possibility of covering
the events evoked by the notion of the quotidian is, as we shall see, the
main lure for tho realist desire. Indeed, with various different emphases,
what marks the anti-idealist move in postwar culture is the privileging of
everyday life. The accent on the everyday-on nonspecialized labor, private
life, unstructured or extrainstitutional activity or thought-as well as
on the underlying materiality and concreteness of cinematic elements,
provides the traditional conjunction of modernism, realism, and politics.
In the period between neorealism and Akerman's films, the intrusion of
extraneous elements, or of a different tempo (when the minor event receives
an attention involving expanded duration), was shaped as a reality
24 Nothing Happens
surplus, a reality effect. In the films of this period, a number of strategies
clearly function to make the everyday and material reality the signifier of
the Real: the temporal equality accorded both significant and insignificant
events; the programmatic foregrounding of materiality and visual concreteness
(Robert Bresson, Straub and Huillet, Akerman); the use of amateur
actors (De Sica, Zavattini, Jean Rouch, Rossellini); the reenactment of
one's own experience (Zavattini, Antollioni, Rouch); and the use of real,
literal time to depict events (Warhol, Akerman). That the quotidian generally
resists direct representation in conventional cinema allows it to promise
a "reserve" available to the realistic impulse. This reserve is precisely
what realist cinema's various attempts at literalness or verisimilitude offer..
As Maurice Blanchot writes, at first, the quotidian is defined in the
negative, as, most immediately, the slice of life that is usually considered
unworthy of narration. Whatever escapes denomination as some other
part of life-work, leisure, etc.-confronts narration with a stubborn "stationary
movement."6 Yet this "unnamable" serves a basic function: "to
participate in the diverse figures of True, ... in the becoming of what
occurs either below (economic and technical change) or above (philosophy,
poetry, politics)."7
What interests me here is the variety ofways in which the "unnamable"
concept of the quotidian attained importance between the mid '40s and
the mid '70s, while accumulating different connotations, different nodules
of expressiveness. Umberto D, Two or Three Things I Know about Her
(1966), and Akerman's work all chart a period in which phenomenology,
existentialism, semiology, the Annales school, and feminism all in one
way or another claimed the everyday as their object (or banner).
Charting the Everyday in Postwar Europe
Between the mid '40s and the mid '70s, questions of social reality and the
everyday took vivid cinematic forms to represent a new focus of the postwar
period-the privileging of materiality, of concrete existence and of
social solidarity. Those concerns were tied not only to a generic humanist
feeling, but to a Marxist sensibility geared toward analyzing material
conditions.
The general critical interest in foregrounding minor events and occurrences
is worth examining. Henri Lefebvre was the first to instill the
notion of everyday life with theoretical currency; a Marxist, Lefebvre
published the first volume of his Introduction a une critique de 1a vie
quotidienne in 1947.8 Annales historian Fernand Braudel's "The Situation
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 25
ofHistory in 1950" suggests, following the work ofMarc Bloch and Lucien
Febvre, that history needs to go beneath the surface ofpolitical events. The
analyses of a history developing in a slow-paced rhythm-the longue
duree-as well as the careful study ofthe fabric ofthe everyday life become
the material for a New History that develops into the seventies. And Bazin's
writings on cinematic realism appeared during the same postwar
moment, suggesting a shared interest in everyday life on the part of cultural
historians, sociologists, and critics.
The quotidian in this discussion occupies a double space: it is both the
utopian space of change (what Lefebvre calls the "festival") and the elusive
other in need of disclosure. In its very indefinability, its dissemination
in the social fabric, it is the core of revolutionary potentiality. It
"emerges," Lefebvre writes, "as a sociological point of feedback with a
dual character": "it is the residuum (of all the possible specific and specialized
activities outside social experience) and the product of society
in general; it is the point of delicate balance and that where imbalance
threatens."9 The situationist Guy Debord addresses this point "where imbalance
threatens" in his "Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday
Life," a talk he gave through a tape recorder in the "Conference of
the Group for Research on Everyday Life," convened by Lefebvre in 1961.
There Debord talks about the "useless, vulgar and disturbing concept of
everyday life": "What makes for the difficulty ofeven recognizing a terrain
of everyday life is not only the fact that it has already become the ...
meeting ground of an empirical sociology and a conceptual elaboration;
but also the fact that it ... happens to be the stake in any revolutionary
renewal ofculture and politics."10 Perhaps it is its resistance to conceptual
representation that leads everyday life to be "policed and mystified by
every means," to serve as "a sort ofreservation for good natives who keep
modern society running without understanding it."ll
Debord wrote these words at a time when the everyday had become the
ground of a continual revolution, when to consider the concept of the
everyday "would imply the necessity ofan integral political judgement."12
By May 1968, a suspicion of representation, and of any form of social
representativeness, encompassed every institution, including that of art
cinema. Raoul Vaneigem, for instance, a member of the Situationist International,
claimed that "Godard is to film what Lefebvre or Morin are to
social critique: ... [Aragon's or Godard's collagesl are nothing other than
an attempt to interpret "detournement" in such a way as to bring about its
recuperation by the dominant culture."13
Aside from a territorial controversy (as to what art can resist commodifi-
26 Nothing Happens
cation), what is ofinterest here is the role ofthe quotidian as a space where
noninstitutionalized practices can unfold. The utopian dimension of the
everyday seems to lie precisely in its resistance to institutionalization. At
the same time, of course, the very attempt to frame the everyday brushes
against the conventional sense of everydayness as repetitious routine. The
quotidian stands, then, both for material reality and for the impossibility
fully to account for it, to represent it. Hence the desire to represent materiality
either concretely, by exacerbating cinematic elements, or thematically,
by inscribing the signs of this reality (banal events, mundane gestures,
actions irrelevant to the plot), becomes the trademark of a realist
impulse.
In historicizing the interest in everyday life, Lefebvre relates how, in the
period immediately after World War II, the hopes for a "second liberation"-the
"social change that was to follow ... in the footsteps of politicalliberation"-had
miscarried: "The workers were being dispossessed of
their consciousness and attempts to build a new society based on this
consciousness had not succeeded."14 Moreover, the model for a "new society"
had been thrown in disrepute by the identification of Stalinist socialism
with totalitarianism. During the postwar reconstruction in France,
economic and social regeneration were mistakenly taken as the "building
of a new society." What was actually happening was an increasing social
bureaucratization, a process that included the Communist Party. Given the
polarization effected by the cold war, however, Marxist intellectuals had
trouble openly admitting that both Stalinist and Communist Party policies
were informed by totalitarianism, and geared their energy instead toward
analyzing the failure of postwar revolutionary consciousness: alienated
consciousness in capitalist society. This analysis demanded a rethinking
ofthe vesting ofrevolutionary energies in a working class that noticeably
shared the aspirations ofthe bourgeoisie.
The perception ofa new postwar society led intellectuals to reformulate
humanism, Lefebvre writes, in a way that "did not aspire to enlist rhetoric
and ideology in the cause of a reform of superstructures (Constitution,
State, Government) but to 'alter existence.' "15 It was this new humanism
that animated existentialism in its more popular and widespread version,
visualizing the everyday as a space of continual commitment and choice.
In a way, then, the energy around the concept of the everyday was nourished
by disillusionment and disappointment over the rampant institutionalization
of power after the war, in the spheres of leftist politics and
academia as elsewhere.
Lefebvre's revision of his inaccurate understanding of capitalism as a
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 27
localized (affecting mostly the infrastructure) rather than a widespread
force went hand in hand with the emergence of critical terms geared toward
capitalist society as a whole: consumer society, the "bureaucratic society
of controlled consumption" (Lefebvre, 1971). the "compartmentalization
of everyday life." Earlier, romantic notions of the worker as bearer
of revolutionary consciousness-because closer to the sphere of nonspecialized
labor and therefore more prone to alienation-were gradually
replaced. In a self-critique in his Everyday Life in the Modern World,
Lefebvre remarked that "the theory of everyday life had become contaminated
by a form of populism.... It implied both an obsession with the
working classes ... and a philosophical obsession with the genuineness
concealed within the ambiguity ofexperience" (my italics).16 To renounce
the myth of the working class, and other exploited groups, as exempt from
bourgeois or capitalist values was perhaps the greatest step toward the
acknowledgment of, and direct confrontation with, the recuperating force
of capitalist society, prompting an understanding of alienation that went
far beyond the context of labor. Incorporating Hegel's notion of alienation
as subjective misrecognition (minus that notion's idealist contours), critics
could see alienation as implicated in the very formation of subjective
consciousness.17
It is significant that the simultaneous efforts to redirect attention to
material phenomena and to the movement of consciousness, to a worldly
situation and to individual commitment and choice, had everyday life as
their shared ground. It is indeed the everyday that allows for the precarious
marriage of existentialism and Marxism. For both, at their most
generous theoretical stretches, daily life is the arena where consciousness
(class or subjective) and material reality need to be confronted. A recurring
myth, however, lurks behind every new conceptualization of the everyday:
that of some essential truth yet to be represented. The perceptual
horizons of this myth are sketched above in the link between theories of
everyday and the "philosophical obsession with the genuineness concealed
within the ambiguity of experience." In slightly different arrangements
these words reappear promoting the necessary affinity of cinema
and phenomenology.
A Realism of Surfaces: Bazin and Neorealist Film
In "Film and the New Psychology" (1947), Maurice Merleau-Ponty defends
the idea of such an affinity by remarking on the evidence, supposedly
provided by cinema, of the permeation of subject and world. As a
28 Nothing Happens
perceptual object, he claims, a film can be associated with Gestalt theory,
because "the movies ... directly present to us that special way ofbeing in
the world ... which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze
and which clearly defines each person we know. "18 Later, Merleau-Ponty
expands on the indissolubility of mind and body and the timeliness of
Gestalt theory as a break with classical psychology. Likewise, "phenomenological
or existential philosophy is largely an expression of surprise at
this inherence of the self in the world and in others, ... and an attempt to
make us see the bond between subject and world ... rather than to explain
it as the classical philosophies did. "19 This argument encapsulates a recurring
assumption in the realist rhetoric that persisted until Godard: the idea
that description can be used to fend off conceptualization, as an access to
and envisioning of the object and its inherence in the world. MerleauPanty's
defense of the use of existential terminology in analyzing film is
capped, for instance, with the phrase "because this is movie material par
excellence."zo Arguing that film is in harmony with (phenomenological or
existential) philosophy, Merleau-Ponty defends a notion echoed in the
writings of Rossellini, Zavattini, and Bazin, among others:z1 Zavattini, for
example, states, "No other expressive medium has, as cinema, this originary
and congenital capacity of photographing things that ... deserve to be
shown in their quotidianeity, meaning in their longer, truer duration; the
machine ... sees things and not their concept. "Z2 The parallel between
existential philosophy, phenomenology, and cinema, then, is based on
their shared avoidance ofbeing a "showcase for ideas."
Bazin, the main propounder of an ontology of realist film, expounds on
depth offield as a spatial correlate ofthe temporality of the long take, for
"it confirms the unity of actor and decor, the total interdependence of
everything real."n As Annette Michelson points out in her introduction to
Noel Burch's Theory ofFilm Practice, this privileging of the long take and
of depth of field places Bazin's writings in a precise cultural and political
climate: "The viewer, unguided by an assertive style, proceeds in time to
apprehend the donnees ofthat field, by implication rehearsing through the
experience of film viewing the existential situation of being-in-the-world,
'choosing in ambiguity.' "24 Michelson's use of expressions culled from
existentialism and phenomenology locates the philosophical basis of
Bazin's unequivocal endorsement of ambiguity, which he proposes as a
correlate of the fluidity both of perception and of reality.
Bazin's writings uphold Amedee Ayfre's statements in his article "Neorealism
and Phenomenology,"25 where he suggests that Rossellini and a
few others have tried, like Husserl, to "go ... to things themselves....
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 29
their approach as filmmakers runs an opposite course to that of analysis....
ceasing to delve subtly into 'characters' and 'milieux' ... and in
a sense attempting a total apprehension which is sequentially complete
like existence in time."26 Besides endorsing Ayfre's position, the style of
Bazin's writings suggests an undecidability and an incompleteness that
parallel his privileging of ambivalence. In fact, his prose recalls the thrust
and tone of phenomenologkal description: the movements by which he
tracks the object delineate the problematics of objectivity without confronting
them,27 a trait explored by Jacques Derrida in a fine critique of
phenomenology which clarifies the philosophical grounds of this avoidance,
and suggests both the benefits and the costs of the embrace of ambiguity.
Actually, the phenomenological substratum of Bazin's writings reveals
some of the same operations that, for Derrida, characterize Husserl's
enterprise: phenomenological description is predicated on an obfuscation
of the dichotomy between "structure" and "genesis." This unquestioned
dichotomy creates a "philosophy of essences always considered in their
objectivity, intangibility, their apriority: but, by the same token, it is a
philosophy of experience, of becoming, of the temporal flux of what is
lived which is the ultimate reference."28 Veiled by the "serene use ofthese
concepts [of structure and genesisi," Derrida says, is a "debate that regulates
and gives its rhythm to the progression of description ... and whose
incompleteness, which leaves every major stage of phenomenology unbalanced,
makes new reductions and explications indefinitely necessary. "29
This need for new reductions and explications is the supplement animating
any essentialist approach to reality, and inspiring Bazin's wish for
(and deferral of) totality. His writings are characterized by a swinging
motion between, on the one hand, granting the object an a priori existence
to be unveiled by a transparent record and, on the other, continuously
deferring definition in favor of the shifting movements of perception. As
Philip Rosen notes, Bazin's "often noted belief in reality'S 'ambiguity'
works, among other things, to refuse the finality of constant criteria."30
And this refusal allows the subject's continuing investment in "satisfying
his 'obsession with realism.' "31
A grasp of the ambivalent status of description in both art and philosophy
is crucial in understanding modern cinematic realism as well as the
rhetoric of fidelity put forth by Rosselini's statements and Bazin's writings.
In nineteenth-century realism, description must reconcile classical
notions of "coherence and global organization" (aesthetic) with "the influence
of non-literary theories (sociological, biological, anthropological,
etc.) that affirm that the individual is subject to dependence on his en-
30 Nothing Happens
vironment."32 Speaking of Rossellini, Bazin neatly confuses these two
modes of causality as if narrative merely followed the demands of reality:
"It is perhaps especially the structure ofthe narrative which is most radically
turned upside down. It must now respect the actual dumtion of the
event." [my italicsp3 Bazin hesitates, then, in submitting the subversion of
narrative structure to aesthetics, leaning instead toward an "anthropological
causality." The critic nevertheless comes across a bothersome detail:
the cut. "The cuts that logic demands," Bazin writes, "can only be, at best,
descriptive."34 Equating a disjunctive representation to a fragmentary reality,
he suggests that in Rossellini's films, ellipses imply actual lacunae in
reality, or in our knowledge ofreality. Deftly construing a fallacious analogy
between two different orders of reality, Bazin performs the classical
misconstruction informing any essentialist realism. He blatantly evades
the issue oflanguage as a medium with a reality of its own.
An important variant of this essentialist realism is exemplified in the
positivism of sociological practices that embraced the new technology of
film for its research.35 The gap can only exist in filmic approaches such as
observational cinema if it is perceived as a direct correlate of a faltering
reality. As John Marshall and Emile de Brigard claim in "Idea and Event in
Urban film," "Film can follow small events closely, letting them take their
own time and produce their own content. The result is a sequence notable
for the lack ofconceptual and contextual framework which other forms of
film attempt to supply."36 This notion of sequence filming agrees with
Bazin's conception that spatio-temporal continuity can preserve the unity
of an event or act. Deployed in the controversy around the issue of objectivity
in collecting data, these arguments are clearly defensive in presenting
film as a recording medium for the social sciences. Their rhetoric
of instrumentality shows how issues of filmic continuity are subsidiary
to broader questions of avoiding.a "conceptual" or "contextual" interference.
To Colin Young, observational cinema differs from "simple notetaking"
in that "the final film can represent the original event or situation
directly. The filming process can be as much like observation as
possible."37
Crossing various epistemological fields (ethnography, history, sociology,
etc.), the idea of the "truth of vision" in Western literate culture entails
an entire set ofmetaphors that presuppose a process ofobjectivity and
objectification.38 This "truth of vision" is manifested in cinema as a positivistic
faith in film's technical neutrality. This faith experienced an upsurge
with the development of direct sound recording in the early '60s,
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 31
which allowed both American direct cinema and French cinema verite to
assert a claim as records of reality, basing their procedures on a notion
of truth as palpable, "visible" (and audible) evidence. This visualist approach
extends into cinema verite's attempts to present the filmmaker's
own subjectivity as concrete "image": since it is a condition of "truth" in
cinema verite that the diegesis encompass the cinematic process itself, the
interview situation itself may become part ofthe film's imagery, in image,
voice, or camera axis, signaling the attempt to represent the shadow side of
filmmaking-the filmmaker's own presence.39
The residual subjectivity muffled in verite practices appears mostly to
emphasize the filmmaker's heroic hardship in getting behind the public
person (in the case of direct cinema) or to the person's truth core (in verite
practices).4o The naIvete of direct cinema's fear of the spoken as actual
interference-in Nehru (1962) Ricky Leacock verbally announces a pact of
noninterference, i.e. he will not ask questions of Nehru-confirms this
genre's positivistic faith in imagery. In addition, it makes clear the arena in
which the authenticity of documentary is finally waged. In French cinema
verite, it is the order of speech that negotiates the legitimacy of the film as
relatively independent from ethical issues of interference. As subjectivity
is objectified, represented as image and sound, mediation is cleansed of
the guilty conscience of the documentarists. And what better place to get
rid of this guilt than through a technological apparatus converted (as it
privileges speech) into a confessional chamber? In addition, synchronized
sound's tendency to create an alternation of statement with doubt or hesitation
is seen as authenticating the fact that a presence is fully represented.
As it evades editing, speech that is now fluent, now faltering circuitously
confirms the contiguity of cinematic apparatus and the reality facing the
camera. In a film in which hesitations and silences are left intact, the
issue of authorial control is elided. Marks of interference are avoided,
and the process of editing and choice is in a way bracketed. The truth of
this cinema is moral and depends mostly on recording the emergence of
conscience.41
Bazin's description of the neorealist use of ellipsis, and the emphasis in
Chronicle ofa Summer on hesitations, mistakes, and so on, are versions of
this notion of a representational analogue that merely reproduces an incomplete
reality, a reality still in the making.
The gap might also work, within a different aesthetic agenda, as a signifier
of cinematic materiality, pointing to an explicit artistic artifice. In
his analysis of Bresson's Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Bazin shows the
32 Nothing Happens
stakes ofa modern realism. In this film, Bresson amplifies sound to make it
concrete and referential, a strategy Bazin reads as a stylistic choice creating
an interplay of abstraction and concreteness:
The rain, the murmur ofthe waterfall, the ... hooves ofthe horses on
the cobblestones, are not there just as a contrast to the simplification
ofsets ... [or tol the literary and anachronistic flavor ofthe dialogue.
They are not needed either for dramatic antithesis or for contrast in
decor. They are there deliberately as neutrals, as foreign bodies, like a
grain ofsand that gets into and seizes up a piece ofmachinery.42
Bazin and Roland Barthes (in "The Reality Effect," 1968), sift with similar
critical finesse through the narratives of modern realist cinema and literature,
looking for the impure and concrete element that will create a gap, a
rupture with conventional forms of verisimilitude. The "detail" for Barthes
is the "irrelevant event," for Bazin the "grain ofsand that gets into and
seizes up a piece ofmachinery." Barthes's critical essays are turned toward
exposing the illusions ofreferentiality; Bazin's are packed with the mounting
contradictions ofexposing how the real is constructed at the same time
that they minimize the role of cinematic mediation. Both writers embrace
ruptures and divergences from functional narrative as signs ofa new, modern
verisimilitude. To acknowledge the points of contact between the
structural semiotician's and the realist critic's investment on referentiality,
allows one to grasp more fully the nuances of cinemas involved with
realist representation. It allows one to perceive the shared ground of neorealism
and Godard's work. Godard's descriptive excursions, for instance,
function both as expansions of the diegetic reality-in their attention to
overseen, nonrepresented realities-and as reminders of the structural
place occupied by the Barthesian "irrelevant event," the gap.
Although still operative in films, by the mid '60s the myth of unmediated
reality is theoretically (and at times practically) in question. The idea
ofthe "inherent" phenomenological yielding ofthe truth in film is put on
hold. An oscillation between a belief in the values of reference and a
critique ofthe "referential illusion" frames most ofthe French and American
avant-garde film culture of the '60s. Within and outside narrative
projects, the illusion of a continuum in representation is challenged. The
versions of radical cinema represented by Godard and Alain Resnais (in
their fiercely eclectic shifts ofreferential ground), Stan Brakhage and Peter
Kubelka (in their expressive and structural projects), constitute, among
several others, examples ofan active bracketing ofreferentiality.
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 33
From Surface to Structure: Barthes, Godard,
and the Textualization of Reality
By the mid '50s, description assumes a polemical role, expounded in
the theories around the nouveau roman, the "new novel." Alain RobbeGrillet,
in For a New Novel, relentlessly questions the humanist bent of
the traditional novel. His fiercest attacks are directed at notions of literary
analogy, which he sees as infected by a "pananthropic" notion. For
Robbe-Grillet, not surprisingly, nature and its myths are "clogged" by anthropomorphic
language.43 Quoting Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre's La
Nausee-"All the objects that surrounded me were made ofthe same substance
as myself, of a kind of shoddy suffering"-Robbe-Grillet concludes,
"Drowned in the depth ofthings, man ultimately no longer even perceives
them: his role is soon limited to experiencing, in their name, totally humanized
impressions and desires."" Instead, Robbe-Grillet proposes a
description that records "the distance between the object and myself and
the distances of the object itself (its exterior distances, i.e., its measurements)."
This proposal comes down to "establishing that things are here
and that they are nothing but things each limited to itself."
As description is questioned as a methodology-does it reveal its object
or create it?-there is a parallel shift of interest from a humanistically informed
subject matter to a concern with structures. This shift-represented
in philosophy by structuralism, in psychoanalysis by Lacan, and in film by
approaches such as Godard's-participates in the general demand for an
analysis of everyday life and alienated existence. Perhaps this need is
justified by the very nature of structure. As Poster points out, "Structures
made tbeir effects through their absences.... one is aware of buying this
object in the store, not ofthe structure of commodities."45
Barthes's Mythologies (1957) explicitly attempts to make this structuring
absence somehow visible. The significance of Barthes's book lies both
in its focus on everyday activities as refracted by media-i.e., already seen
as spectacle and commodity-and in its need to decode such subjects as
wrestling matches, Garbo's face, ornamental cookery, soap powders and
detergents, and other myths as languages. The critical approach that Barthes
proposes leans on semiology, unveiling the "natural given" as a historical
construct.
With the expansion of the interest in subjecting reality to textual examination,
using semiology as a bridge, cultural critics perceive the notion of
the everyday as complicit with consumer society and its figures of specta-
34 Nothing Happens
de and visibility (Le., the devices through which that society makes itself
amenable to desire, in advertising, fashion, and so on). The mass media are
seen to epitomize the diffuse powers of alienation in the quotidian. In a
more historicizing vein than Barthes's Elements of Semiology and Mythologies,
Lefebvre sketches, through the precarious semiological term
"collapse of referentials," what he sees as the disintegration of everyday
life. For him, the process starts in the early twentieth century and attains
its apogee during the postindustrial period of the mid '50s and early '60s:
"The enormous amount of signifiers liberated or insufficiently connected
to their corresponding signifieds (words, gestures, images and signs), and
thus made available for advertising and propaganda: a smile as the symbol
of everyday happiness."46
Given the massive industrialization that the production of household
goods had undergone by the early '60s, along with the new media pressure
to participate in the market, Marxist critics such as Lefebvre and Jean
Baudrillard (Le systeme des objets, 1968, Pour une critique de l'economie
politique du signe, 1972) found themselves forced to analyze the change in
the relation between man and product. As Michel de Certeau puts it in his
introduction to The Practice ofEveryday Life, consumption, "an activity
that is unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolized," becomes the cultural!
economic production of nonproducersY The writings of both Lefebvre
and Baudrillard retain a nostalgic tinge: the first author privileges speech
as the single realm ofunity between sign and meaning, the second sets his
analysis of functionality and serially produced objects against a moment
when objects still retained some relation with human, natural time. (The
time a tree takes to grow, for instance, sustains the symbolic value of
wooden furniture.) To address the social changes manifest after World
War II, both Lefebvre and Baudrillard refer to a lost moment, when society
relied more on artisanal production.48
Even before postmodern writers celebrate the idea ofnondiscrimination
between levels of authenticity, one witnesses a relatively simpler acknowledgment
of the pervasiveness of representation in social life. This
recognition, exemplified in Godard, corresponds to a historical moment in
which a humanist Marxism still envisages a critical gesture that might
transform society. Godard's jumbling of different referential registers in
his cinematic textures is situated at this juncture; his work absorbs the
critical analysis ofthe disjunction between sign and referent performed by
Lefebvre and Barthes, along with phenomenology's fascination with the
"inherence of man in the world" defended by Merleau-Ponty. Godard's
apparently contradictory fascination with and demystification of the sur-
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 35
face of things can be read through this critical nexus. For implicit in the
critique of "the collapse of referentials" carried on by both Lefebvre and
Barthes is a romantic longing: Barthes's "third meaning" or "obtuse meaning,"
in its purposive praise of ambivalence (of how much more one can
read into an image), can be aligned with the inscrutable face of Henry
Fonda as Godard describes it in his early writings (an analysis inflected in
its turn by Bazin's phenomenology). Discussing Alfred Hitchcock's The
Wrong Man, Godard writes,
Reaction shot and long close-up of Henry Fonda, staring abstractedly,
pondering, thinking, being.... The beauty ofeach ofthese close-ups,
with their searching attention to the passage of time, comes from
the sense that necessity is intruding on triviality, essence on existence....
Its only criterion is the exact truth. We are watching the
most fantastic of adventures because we are watching the most perfect,
the most exemplary, of documentaries.49
By the early '60s, the critique of consumption takes on the ironic shape
of pop art, which Godard's cinema brilliantly assimilates in a clear grasp of
the double register of images. In subscribing to the regime of quotation, in
reproducing images (posters, fashion photos, outdoor shots, etc.) as opposed
to reality, Godard's cinema, from Breathless (1959) to Alphaville
(1965) and Made in USA (1966), sows the seed of a double referentiality
that later artists, in a different, postmodern frame, will purposefully blur
and make indistinct. Unlike Warhol's and Cindy Sherman's work, however,
Godard's films rather accentuate the borders between the different
realities they refer to, even when not calling attention to them explicitly. In
Two or Three Things, for example, Godard discusses the sorts of realities
he might be focusing on as the camera scans and analyzes potential subjects.
The critical anxiety of being unable to cover reality in its entirety is
transformed into a poetic semantic quest. Over images of Juliette's husband's
garage, Godard whispers in voice-over,
Are these really the words and the images I should employ? Are they
the only ones? Aren't there others? Do I speak too loud? ... Do I look
from too far or from too close? ... should one speak of Juliette or of
the leaves? Since it is impossible, anyway, to talk about both at the
same time ... let's say they both were swiftly trembling in this late
October afternoon.50
In Godard, the filmic and semantic vocabulary includes choice. This is a
far cry from Warhol's work, in which the camera stares seemingly unques-
36 Nothing Happens
tioningly, for what seems too long a time, at realities already loaded with
public status (the Empire State Building. say), or at would-be star performers.
Although Warhol's politics of banalizing meaning couldn't be
more distant from Godard's creation of a political meaning for the banal
and the quotidian, both directors' works are major signifiers of the limits of
the critical gesture in cinema.
Godard's critique of referential illusions and his simultaneous debt to
existentialism and semiotics will be discussed later in this book. We turn
now to another cinema involved in an equation of the dramatic and the
banal.
Beyond Cinematic Positivism: The Antirescue
Cinema of Andy Warhol
Zavattini, reporting an American film producer's description ofthe difference
between Hollywood and neorealist narrative, zealously and emphatically
corrects him by introducing no less than a cinematic ideal: he de-
mandsmore.
"This is how we (in Hollywood) would imagine a scene with an aeroplane.
The plane passes by ... a machine gun fires ... the plane
crashes ... and this is how you [neorealistsl would imagine it. The
plane passes by ... the plane passes by again ... the plane passes by
once more.... " He was right. But we have still not gone far enough. It
is not enough to make the aeroplane pass by three times: we must
make it pass by twenty times.51
Zavattini's rhetoric emerges in the order of excess. It is composed of exclamations:
"Today! Today! Today!"52 His interviews, notes, and articles
constantly repeat the need to repeat. The climax ofthis energy for analyzing
social fact lies in the director's plea that a film should follow the life of
a man to whom nothing happens for ninety minutes.
Implicit in Zavattini's plea is a call for a relation between theme and
form-between the quotidian and a "truer" temporal relation in representing
it. Such a relation might involve the pairing of routine activity with
some visual or narrative suggestion of recurrence, or with an attempt at
literal rendition. From repetition to representation in real, literal time, one
traverses a wide spectrum of narrative possibilities. In either case, what is
suggested is a surplus of reality. This surplus can be provided by the expansive
illusion ofrepetition-"She woke up, as she does any morning"-
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 37
or in that of a one-to-one relation between representation and reality: the
illusion of the unique or singular record, the literal representation.
While excess rules both Zavattini's inflammatory rhetoric and Warhol's
literal cinematic procedures, Zavattini's motto is not exactly answered by
the extended duration of films such as Warhol's Eat (1963), Kiss (1963),
Sleep (1963), etc., or for that matter by the daily activities depicted in real
time in Jeanne Dielman. Both Warhol and Akerman choose the literal
approach rather than the "iterative" representation (the deduction of a
recurrent series through the presentation of a single event). But there is a
crucial difference between, on the one hand, Akerman's and Warhol's excesses,
both a form of minimal hyperrealism, and, on the other, the expansive
thrust of neorealist narrative, which, for example, may try to signify
all unemployed Italians through a single character such as Umberto D. The
minimal-hyperrealist rendition undoes any idea of symbolic transcendence.
Besides injecting representation with the effect of a surplus of reality,
literal time robs it of the possibility of standing for something other
than that concrete instance.
For Zavattini, "no other medium of expression has cinema's original
and innate capacity for showing things that we believe worth showing, as
they happen day by day-in what we might call their 'dailiness,' their
longest and truest duration."5:1 This duration that he proposes as innately
cinematic is more appropriately seen as another figure of the 8xcess required
in the unending search for truth, an excess of the same order as the
ability Margaret Mead imagines a 360-degree camera might have to register
a vanishing tribe, or of the fixed camera she mentions in her discussion of
film's potential for objectivity: "The camera or tape recorder that stays in
one spot, that is not tuned, wound, refocused, or visibly loaded, does
become part of the background scene, and what it records did happen."54
Mead could not have known that she was advocating for her objective
record the same basic cinematic framing-the long fixed take-that would
reveal the amazing performances in Warhol's films, and would create the
rigid, distanced, albeit subjective perspective in Akerman's.
In Warhol, for instance, the issue of the degree of objectivity in representation
is moot. With an ethnographic sensibility (his films show the
interactions of a very specific "tribe"), Warhol undermines observational
and direct cinema by hyperbolizing, to the point of caricature, the very
basis of their existence: the notion of noninterference. He trades their
positive indexing of the ethic of noninterference for the equally ethical,
and in his case actively political, stance ofindifference. Merely by cnhanc-
38 Nothing Happens
ing duration, the fixity ofthe frame, and the intrusion of chance, he undermines
the belief underlying observational cinema and American direct
cinema that a measured closeness between subject and object guarantees
objectivity.55
Warhol's attack on the subject!object dichotomy is twofold. First, he
undermines the path of anthropological enterprise by deflating its pretext.
Once one chooses as one's object something already of known interest,
there is nothing to be discovered. Shrouded with prior representationsbeing,
in fact, banal, even cliched-the object makes no claim to be newly
unearthed or newly revealed in Warhol's films. It is a surface before he
records it in film. On screen, the Empire State Building comes "alive" only
in disallowing essence-comes alive as a simulacrum.
Second, Warhol's fixed camera and extended takes exaggerate the filmmaker's
usual interest in the subject to the point of blindness. If a fixed
camera in principle means noninterference, a zoom shot signals closeness;
from neorealism to observational cinema, from direct cinema and cinema
verite to Rossellini's didactic films, a savvy combination of long takes and
zooms represents the compromise between lack of mediation and genuine
interest. But Warhol overdoes these techniques, altogether discrediting
interest, as well as cinematic functionality. His aleatory zooms (in The
Chelsea Girls, 1966, Lonesome Cowboys, 1967, etc.) flaunt an arbitrariness
that comments retroactively on a whole range of essentialist quests in
cinema.
Warhol exposes the limits of the humanist perspective in cinema. He
defies it initially by suggesting a radical lack of empathy among filmmaker,
object, and spectator: the cinematic and the profilmic are purposefully
at odds, resulting either in a busy-The Chelsea Girls, Vinyl
(1965)-or a simplified-Sleep, Blow Job (1963)-arbitrariness that never
caters to the spectator. Warhol's forty-five-minute Eat, six-hour Sleep, and
eight-hour Empire (1964) resemble exaggerated responses to Zavattini's
plea for a film that would follow someone to whom nothing happens for
ninety minutes. After Warhol's attack on spectatorial comfort, Zavattini's
assertion, once bold in its privileging of"nothingness," seems too careful a
compromise: ninety minutes, after all, is the normal length of a commercial
feature. Warhol's films mock and subvert all the basic values associated
with neorealist "nothingness." Warhol's extended renditions of
cliche images create a different register through which to read neorealism's
narrativized phenomenology of the quotidian. His gaze allows no
space for the heroic. The changing backgrounds that, in neorealism, throw
the constancy of the hero into perspective is dropped. In place of a narra-
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 39
tive in which the humanist hero is outlined against a tokenistic surface of
varying sites and situations, Warhol proposes an antinarrative in which
variety issues from any object looked at long enough. Instead of cashing in
on the neglected and "irrelevant"-thc neorealist strategy-Warhol doubles
the banality of his objects by promoting an overvisibility where it is
superfluous. In overdoing his reductions (single themes filmed for extended
periods of time), Warhol excludes even the limited suggestiveness
of neorealism's policy of variegation and tokenism.
Bazin more than anyone sees realism to be at its best when it pursues
ideas of noninterference and the integrity of reality so as to enlarge the
perceptual field ofrepresentation. Hence he puts a moral value on the use
ofthe long take and depth of field at the expense ofmontage; for him, these
devices forgo artifice. Discontinuity and gaps constitute the main threats
to the flawless homogeneity of a cinema intended as an analogue to an
equally full reality. Taking this idea one step further, what matters is no
longer the actual physical integrity of representation-its lack of cuts-but
that it appear to be physically integral (as in Umberto D).56 Despite Bazin's
theories (but in accord with his aesthetic inclinations)' from Jean Renoir to
Rossellini, the textural integrity provided through the long take has been
less an assurance ofhomogeneity than the counterpoint to a mise-en-scene
intended to resist harmony. The long take here is meant not as an analogue
for reality but as one more element in a subtle weave of artifice and spontaneity,
of theatricality and realistic detail. Modern cinema's appropriation
of the long take is to be understood as the background for the emergence
of an "effect of reality," in Barthes's sense. The "irrelevant detail"
(Rossellini's term) appears best when set in an unfractured shot.
Warhol's literal representations foreclose on the differential play between
depth and surface that constitutes the truth of modernist cinema.
Rossellini, Renoir, Akerman, and other modernist realists use the qualities
of cinema to set up material clashes with idealized versions of reality.
Warhol establishes a forceful and arbitrary entropy of registers. One could
say that with Warhol, the materiality and concreteness that pop up in these
directors' films are drastically amplified as pure (and passive) resistance.
Warhol undoes the main knot underwriting their visions ofa truer cinema.
Where they invoke intention, he seems indifferent. His cinematic choices
are aprioristic, and provoke randomness of performance (in his scripted
films) and perceptual arbitrariness (in his early work). At the base of any
cinema engage is human interest. In Warhol, interest is challenged on all
fronts: the filmmaker is absent, the object is banal, the spectator is bored.
The spectator's confrontation with his or her own physical and mental
40 Nothing Happens
endurance delineates a cinema that has given up on the notions of truth
that sustain other alternative cinema (Akerman's included). But interest is
not simply traded for indifference, for the Warhol strategy puts forth a
politics of indifferentiation: identity wavers between representation and
reality, between acting and being, flickering constantly and unstably.
By contrast with Warhol's politics of indifference neorealism's and cinema
verite's search for authenticity in reenacting events seems hampered
by its desire to find a truth lying always beyond materiality, beyond the
body. As suggested, Warhol's undermining of search, effort, and intention
makes any cinematic approach seem lame before it even gets close to its
object. So his cinema never does get close: Warhol does not intend to "get
inside" the objects of his cinema (as Rouch would have it). Yet neither
does it search for a feeling of being "outside"-for an alienation effect, of
the kind that might give rise to a sudden empathy (as in Godard, Bresson,
and Rossellini). The literalness of Warhol's cinema qualifies these two
approaches. On the one hand, the event's radical duration on screen disallows
the equation of fissures in the illusion with truth. His work provokes
such a random surfacing of fissures-mistakes in performance (The
Chelsea Girls), shifts in address (Beauty #2, 1965), mixings of genres
(Lonesome Cowboys)-that a gap or error cannot be taken as more true than
articulated speech. On the other hand, his enhancement of cinematic materiality
is so pervasive as to defy the pedagogic thrust of a modernist
cinema intent on the disclosure of materiality (Godard and Straub and
Huillet being the main examples). Moreover, it is precisely through an
apparently unfissured surface, in a Bazinian sense, that Warhol shifts discontinuity
from the text onto the spectator's perception.
Neither Bazin's concept of an unfissured realist representation nor Warhol's
overturning of such a notion, however, responds fully to the neorealist
desire for totality. This essentialist conception leans on metonymic
expansion, which might dissect for us, for instance, the bedroom where
Umberto D sleeps, but might also create a physical and moral geography
that suggests a totality. In this respect, the attention to details, and the
presentation of sites and events as illustrative tokens, operates in neorealist
film in much the same way as the display oficonographic images works
to shape allegorical meanings in conventional cinema. In Bicycle Thieves,
all of Rome (or rather all of Italy and of the postwar world) is meant to be
represented by the syncretically woven neighborhoods and sites that Antonio
traverses. The wanderings of the characters in Umberto D or Bicycle
Thieves signify a solely "physical" coverage of reality only superficially:
here multiplicity-of spaces, of people-always reconvenes on a center,
The Everyday in Postwar Realist Cinema 41
sucked back to it by a human perspective that is represented in the films by
a human body, a hero. It is this heroic body, the generic postwar individual,
that Akerman's Jeanne Dielman takes to task. While Warhol substitutes
the character's body for the filmic body, transforming the one-to-one
nature of literal representation in an ultimate decentering of humanism,
Akerman proves how a body can flicker in and out of character (through a
kind of oscillati ng perception made possible by literal representation) and
still further a narrative.
Akerman's minimal hyperrealism, in so many ways similar to Warhol's.
makes a positive claim to tell a story; her equation of drama and everydayness
is made from within narrative. Moreover, it is in instituting another
sort ofhero(ine) that she mounts her blows on essentialist humanism. The
singularity of Akerman's Jeanne defies the generic humanism of Umberto
D or Antonio. The historical grounding of this sort of heroine is represented
at its best in Akerman's fusion of a minimalist hyperrealist sensibility
with an acute awareness of 70's micropolitics, and of feminism in
particular. And it is this awareness of the singularity of a woman's everydayness
that forms the backbone ofAkerman's corporeal cinema, a cinema
whose split concern with referentiality and cinematic materiality can be
examined in the context of other contemporaneous artistic practices.
2 TOWARD A CORPOREAL CINEMA
Theatricality in the '70s
I think his solution to the problem . .. is relevant because his work was representational.
The complicated involvement ofhis perception of exterior reality; his creation
ofa work which both represents and is something, hisrespectfor a lot oflevels
are exemplary to me.-Michael Snow on Cezanne.'
In my films I follow an opposite trajectory to that of the makers ofpolitical films.
They have a skeleton, an idea and then theyput on flesh: I have in the first place the
flesh, the skeleton appears later.-Chantal Akerman. 19752
Akerman's cinema is post-Godardian in sensibility. The filmmaker's opposition
of flesh to skeleton epitomizes the dichotomy between event and
structure, which animates the notion of a truthful, adequate representation
of reality during the '50s and '60s.3 More than merely privileging
experience, Akerman's corporeal metaphor indicates her concern with
going beyond the material and structural aspects ofcinema. Her interest in
human physicality has a weight that differs significantly from the aesthetics
ofsurface in modernist cinema.4
Akerman's hyperrealist cinema revises the modernist stress on materiality
at the expense ofreferentiality. Following the suggestion present in
Michael Snow's cinema and expressed in his appreciation for Cezanne,5
Akerman's assertion of a representational narrative disregards the '60s
indictment of the realist image.6 Her emphasis on the representational as
well as the material aspects of cinema suggests an alternative to both an
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 43
analogical realism (like neorealism, for instance) and a realism of ideas
(such as Jean-Luc Godard's anti-illusionistic project). Subordinating the
issue of anti-illusionism and its informing dyads (surface versus Renaissance
perspective, discourse versus story, etc.), she also breaks with the
resolute frontality (direct address) of certain trends in cinematic mod-
ernism.
Akerman works within the "fluctuation of emphasis from the concrete/
materialist to the naturalistlrealist."7 Explaining the fixity of her camera
in her structural documentary Hotel Monterey (1972), Akerman states the
main principle ofminimal and hyperrealist aesthetics: "When you look at
a picture, if you look just one second you get the information, 'that's a
corridor.' But after a while you forget it's a corridor, you just see that it's
yellow, red, lines: and then it comes back as a corridor."8
In Hotel Monterey and News from Home (1976), two of Akerman's films
made in New York under the influence of structural filmmaking, a fIxed
shot of an empty corridor or of a crowded subway car (human absence,
human presence) maps the range of possibilities of structural film. When
the elevator door opens onto an empty corridor in Hotel Monterey, the
image can be considered as a set of lines, colors, perspectival illusions.
When it opens into a hall full of people, the camera address is articulated
more interestingly, as a problem: this moment of mutual acknowledgment
intimates a register of performance for documentary structural film. The
dichotomy between two kinds of space (the elevator and the various
floors) is acknowledged only when the "shutter"-the elevator doors-is
open. This is also the point at which the dyad of viewer and object is
activated, in a mirroring effect. The camera is fIxed-in the elevator, or, in
News from Home, perpendicular to the opening doors of a moving subway
train, granting an ever-changing scenario, as new strangers encounter it.
The camera stubbornly addresses this obtrusive viewer, as briefly as the
contact of a glance or for as long as a stare.9 The relative closeness of the
hotel transients or subway riders to the camera turns into an example of
proxemics (the study of the social and psychological boundaries that define
the proper spaces between people in diverse situations). In News from
Home the camera "functions as a recording device in suspense."lO The
camera's potency is measured for some time; finally, it is revealed as too
insistent, when it forces a rider into the deep perspective of a whole subway
car, and even into the next car, until he vanishes from sight. In both
films, the fixed, oblivious camera creates both frame and impetus for the
emergence of performance and of camera address on the part of passersby.
That a layered dimension, usually of a performatic order, results from an
44 Nothing Happens
Subway passenger faces the camera before moving into the next car, News from
Home (1976). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of World Artists Release.
excessively dry cinema will be one of my claims regarding Akerman's
theatricality. Most immediately Akerman's theatricality refers to her privilege
to the profilmic. She has claimed that she does not make montage
films: "Before me, Dreyer, Bresson and even certain Japanese directors did
that. My work is close to other filmmakers regarding the use of the camera.
What I did in Jeanne Dielman are actions in real time: the fixed camera
is not, for me, that different from ... Warhol. "11 The fixed focus and
extended duration of Akerman's shots create a relatively stable texture
that allows one to perceive the disjunctions between body and character,
speech and script. The predictability of her methods of framing and cutting
forces one to attend instead to her mise-en-scene.
Still, Akerman's cinematic strategies, her extended scrutiny of a reduced
setup or a single character is itself far from neutral. Duration and the
sense ofrigor that derives from her unchanging compositions and limited
number of camera setups are crucial in establishing the feeling of a wavering
between "illusion" and "fact." Long takes, with little in the way of
action, elicit a hyperacute perception, in which one recognizes both the
image's literal and its representational aspects.
Discussing a scene in his 11 X 14 (1976). the minimalist filmmaker
Benning confirms this effect of duration:
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 45
Old woman faces the camera and hesitates to enter the elevator, Hotel Monterey
(1972). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of World Artists Release.
When you start to watch the smokestack scene it's obviously a smokestack
and you can apply particular meanings to that, even cliched
meanings like pollution or phallic symbol-but since it's on for seven
minutes and a half eventually you have to deal with it as swirling
grain on screen. Near the end of the scene, however, a plane comes
through, so that after you've begun to look at the image formally it's
reintroduced into the narrative lmy italics].'2
Thus sudden actions (the plane coming through), but also extended duration
itself (which, for example, can make the image Akerman discusses in
HoteJ Monterey come back as "corridor")' can eventually tip images back
to their representational function. A crucial quality of extended duration,
then, is this polarity ofreception.
The oscillation between (or rather coexistence of) representational and
literal registers can be further proposed as the hyperrealist factor intrinsic
to Akerman's cinema. Hyperrealism is understood here as a cinematic
translation ofthe effect of distance that results when a picture or sculpture
reproduces a subject which is already an image-when, for example, a
Richard Estes painting reproduces a photograph. There is a doubling effect
here: we are looking at an intermediary, frozen stage of reproduction,
46 Nothing Happens
A man crosses the subway platform and reveals the space perspective, News from
Home (1976). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of World Artists Release.
which subtly undoes referentiality, presenting it at a second degree of
removal. In some hyperrealist art, this distancing effect also results from
an exaggerated focus on apparently mundane details of reality, and from a
change of scale. The emphasis on surface details intimates an estrangement,
an excess-one sees more than one needs to in order to "read" the
image.
What are the exact terms of this effect's transference from plastic to
cinematic representation? How does cinema construe this distance that
pierces the referent? In the passage from untroubled realism to uncanny
hyperrealism, a principal device for the filmmaker is extended duration.
Hyperreality is attained through a fake impression of depth, the excess of
detail resulting from a fixed stare. At the core ofthe defamiliarizing hyperrealist
image, of its simulacrum effect, lies the hesitation between the
literal and the symbolic registers exemplified in the work of Benning and
Akerman, as well as in Warhol's and Michael Snow's cinema.
Warhol's minimal-hyperrealist cinema can be proposed as a layered,
material realism. Even when Warhol records a natural referent (for example
in Sleep, 1963) or a reality such as the Empire State Building, ridden
with prior representations, his exaggerated focus always tips representation
from its figurative to its literal properties and vice versa. And Snow
creates a version of conceptual cinema by emphasizing the structuring
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 47
principles of this oscillation. In One Second in Montreal (1969) still images
of sites for public sculptures, covered by snow, also provide under
extended scrutiny a wavering between an illusion of reality and flatness.
Both filmmakers fully develop the consequences of a process of layering
present in other artistic practices. In taking as their referent a reality already
caught in images, both pop and hyperrealist art prefigure the postmodernist
ethos in which it is impossible, not to mention futile, to distinguish
between a natural and a textual reality.
Also of interest in thinking about a layered representation is modernist
narrative cinema's dependence on texts: films such as Jean Marie Straub
and Danielle Huillet's Chronicle ofAnna Magdalena Bach (1967), Roberto
Rossellini's Rise to Power ofLouis XIV (1966), Dreyer's Gertrud (1964), and
Bresson's Diaryofa CountryPriest (1950) adopt a novel, play, or document
as their text, creating in the process a deliberate awkwardness of delivery
and performance. The text sits uneasily in these adaptations; it becomes
an extra material layer.
My interest in this chapter is to establish a parallel between the two
processes of layering in two distinct aesthetics. The dual register of figuration
and literalness promoted by extended duration in American experimental
film and the inscription of a second-degree realism in European
modernist cinema, both involve a corporeal dimension: insisting on and
amplifying the referential aspect of representation, they constantly remind
the viewer of physical, material presences-of cinema, of the actor/
performer, ofthe spectator.
While in Akerman's early films the issue ofperformance is a by-product
of a fixed, oblivious camera modeled on Warhol and on structural filmmaking,
her later, narrative films involve an oblique mise-en-scene and a
mode of address-the monotone dialogue-qua-monologues ofJeanne Dielman
and Meetings with Anna-that recall the antinaturalist cinema of
Bresson and Dreyer. Through Akerman's films, I will explore the points of
rapprochement between these two cinemas. Geared in Europe to a textualized
antinaturalism (Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Dreyer's Gertrud, etc.), in
the United States to experiments with proto- and infranarrative forms
(Warhol, Snow, James Benning), these bodies of work reflect unique approaches
to narrative and performance. In Akerman, they meet through a
radical reconsideration of the notion of theatricality. My use of this term
becomes clear once we consider how Akerman's minimal hyperrealism
creates an effect of presence.'3
The enhanced indexicality of Akerman's aesthetic encompasses, moreover,
an emphasis on the physical presence and performance of her actors
48 Nothing Happens
and characters. suggesting an interest in a more concrete (less transcendent
or ideal) human presence that is inflected by specific theatrical traditions.
One of these is the European tradition that combines a desire for
narrative and a strong antinaturalism; its main trope is Bertolt Brecht's
notion of "quotation," of a text spoken in such a way as to reveal its social
and historical preexistence. "Natural" speech is acknowledged as fabrication,
and character as a relay of this knowledge. As we shall see, Akerman
qualifies this Brechtian notion of quotation. A second notion ofthe theatrical
present in Akerman's work derives from American art of the '60s and
'70s, when a general concern with dissolving the boundaries between reality
and representation was translated into a widespread use of real-time
representation-a strategy of special consequence in Akerman's Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
The United States in Real Time: Minimal,
Hyperreal, and Structural
Akerman's stay in the United States in the early '70s exposed her to experimental
film, minimal art, and new American dance and performance art.
During 1972 she frequented Anthology Film Archives, Millenium, and
attended, along with the cinematographer and filmmaker Babette Mangolte,
performance events. A brief discussion of the noncinematic background
of her aesthetics allows an understanding of the import of realtime
representation in the early '70s, and the phenomenological proclivity
that marks her realism is best understood in the context of the revision of
modernist art in the United States in the mid-'60s.
Clement Greenberg's writings of the '50s had defined modernist art as
bound ultimately toward a reduction to its own material specificity."4 In
different ways, pop and hyperrealist art addressed such art's entrenchment
in pictorial abstraction-its dual proscription of figuration and concept.
By including the external world as subject matter, by depicting circulating,
graphic commodities such as ads, product labels, and photos of
movie stars, pop art assaulted the equation of modern art with abstraction.
Initiating a layering process crucial in the '60s revision ofreferentiality,
pop art contributes a more ironic image for the critique of the sign and
of consumer society advanced by Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and
Henri Lefebvre in '60s France. Revising the opposition between modernism
and realism, pop art makes pseudo-objective use of mechanical printing
processes (silk screens, cutouts) to stress a public, serialized version of
the everyday. Hyperrealist art, coming after minimalism and pop, also
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 49
displays a concern with the phenomenology of the everyday, providing a
visual analogue for the role of description in the nouveau roman.15
Hyperrealists such as Richard Estes and Duane Hanson create "second
natures," giving surface details of their referents-reflections on windows,
skin crevices-a mediated attention. In Estes's paintings, the transparency
of the window is replaced by reflections, which block the view of whatever
is behind the glass. As his intermediate photographs prove, appearances
disallow a priori knowledge: "Perhaps the more you show the way
things look the less you show how they are or how we think they are."lli
Likewise, the detail and concreteness of Hanson's sculptures counter an
abstractive, reductive reading of the human presence. This move toward
particularization can be likened to Akerman's interest in the uniqueness of
the individual:
The topics of the radical realists are specific and singular. The people
portrayed are individuals by name, age and certain personal characteristics.
Man is no longer the ordinary representative or the statistically
created average man ofmass media demographies or the superstar
cliche (as in Warhol). Rather particular attention is paid to ... the
uniqueness of a person.17
Blurring the line between reality and representation was the impetus
behind a variety of art of the period from the mid '60s to the mid '70s.
Hyperrealism, through its overdetailed reproduction of reality or of a mediated
image, problematizes referentiality; '60s happenings and minimalist
art and '70s performance and video break away from the canvas and
into experience. Apparently subscribing to the modernist decree of simplification
and evacuation of content, minimal art actually proposes one
of the most radical alternatives to modernism, challenging the instantaneity
of apprehension that for Greenberg or Michael Fried defines the
presentness of art as an escape from duration-as "pure" opticality. Indeed,
in "Art and Objecthood" (1967), Fried fiercely attacks the "theatrical,"
experiential dimension of minimal art and rejects some of that art's
defining traits-duration, spatial relations, and attention to the role ofthe
beholder.
Instead of an "abstract spectatordom," minimalism proposes an experience
exercised by a subject whose "corporeal density both guaranteed and
was made possible by the interconnectedness of all its sensory fields so
that an abstracted visuality could make no more sense than an abstracted
tactility."lB In the works of minimalists Donald Judd and Rohert Morris,19
both the "unitary form"-the form without internal configuration-and
50 Nothing Happens
seriality push viewers to confront their concept ofwhat a form is like.20 As
Morris puts it, "The constant shape ofthe cube held in the mind but which
the viewer never literally experiences, is an actuality against which the
literal changing, perspective views are related."21
Part of the significance of Akerman's bodily metaphor of the flesh and
the skeleton is to suggest that the body-in-general addressed by the minimalists
in the '60s is, as Rosalind Krauss argues, the same body that is
particularized in the art of the '70s and '80s.
A clear example of how the spectator's awareness of his or her own
physicality may be eventually linked to a politicized aesthetics is exemplified
in Akerman's and Yvonne Rainer's cinema. Je tu il eJle (l974)
makes clear Akerman's debt to minimalist principles of cumulative seriality.
In the film (discussed in detail in chapter 4) Akerman exhausts a
conjugation of positions for herself and her prop, a mattress. She adheres
to Yvonne Rainer's move toward a more concrete everydayness in performance,
to the choreographer and dancer's minimalist mandate that performance
emphasize movement at the expense of psychology. Akerman's
moving of the mattress around her room in Je tu il eJle and Rainer's use of
valises and boxes in the performance Grand Union Dreams (1971) are
examples of task-oriented performance in which the object, rather than
being the butt of an action called for by character or plot, is a prop to
objectify and banalize gesture and movement.
The affinities among minimal art, performance art, and minimalist and
structural film clarify how strategies of real-time representation, repetition,
and seriality engage the spectator's body, a critical step for a corporeal
cinema. Two major formal tendencies, both committed to engaging the
spectator's awareness of his or her own physicality and perception, are
rehearsed again and again in '60s and '70s art. In the first, an excess of
information, given through a multiple input of issues, shapes, gestures,
and media, divides one's attention. The Fluxus group's and John Cage's
performances, Allan Kaprow's happenings, and New American dance
(Rainer, Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham) all advance
the recognition that simultaneity-a copresence of events internal and
external to the text-can effect a nondirected field of spectator response,
frustrating the acknowledgment of authorship and intention. Silence, for
instance, becomes a composite of aleatory audience sound and, to Cage,
emptiness, just as multiple images open the terrain ofnonintentionality.22
Spectatorial focus is dispersed over a fractured surface.
In the second, minimalist tendency, simplified shapes, single events,
and series of repeated images or forms seem both to block interpretation
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 51
and to mock the immediacy of apprehension proposed in modernist art.
The spectator's extended gaze over holistic forms displaces the burden of
decentering entirely onto his or her perceptual and physical relation to the
art object. Duration is a major factor in minimalism's continuous exchange
between abstractive, conceptual procedures and sensorially based experience.
The insistence on simplified forms, or on seriality, makes the experiential
time and space of the spectator's confrontation with the work as
obdurate as the forms presented; the work "works" solely through the
viewer's persistence in time. Here, the term "simultaneity" refers not only
to the display of several events at one time but to the bleeding of the work
into its conditions of reception. More accurately, it refers to the coexistence
of representation and spectator. In cinema, the representation of
events in real time is a principal way of bringing this coexistence about.
While aleatoriness and multiplicity are perfectly adequate to "silence"
intentionality in a work, they are easier to effect in theatrical or live
performance than in cinema. In cinema, the demand that the observer's
gaze negotiate simultaneous foci of attention may be prompted through
multiple-screen projection. Or, in projects as diverse as that of the Fluxus
group and of structural materialist film, a film's screening is shown as
dependent on contingency: as the scratches and dirt accumulate on the
empty screen of Nam June Paik's Zen for Film or of George Landow's film
in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc
(1966), the specificities of both cinema and performance are recognizedcinema
in its predicament of repetition, performance in its condition of
aleatory uniqueness.23
Another solution, following Andre Bazin's notion of a wandering spectatarial
focus, is the long take, which mayor may not exhibit the many
planes of a deep-focus shot. Warhol's cinema shows that both a simultaneity
of events on screen and the extended duration of a single image
or event can forestall unidirectional apprehension. Empire, with its single
image and extended duration, as much as The Chelsea Girls, with its
screening of two segments at a time and its busy, haphazard zooms, attests
to Warhol's welcoming of "noise," both within the work's structure and
surrounding its reception.
Underlying all these procedures is a sense ofthe exhaustion of meaning.
Both pure, holistic shapes and an endless substitution and juxtaposition
of paradigmatic camera shots, a layering of formal plays, are strategies to
deflect signification. A simplified shape, content, or process can hamper
logical apprehension no less than an excess of associations (as in several
game structures proposed by Frampton, Snow, and Landow). Richard
52 Nothing Happens
Serra's Hands Scraping (1968) visualizes a process ofreduction, literally
leading to an "empty" screen. The process is in some ways consonant with
modernism's repression of content and privileging of art's material and
experiential dimensions; but unlike Greenberg's modernism, the minimalist
project seeks to elicit a subjective investment through subject matter
that approximates the blank screen.24
Referring to the "inconclusiveness" that characterizes the '70s films,
Patricia Patterson and Manny Farber have distinguished between two
types of seventies film structure: "dispersal and shallowboxed space."25
Their examples ofthe first type of film are McCabe and Mrs. Miller(1971),
"Rameau's Nephew" byDiderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Shoen
(1974), and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974); their examples of the second
are In the Realm of Senses (1976), Katzelmacher (1969), Nostalgia
(1972), and "the various short films ofminimalist sculptors and painters,"
which "present a shallow stage with the ritualized, low-population-image
squared to the edges of the frame. "26 They associate this strategy with
Akerman's use ofreal time.
Akerman's reduction of elements of scrutiny is indeed akin to that of
structural minimalist filmP In all of her work real-time representation
engages the spectator's awareness of his or her own physical presence.
Moreover, in her structural work, fixed, extended shots combine with aleatory,
unique events, setting structure against play and bringing out a performance
aspect that is basic to '70s aesthetics. This concern can be detected
in Akerman's early films La Chambre 1, La Chambre 228 and Hotel
Monterey (1972), and also in News from Home (1977).
La Chambre 2 is a 360-degree panning survey of a room. As the camera
pans steadily to the left, Akerman lies on the bed, facing the camera while
she rocks her head against the back ofthe bed. The second time around she
is covered and rocks under the sheets half covering her face. During the
next circular pan, in a half-sitting position, she looks distractedly and
holds an apple. She doesn't look at the camera but plays with the apple
with her fingers. The camera stops at what we now distinguish as halfway
through the entire length of the pan and reverses its direction. We see
Chantal nibbling the apple; the camera moves on and then shifts to left
again. She's biting the apple and looking at the camera. The camera moves
leftward and stops at the same point as before, shifting to the right again.
Chantal vigourously bites the apple as the camera performs a complete
turn to the left, meeting Chantal again rubbing her eyes as she lies down
facing the camera. The rigid formal parameters set for each film-the 360degree
pan in La Chambre 2, the scanning of the entire building from
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 53
basement to roof, from evening to dawn, in the axial movements of Hotel
Monterey, the fixed symmetrical shots in News from Home-allow chance
events to define themselves as privileged foci of attention: a passenger's
refusal to confront the camera in the cramped space of an elevator and a
pedestrian's desire to turn around every few steps and look at the camera
mounted in a subway corridor are examples ofunique events generated, so
it seems, by the camera's circumscribed viewfinder.
The films in which Akerman herself performs share this dynamic of
address. In Ie tu if elle and in La C,nambre 2, Akerman assumes different
forms of address vis-a.-vis the camera. From posed indifference to resolute
confrontation, whether denying or engaging the camera's seemingly mechanical
trajectory, Akerman creates momentary interlockings between
her gaze and the camera's. In a push-pull dynamic, her presence in the
films links the spaces behind and in front ofthe camera.
One might extend the terms of Akerman's reflexivity. Like a mirror, the
camera creates a presence that is always split;29 the performance aspect of
all Akerman's films defines a place for the spectator coextensive with the
camera's gaze. This gaze might seem impassive, but its relation with the
profilmic event is in fact intensely provocative. The forms ofaddress solicited
through this setup delineate a dialogue between Godard and Warhol:
the seeming obliviousness of the cinematic (camera movement, framing,
and editing) toward the profilmic activates a kind of spectator participation
that inaugurates a post-Godardian reflexivity. For Akerman, this will
mean a camera address less intent on revealing or mediating a statement of
truth, a camera address that locks the spectator within a mechanical, apparently
unmotivated mise-en-scene.
The unmotivated (Warholian) camera confronts two pulsating materialities,
two bodies: one is the character's cinematic body, the other the body
of the spectator. Between these different rhythms-that of camera, performer,
and spectator-a tension creates the specific theatricality of structural
minimalist film. Benning's staging of micro-occurrences to brush up
against his static landscape shots in 11 x 14, and Snow's quasi-narrative
mementos in Wavelength (1967) and Back and Forth (1969), are additional
bodies in this economy. (I discuss the structural minimalist notion of
event in the next chapter.)
Yet as the analysis of Ie tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman make clear, Akerman's
affiliation with the structural-minimalist film project is singularly
qualified. Given her commitment to narrative, other factors need attention,
notably her conception of character. We should return, then, to the
other strand of theatricality informing Akerman's work.
54 Nothing Happens
Quotation Reconsidered: European "Theatrical" Cinema
The use of quotation and the various forms of disjunction between script
and speech, text and image (often associated with truth and nature), establish
the commonality of, among others, Godard's, Marguerite Duras's, and
Straub and Huillet's work. Emerging from a European modernist literary
and theatrical tradition, these directors' films are often based on preexisting
texts-novels, documents, or news events. European antinaturalism is
characterized by such prior layers somehow made present, in a disjunctive
effect.30
I should, however, describe the nature of quotation in Akerman precisely,
and establish the specificity of her antinaturalism. Akerman's
"talkies"-films in which text competes with long silences-confront the
deeply entrenched naturalistic convention of necessary and sufficient dialogue.
The unintelligible babble ofmethod acting, which came to stand as
the very sign of naturalness, is absent in Akerman's cinema. Speech becomes
audible, spelled-out matter; it does not so much represent as constitute
a voided interiority. Instead of showing the interior, unspeakable
nature of speech through hesitations and mumbles, Akerman's characters
bring communication to an impasse either by silence or by turning articulate
speeches into a "bla, bla bla." If Marlon Brando's mumblings in Elia
Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) are to signify a specific affect and feeling,
Anna's or Jeanne's clear but distended delivery in Meetings with Anna and
Jeanne Dielman also works expressively, rather than functioning solely to
inform.
Conventional cinema naturalizes verbal address, and anti-illusionist
cinema tends to emphasize it. Conversely Akerman gives the text a centrality
that characterizes the "theatrical" in cinema-namely, the frontal
presentation of characters who speak extensively to one another. A closer
study of Akerman's treatment of dialogue in chapter 6 will further an
understanding of post-Brechtian, post-Godardian forms of address.
Brecht's ideas ofacting and alienation techniques bear strongly on Akerman's
formal politics,31 but her work is not pedagogical as his is, and by
the very fact that her mise-en-scene invokes (as it denies) a fourth wall, she
problematizes the Brechtian direct address. Discussing the relation between
painting and viewer in eighteenth-century France, Fried argues in
his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age
of Diderof32 that the period's representations of states of absorptionpeople
reading, listening to a story, sleeping-explicitly arise from the
need to "arrest" the audience in front of the painting while paradoxically
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 55
avoiding direct address. The portrait, on the other hand, with its posed
frontal address, resolutely faces the beholder. Fried shows how the "miseen-scene"
of dramatis personnae in a painting, considered successful if
the people depicted were turned inward, was an explicit attempt to ignore
the presence of the beholder, and it is precisely this insistent negation
of the beholder, present in criticism and in the art, that indicates its problematic
status in the period.
The depiction of the subject as so absorbed as to be oblivious to all but
the activity in which he or she is engaged is a response to frontal address.
For obviously different purposes, Akerman's cinema restages a scenario of
indifference. The relation between absorption and theatricality maintained
in Jeanne Dielman, Je tu il e11e, and Meetings with Anna indicates
the desire to reexperience, through representation, the choice between
turning the face toward the scene and turning it toward the audience. The
characters' relations among themselves and with the audience are not
mutually exclusive here but animate each other with a certain instability.
The hyperbolic focus on the text helps create this oscillation between
scene and audience. Akerman's dialogue suggests a new balance between
the three levels of discourse theorized by Eric Rohmer-indirect, direct,
and "hyperdirect."33 In his essay Rohmer addresses the amount and quality
of material conveyed, distinguishing between information necessary
for understanding the plot and information included for the sake of verisimilitude.
If Akerman's films seem theatrical it is because they often
include information that might be necessary on the stage, or in a book, but
is redundant in film.
Akerman challenges the didactic thrust of quotation, charging her text
instead with conflicting functions. Sometimes the text telegraphs information
through an excess of verbiage; sometimes the release of unwarranted
information is sanctioned on other, not immediately functional levels.
Akerman may alter the rhythmic value of a given sentence, deliberately
confusing the registers of signification and sheer information (meaning,
content) and those of expressivity and affect (rhythm, tone, etc.). Akerman's
dialogues seem to answer Brecht's dictum on expressivity: "His way
of speaking had to be free from parsonical sing-song and from all those
cadences which lull the spectator so that the senses get lost."34
Brecht theorized a citational quality of speech as the main mode of
denaturalizing a character; Akerman deprives this mode of its didactic
thrust, the defining quality of Brecht's legacy to anti-illusionistic theater
and cinema. Brecht opposes a sing-song expressivity; Akerman wants to
loosen signification in favor of a more expressive communication. Brecht
56 Nothing Happens
separates script from performance; Akerman collapses the two, clarifying
their disjunctiveness, speech and writing being always citational and
marked by textuality.35
One might consider an alternate model for Akerman's treatment of text
to be Samuel Beckett's alogical permutations and minimalist repetitions
and, in film, Bresson's flattening of his characters' delivery in repetition
and monotone. Through repetition, first in rehearsal, then in numerous
takes, Bresson weaves a cinematic texture that recombines and intensifies
sound, movement, and framing. As opposed to Brecht's eclectic collages (a
technique best represented in film by Godard's montages of materials and
voices, which tap different channels of rhetoric-interview, documentary,
visual text, etc.), Bresson prizes the intensification of elements effected by
a homogeneous texture: his subversive linearity and enhancement of diegetic
sound privilege metonymic displacement rather than metaphoric
association.36 According to P. Adams Sitney's lucid distinction between a
geometric style (Kubelka, Eisenstein, etc.) and a linear one, Bresson "concentrates
on those figures of cinematography which produce a sense of
fluidity and condensation and avoid strong rupture and interjections. "37
Bresson, like Akerman, pursues an aesthetics ofhomogeneity.
By interposing repetition between speech and script, Bresson's films
dislocate the natural fit between character and performer/model. In his
fiercely modernist essentialism, Bresson collapses the notion of automatism-as
a natural, unthought process-with the processes ofrepetition inherent
in cinema and cinematic reproduction. His project is to make both
body and performance conform to the mechanical order ofcinema, with its
power to fragment and recompose. Enforcing cinema's repetitions (rehearsal,
successive takes, the very projection of film in the theater) over the
model's performance, Bresson suggests an antimetaphysical aesthetics:
the automaton body performs the impossibility of escaping quotation.38
The Brecht-Bresson distinction involves a controversy that may ultimately
inform the divergences between heterogeneity or homogeneity as
decentering modes: cinema's ability to assimilate other art forms and matters
of content as well as forms of spectator address are two main factors in
establishing a nuanced antinaturalist cinema. The horror of"the aping ofa
non-coincidence,"3" the disgust with the fake synchronicity of speech and
sound in naturalist cinema, is enacted in a number of ways. In fact, the
antinaturalist cinema that is most closely associated with the vanguard of
cinematic modernism is a cinema of irony and commentary, a cinema
marked by an aesthetics of heterogcneity.40 This cinema has as its main
intertext the repertory of reflexive strategies exposed for didactic intent
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 57
by Brecht: quotation instead of enactment, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous
materials, the eclectic use of media and modes of performance.
The Godardian aesthetic advances by juxtapositional and oppositional
spurts, by a juggling of elements within filmic materiality. Godard, Straub
and Huillet, Rainer, Fassbinder, Hans Jiirgen Syberberg, Jacques Rivette,
and others promote an impure cinema. They may use, for example, a theatrical
mise-en-sdme as one more variable in texture and address: films
such as Straub's The Bride, the Pimp and the Commedienne (1968), Syberberg's
Our Hitler (1977), and Godard's Two or Three Things I Know about
Her (1968) adopt the proscenium shot, the long shot recording a conventional
theatrical scene (a la Melies). Both the proscenium shot and the
character's frontal address become foreign bodies in the smooth continuity
of the classical film. Visual and aural breaks in continuity are made to
work similarly, recalling Brecht's didactic notion of quotation. Within this
modernist ethos, these breaks connote another, more than merely formal
sort of rupture: that of a politicized gesture-against capital, the establishment,
etc,41
Although disjunction is a staple in antinaturalistic cinema (from Soviet
cinema montage to Peter Kubelka's rhythmic montage to Bruce Conner's
found-footage "collages")' the agonistic modernist discourse inevitably
refers to the classical or conventional text it is supposed to rupture. Godard,
for instance, describes his opaque lead character in AlphavilJe (1966)
through the action ethos ofthe American Western:
In all westerns ... there is someone who arrives from nowhere, we
don't know, he pushes the door of a saloon and then, at the end he
vanishes, and that's all. Well, it's only a partial view of him but it is
done in such a way that people believe having lived a complete story.
This must be their strength. This always bothered me, I never managed.
I started simply to deal with fragments.42
Hence the postwar European cinema, which Annette Michelson terms a
cinema of "radical aspiration," manages to "sublimate and convert to an
aesthetic purpose the dissociative principle" that underwrites its marginal
position.43 In this cinema, epitomized by the work of Godard, "the critical
allegiance ... to the conventions of Hollywood commercial cinema ...
has acted as context and precondition of formal radicalism. "44
Akerman's work, on the other hand, makes no comment on other cinematic
modes. Its energy is not centrifugal, like Godard's, opening up onto
other discourses and realities; its concentrated focus is better understood
in terms ofthe aesthetics ofhomogeneity proposed by Bresson, and also by
58 Nothing Happens
Dreyer and Rohmer.45 Akerman's work is syntagmatic, operating through a
linear accumulation of repetitions. Akerman insists on simplified forms
and singular characters and actors, as well as on minimal variations in
sets and locations. The tools with which she constructs an alternative to
the Brechtian/Godardian model are duration, accumulation, sobriety, and
sameness. Hers is an aesthetics of homogeneity. Akerman's reading of cinematic
naturalism is perverse: she complies excessively-and this is her
transgression-with classical cinema's demand for linearity and for uniformity
of texture. Her long takes and extended in-character monologues
oversaturate textual and diegetic homogeneity, creating a rhythmic imbalance,
a taint in classical cinema's precious equilibrium.
Akerman's formal allegiance to Bresson, Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, and Warhol
demands an understanding of how her nondidactic antinaturalism
shares in a shift in sensibility that is distinctly post-Godardian. This term
is not to be taken as suggesting a surpassing ofGodard's achievements. Nor
should it be taken as a dismissal of Godard's political thrust; his favorite
theme-the analogy between production and commodification in society
and in cinema-is more powerful as a social than as a self-reflexive critique.
The term "post-Godardian" should be seen, rather, as reflecting a
reassessment of the axiomatic equation of politicized art with certain formal
and rhetorical strategies-an equation reinforced by some of Godard's
work (most notably in his Dziga Vertov period) and reified by some of his
critics. For some, direct address, allusion, and metacinematic references
are automatic banners of anti-illusionism and, by extension, of the filmmaker's
political intervention.46
A reevaluation of this idea can first be detected in a critical uneasiness
with cinema's overdose of Brechtian alienation techniques. In May 68 and
Film Culture, Silvia Harvey makes a distinction between the Brechtian critique
of illusionist art and the anti-illusionism of the structural materialists
and other modernist filmmakers: while Brecht proposes to go "beyond
a critique of illusionism in order to engage in an analysis and transformation
of the real," many of the modernist directors "engage in a constant
critique of illusionism, which is much the same thing as a permanent
meditation on the nature of art."47 Harvey warns that certain formal antiillusionist
devices of modernist "counter-cinema" have been reified as
"essentially more adequate to the representation of social reality than the
devices drawn from those styles labelled 'realist' or 'naturalist.' "48 A main
cinematic tic of this formalist reading of Brecht is the frontal address,
which professes truth simply by shifting from obliqueness to frontality,
from avoiding to confronting the spectator's gaze.
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 59
In "Les Deux Regards," his essay on camera address, Pascal Bonitzer
analyzes Brechtian cinema's dangerous border with what he calls brechtisme:
it is sufficient that the "author believes himself in possession of
sufficient knowledge about the spectator position and is satisfied in exercising
this supposed knowledge"49 for the work to fall victim to the
stalemate of proselitism. For Bonitzer, Godard's Wind from the East, as
well as Straub and Huillet's work, falls into this trap. Filmmaker Peter
Gidal attacks another staple of brechtisme, the theme ofreflexivity, from a
different perspective: certain modalities of anti-illusionism are caught in
the web of transparency. "The use of the film medium as transparent,
invisible, is exactly the same when the object being documented is 'some
real event,' some 'film procedure,' some 'story,' etc."50 Discussing structural
materialist film, Gidal defends a nonillusionistic practice that "deals
with," instead of "representing," the "demystification of the film process."51
But his fierce attack on any remnant of symbolic meaning and the
fastidiously antirepresentational, antinarrative thrust of his rhetoric define
his idealism as a mere inversion of brechtisme, since ultimately he
seems to believe in a realm outside representation. The debate about the
reification of Brecht's techniques demarcates, as its supplement, the new
narrative directions taken by, for instance, Peter Handke's film The LeftHanded
Woman (1978) and Akerman's work; these narratives incorporate
critical distanciation without proselytism.
The shift away from an authoritarian brechtisme parallels the post-'68
discrediting of the intellectual as representative of the people, the avoidance,
in short, of the position of "master of discourse." Akerman's refusal
to mediate between herselfand others from within the film is compounded
by her discourse of excess, which establishes the separateness and independence
of the audience: "I cannot but leave a place for the spectator in
his/her difference,"52 says Akerman. Seemingly democratizing reception
(as Bazin does in advocating the long take), the hyperbolically homogeneous
texture of Akerman's cinema makes it impossible to forget one's
condition as spectator.
Another way to understand the post-Godardian cinema is to consider
Akerman's affinities with her contemporaries. Wim Wenders, for example,
looks to Warhol and Ozu as models for his descriptive narratives;53 his first
short films are basically structural exercises that allow a phenomenological
attention to the real. Their Warholesque camera fixity, their duration,
their seriality, and their use of film loops delineate the shift from a
juxtapositional model (Godardian, Brechtian) toward another mode of
distanciation-one that explicitly acts on the spectator's attention through
60 Nothing Happens
duration, and that comprises a narrative based on linearity and a new,
deflected dramaturgy.
At stake in this post-Godardian sensibility is the need to deal differently
with the referent. A problematized linearity of episodes or ellipses and a
preference for obliquity over frontality in mise-en-scene, replace the direct
questioning of cinematic language and the direct address of the audience.
Akerman's mise-en-scenes clearly opt out of direct address. One recalls
the invisible fourth wall in the frontal framing of jeanne's and Anna's
solitary activities and the semifrontal single-shot compositions of the dialogues
in Meetings with Anna, which seem to challenge the characters'
involvement in the scene. Akerman's characters seem suspended between
absorption within the scene and a theatrical awareness of the audience.
Akerman's characters may face the camera without addressing it, as in
Meetings with Anna and Jeanne Dielman, and in this frontality one might,
superficially, recognize the operations of theater-a prosceniumlike shot
or a stagelike posture. More importantly Akerman's hyperbolic strategiesconcerning
verbal address and duration-include an excess, in cinema,
that is ofa corporeal order.
Simultaneously engaging and defamiliarizing the spectator, Akerman's
minimalism creates a distance that can only be characterized as "disquietingly
theatrical."54 At stake in the term "theatrical," both for minimal
art (sculpture) and for cinema, is the cleavage between two presences that
demand recognition at the same time: that of the spectator and that of the
scene. These are related through conditions of separation or of familiarity
that are, at each instant, absolute. And these two poles define a gravitational
field in which the engagement with the represented scene parallels,
but never erases, one's acknowledgment ofone's own detachment from the
scene.
To unbalance representation by rephrasing drama's old antitheses of
naturalistic absorption and artifice means taking the Godardian frontal
address askance. In the cinema of Bresson, Dreyer, Rohmer, Handke,
Straub and Huillet, and Akerman, the self-absorption ofcharacters as they
speak and listen to one another is hyperbolized to the point where their
delivery is transformed into an almost mechanical pathway for the text. In
Dreyer's Gertrud, the speech of one character to another constantly goes
beyond the addressee-"they talk past each other."55 Verbal discourse is
intensified, and the text hangs over the bodies as film music does.56 "It is
the first time," says Dreyer, "I've given so much importance to the word
and this helped me find a new form between the theater and cinema."57
At crucial points in Rohmer's later films (Full Moon in Paris 1984),
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 61
characters face away from the characters they address. Under the narrative
pretext of awkwardness (the morality of confession), these oblique addresses
stage a decalage from cinematic naturalism. But their frontality
does not integrate the audience in the film. Actually, Rohmer's mise-enscene
complements his argument that in film before the '60s, a poetic,
literary dimension of discourse was unproblematically incorporated into
film dialogue. During the '60s this "necessary" discourse was either ruled
out entirely (as in cinema verite) or else relegated to bracketed commentaries
by means of such devices as direct address to the camera and graphic
supports. In the '70s, in reaction to these modes ofbracketing, there was an
inflation ofthe "true to life": phrases that were quite unnecessary in terms
ofinformation were included merely for an effect ofreality. Rohmer rejects
both the primacy of the necessary, in which speech becomes loftily unlike
ordinary direct discourse, and the overinflation of verisimilitude. He advocates
a cinema in which shifts in discourse are transcribed into dialogue
verbatim.58 This documentary form, a filming "book in hand," is a tactical
maneuver to reinstall the novelistic, indirect discourse that naturalistic
theater and cinema, in their search for verisimilitude, preclude. Rohmer's
"impure cinema" challenges both the anti-illusionist indictment of spoken,
natural discourse and the equation oftruth with acted (Hollywood) or
spontaneous (cinema verite) stutterings.
Like Rohmer, and like Dreyer in Gertrud, Akerman allows the text an
importance that conventional naturalist cinema does not. It is the centrality
of verbal address, its excessiveness and maldistribution, that produces
the sense of theatricality in her films. One must understand this
element ofcinema mostly as signaling the recognition, indirect as it might
seem, of the audience's presence; talking past each other, as well as relaying
unnecessary dialogue, characters by default address the audience.
A question remains as to the relation between Akerman's American and
European lineages-between her Warhol-like use of real-time representation
and the treatment of text in Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer (as well as
in '60's Rosselini, for instance). The European cinema briefly discussed
above has always been credited as antinaturalistic; the forms through
which this "theatre in concentrated form,"59 as Dreyer called the "real
talking film," creates a new corporeal and antiessentialist cinema still
demand recognition. How, for instance, does the intensification of the
discursive instance in this European cinema dislocate an "essential" fit
between representation and referent? Is this dislocation somehow comparable
to that produced through Warhol's extended duration?
Processes oflayering in modernist realist cinema are most evident in the
62 Nothing Happens
adaptations ofpreexisting texts seen in the '60s cinema ofRossellini and of
Straub and Huillet. There are affinities between these processes ofinscription
and the layering of minimal-hyperrealist films such as Warhol's and
Akerman's that usually don't use a preexisting text.
In his analysis of Dreyer, Bordwell uses the term "theatricalization"
to name the disparity between a base text and cinematic representation.
"Since Brecht," he states, "we have realized that a production can criticize
its source, but that may be only the extreme edge of a practice whereby a
film can mark a certain distance from its text (a novel, play, script) by
preserving a relative autonomy for its cinematic systems. I shall call this
strategy 'theatricalization.' "60 Two main ideas can be gleaned from this
reading. The first is Bordwell's own formalist privileging of cinematic
language, which he considers mainly in its visual register, paying little
attention to the text and its delivery. In this regard, "theatricalization" is
nothing but a replay of the idealist proscription of sound in early avantgarde
cinema.61 The second notion asserts that "in order for theatricalization
to draw a distance between text and film, the text must be signalled as
existing prior to the film."6z This idea only problematizes the first: it describes
cinematic language as secondary to the already textualized reality
of a novel or play. Though Bordwell has in mind a spectator for whom
knowledge ofthe base text only exacerbates notions of cinematic specificity,
the issue of theatricalization raises a series of questions regarding the
use of a twice-removed reality as one's referent.
This issue of inscription is first articulated in Bazin's "Theater and Cinema"
(which Bordwell duly credits), where the adaptation of plays to the
cinema is a main concern. Bazin makes clear that there are different ways
of adapting a literary work; but a successful adaptation defines itself as
adaptation (for example Olivier's Henry V), or else follows Jean Cocteau's
Les Parents Terribles in exacerbating the feelings of claustrophobia and
intimacy associated with the stage.63 In another essay, Bazin's perceptive
understanding of Bresson's Diary ofa Country Priest (1951), an adaptation
ofGeorges Bernanos's book, ultimately moves him to review what is meant
by realism: "Bresson treats the novel as he does his characters. The novel
is a cold, hard fact, a reality to be accepted as it stands.... in this case the
reality is not the descriptive content ... of the text-it is the very text
itself, or more properly the style. "64 Bazin's concept ofrealism stretches to
an interesting degree here: in this realism "one stage removed," the referent
ceases to be reality, becoming another's text and style. As will become
clear, this insight is relevant for Akerman's own layered processes of
reference.
Toward a Corporeal Cinema 63
In yet another reading of Dreyer's work, James Schamus uses the term
"textual realism" for the practice ofauthenticating one's version ofthe real
through "an aesthetic practice based on documents."65 The term can be
applied not only to Dreyer's use of judicial records in Joan ofArc (1927-
28) but also to the work of modernist realists such as Rossellini (The Rise
to Power ofLouis XlV), Straub and Huillet (Chronicle ofAnna Magdalena
Bach), and Rohmer (Marquise d'O, 1976)-allled by the desire for (the
textualized) real to inscribe text in the film.66 The disparity between "theatricalization,"
with its degree ofstylization, and "textual realism," which
promises an authenticity verified by the real, suggests the referential complexity
ofadaptation. This complexity challenges both realist conventions
(the reproduction of natural reality) and modernist postulates of medium
specificity-the films seem by turn too literary and too theatrical.
Akerman does not use texts such as documents of Louis XIV, or novels
like Kleist's Marquise d'O, from which to suggest distance. Yet her hyperboles-the
extended length of her shots, her distended or compressed
dialogues-do invoke an extra, material dimension of representation that
is in important respects akin to the modernist, second-degree realism of
Bresson, Rosselini, Dreyer, and Straub and Huillet. This European cinema
proceeds through an intensification of discourse. It may incorporate indirect
narratives (or at least literary qualities) into spoken discourse (Pickpocket
1959); it may stretch dialogue into an exchange of monologues
(Straub and Huillet's Othon 1969, Rohmer's Ma nuit chez Maude 1969,
Meetings with Anna); it may double gesture and speech (Gertrud) and play
spoken against written word (Diary of a Country Priest). But with the
important exception of Straub and Huillet's work, which sometimes juxtaposes
heterogeneous filmic realities, this layered cinema works through
an overall texture ofhomogeneity.
It is Bresson's work, however, that best clarifies the import of these
intensifications for a decentering representation. Hi.s amplified diegetic
sound is supposed to stand for the corresponding visual referent. Yet his
work generates a redundance, a blocking of psychological interpretation,
that resembles Akerman's effects: although he claims a higher adequacy
between thought and expression,67 his resistance to naturalist synchronization
leads him to fold commentary over image, spoken over handwritten
word, gesture over speech, always in slight anticipations or delays. What
might have passed unnoticed, absorbed as "natural," creates instead a
sense ofrepetition-one feels one has already seen certain images. In Pickpocket,
Michel raises his finger as if searching for a direction. This gesture
can only be read as the hailing of a cab in the next shot, yet it anchors,
64 Nothing Happens
perhaps unwittingly, the voice-over commentary, "I did not know where I
was going." The gesture is split between meanings. The defamiliarizing
effect of these strategies ofredundance relates to Akerman's use ofredundance
(and literalness) to preempt interpretation.
The imposition of a dual register of reading on a single body creates a
physicality that is of special interest in cinema. Bresson's conception of a
repetition that becomes automatic, like a second nature, engenders, in its
will for a pure cinema, a new form "between theatre and film." This assertion
is not meant as a comment on Bresson's disparagement oftheater and
cinema.58 His proposal of a reconstructed reality existing solely on screen
suggests a fierce indisposition toward the notion of a reality to be enacted,
a script to be followed-toward the idea of representation itself. Bresson
seems to propose a presentational mode, one he knows cannot bypass
repetition. Flat, economical, and exact, the performance of Bresson's
models-his nonprofessional actors-subverts naturalism through the automatism
proper to cinema (which transfers mechanical reproduction to
bodies and gestures). Rather than a provocative comment aimed at a defender
of "cinematography," the qualifier "between theatre and film" is
directed to the complexity of Bresson's attempt to present radical uniqueness
through mechanical reproduction.59 In this new form, the filmic body
as well as the performances are suffused by a sense of the mechanical, by
an automaton quality resulting from massive stylization and from processes
of textual inscription. In the cinema that interests us here, this
quality is transferred onto characters and performers, and accounts for an
awkwardness ofrhythm (ofmovement and speech) that is distinctly other.
The corporeal cinema I have been describing operates through excess;
the superimposition of literal and figurative registers, the redundance of
the informational substratum (given verbally and visually), the imposition
of multiple functions on a single body (of author and performer, actor
and personal-all create a positional disarray. The choice between seeing
Chantal Akerman or the performer in Je tu i1 elle, Delphine Seyrig or
Jeanne in Jeanne Die/man, or between hearing mother or daughter in News
from Home, is not easily resolved. The alternatives are not displayed side
by side or one after the other pedagogically-in the didactic effect ofquotation
and interruption proper to a juxtapositional aesthetic. In the next
chapters we shall examine how Akerman's minimal hyperrealism not only
upsets an essentialist reading of the image through its constantly flickering
oscillation between literal and symbolic registers, but subverts notions
of type, character, and author, creating a double register or internal disjunction
in the representation of the subject.
3 THE EQUIVALENCE OF EVENTS
Jeanne Die/man. 23 Quai du Commerce.
10BO Bruxelles
Tragedy as a mechanism is based upon a calamitous persistence in one's ways.
-Kenneth Burke'
When she bangs the glass on the table and you think the milk might spill, that's as
dramatic as the murder.-Chantal Akerman, 19772
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080Bruxelles is a work about balance,
a balance resulting from the film's structural precision as well as from
an impetus toward quiescence and inertia in the diegesis. Akerman's minimal
and hyperrealist style is deeply involved in this equilibrium. My concern
here is to establish the link in the film between formal and thematic
balance, investigating the effects of a "perfect" parity between the two. An
investigation of Akerman's minimal hyperrealism necessarily involves an
account ofthe excess generated by its all-too-perfect equilibrium.
Balance applies in the film's formal overinscription as well as in its thematics
of an enforced stability. Jeanne Dielman follows a mandate of obsession
compulsion, its balance construed through the guise of an overly
ritualized presentation of household routines. The habits of a mother/
housewife and part-time prostitute and the shaping ofher controlled order
are matched by a cinematic structure consistent in both its display (of, for
example, the scenes in which Jeanne cooks meals) and its elisions (of the
sex scenes). As rigid as the character's own self-imposed chronology, this
structure consists ofa set ofa priori decisions-about the camera's location
66 Nothing Happens
and height vis-a.-vis the filmic event-that remains unchanged through
most of the film.
The narrative structure ofJeanne Die/man is predicated on a formal and
dramatic equivalence between major and minor events. Akerman uses
literal time and a fixed frontal frame to depict actions merely hinted at in
conventional feature films. We are shown the cooking and eating of every
meal for three days, the washing of dishes, the making of beds, the taking
of a bath. We observe Jeanne both following her meticulous routine and
killing time. Most of the actions are followed in their entirety. When they
are not, the repetitive nature of Jeanne's gestures suggests a mold to be
imaginatively filled in by the spectator watching an action or event not
fully shown the second time round (as, for instance, the second time
Jeanne takes a bath, and so on). Akerman's refusal merely to indicate an
action through some kind of synecdochal tag, reinforces one's sense of a
quotidian routine of tasks carried on repeatedly and in full. The feeling of
repetition, I would claim, is a well-orchestrated effect, since one in fact
seldom sees any diegetic task performed in its entirety twice in the film.
What we do see is the "interminable" of the scene: the full duration of a
task and ofa character's waiting.
By presenting unique instances of a gesture or event, and by stressing
real-time representation, Akerman frustrates the abstracting nature of repetition-the
suggestion of constant recurrence (every day, week, month).
As a result of the indexical relations between photographic record and
reality, real-time representation foregrounds the particularizing nature of
the cinematic event. At the same time, Akerman exerts a precise, delicate
economy: she systematically "subtracts" from specific scenes. This frugality
is a matter not simply of available cinematic time but of the possibility
ofa newly constructed visibility: the film's hyperbolic focus on the
quotidian, a focus we imagine as a literal rendition of the actions of the
central character, is so extreme that for a long time into the film we overlook
its cost-the partial or complete elision of scenes.
When focusing on Jeanne's cooking, the camera-with two important
exceptions-is located facing the kitchen from the door, parallel to the
kitchen sink and oven. It insistently faces a focal action point-table, oven,
or sink. This obdurate fixity creates extreme lags of on-screen action, for
one quickly learns that the action in a scene does not terminate when the
character leaves the frame. This is, indeed, one of the film's first lessons:
the camera will face the area of an action's start, even when this action
moves off-frame or is elided. Akerman signals an impending cut by having
Jeanne complete her tasks, move off-screen, and turn off the lights after
The Equivalence of Events 67
leaving the frame. There is a "post action lag of about six seconds before
the cut."3 On the other hand. the next shot always begins in medias res.
We also see Jeanne between spaces-in the corridor as she passes from
bedroom to bathroom or from kitchen to living room. Akerman starts
a sequence that could be titled "Getting Sylvian (Jeanne's son) Out to
School" in the kitchen, but she also films Jeanne as she enters the living
room, where her son is asleep, to turn on the heater and wake him up. The
recording ofJeanne's trajectory inside the house is, as we shall see, as basic
to the film as the shift from literal to fictional representation that occurs
later on.
That Akerman's standardized procedures of setup and editing seem to
follow Jeanne's logic and movements soon becomes one of the film's formal
correlates, so that any disruption in the character's system can be
represented by a concurrent rupture in the editing pattern. Most ofthe film
is shot indoors, providing an additional means to maintain, through framing,
the idea oforder. The three walls of each room in which Jeanne moves,
if not always present in the image, are nevertheless the spatial references
that localize and frame her. At the same time, Akerman emphasizes a
Renaissance perspectival composition through the use of symmetry and,
through the low height (her own) of the camera, creates the illusion of
diagonal lines converging on a central point within the frame.4 This use of
perspective qualifies Akerman's abstracting strategies as structural and
narrative rather than visual and aural: her hyperrealism is characterized
by a hypostasis of illusionist perspective and realist representation.
Throughout the film we are constantly reminded of other, more conventional
ways of telling the same story. Akerman's parti pris is original: her
twisting ofnarrative takes place through the selection and amplification of
devices usually associated with conventional Hollywood narrative. She
hyperbolizes perspective, linear chronology, ellipsis, and the naturalistic
conventions of having single actors perform single characters. Insisting
on, indeed amplifying narrative elements, Akerman defines a homogeneous
texture that subverts the codes of cinematic transparency from
within.5
Akerman's narrative is elliptical and stylistically rigorous. It makes
sparse use of anecdotal detail. Her "litany of constricted forms-austere
camera movement, tight grid of controlled spaces, minimum verbal communication
counterpointed by heightened natural sounds"6 constitutes
an amplificatory tactic proper to what I have termed an "aesthetics of
homogeneity. "7
The frontal camera angles and the absence of reverse shots in Jeanne
68 Nothing Happens
Dielman are part of the assertiveness with which Akerman uses the representational
image. The film's skewed frontality makes us ask, "Why
doesn't Jeanne look at us [at the cameral?" This frontality defies the precise,
ritualistic changes of camera angle that secure a sense ofcontinuity in
the classic cinematic/analytic pattern, but it also challenges the thrust of
the direct address in many anti-illusionistic films.8 Akerman explicates
what analytic editing would mean in Jeanne Dielman when she explains
why she discarded this form of cutting: "It was the only way to shoot that
scene and to shoot that film. To avoid cutting the woman in a hundred
pieces, ... cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to
be respectful."9 In fact this narrative has a center whose distance from the
object never changes: "You always know what point of view it is. It's always
the same.... I didn't go too close, but I didn't go too far away.... It
was not a neutral look, ... but the camera was not voyeuristic in the commercial
way because you always know where I am. You know it wasn't
shot through the keyhole."lO Akerman's extended naturalistic shots, at
medium distance, modify both classic film narrative with its regulated
alternation of shots and experimental film, where the concept of time
could almost be a substitute for the image. In "Repetition Time," Stephen
Heath discusses the specific process through which a structural materialist
film denies narrative:11 "The account given will be extremely subjective
or extremely objective (towards a description of the filmic construction,
the uses of repetition, camera mobility, etc.)."12 Yet in Jeanne
Dielman, and this is precisely the film's "difference," the idea of time
("objective") and the feeling of repetition ("subjective") are not proposed
as substitutes for the flow of the narrative. The idea of time is indissolubly
linked to Akerman's hyperrealism, adding to it a different perceptual
demand.
The extension of time through a naturalistic image-the hyperrealist
effect proposed-has as its utmost limit the question, "What am I doing
here watching what this woman is doing?" The question implies not just a
confusion between a naturalistic image and reality but the actual possibility
of entering the fiction. It is the nature of the image that it seems to
invite us to enter a diegetic process. Yet the kinds of correspondences that
usually regulate the time of the narrative, of storytelling according to this
or that dramatic effect, arc not respected. As Akerman herself says, she
uses duration as a presence rather than for mood (as she had done in her
early film L'Enfant aime ou je joue ii etre une femme mariee [The beloved
child, or I play at being a married woman], 1971).13 This difference is as
The Equivalence of Events 69
crucial in the film as Akerman's avoidance of reverse shots: it defines the
separateness of director, spectator, and character.
Jeanne Die/man "objectifies" the character's and spectator's experience
through its orchestration of repetition: the patterned cinematic structurn,
Jeanne's routine behavior, and the spectator's endurance in the face of
boredom all constitute parallel yet distinct registers of sameness. This
sameness negates the image, creating a form of abstractive blindness,
which explains why one tends, in describing Jeanne Die/man, to misremember
the complex and detailed map of Jeanne's routine. If we are
to follow this narrative, we must modify our notions of repetition and
nothingness. An eye attentive to change is the only possibility left: seeing
and not seeing stand in this film as opposites corresponding respectively
to, on the one hand, attention to sometimes minute changes (in the image
and in events) and, on the other, to complete alienation.
This reconception of focus must extend not only to the dramatic content
of the scenes (cooking, knitting, killing) but also to cinematic events,
events pertaining to filmic texture and structure. Through extended duration
and fixed frame, the spectator experiences the profilmic event as an
expansive materiality. The dishcloth, her apron, the weight of plates, the
soup tureen on the dining table-all become heightened synesthetic foci.
The complicity between spectator and character, then, depends on an
interplay between attention and inattention. And it is this interplay, finally,
that constructs the particular quality of perception and memory
invoked by the work. One remembers each image and detail of Jeanne
Die/man through Akerman's proposal of a seesaw movement: the impossibility
of choosing one pole of reading-story-"against" the other, a literal
flow oftime.
Excess Description: Robbe-Grillet and Cinematic Hype....ealism
Akerman's use of both repetitive compositions and extended real-time
shuts raises questions about the destabilizing, supplementary effect of
detailed description. The insistence on remaining with the scene even
after its narrational or referential information has been decoded inevitably
solicits an estranged experience of the image. The hyperattentiveness
urged on the viewer by Akerman's extended takes in real time is reinforced
by the fixity of camera setup and height. At the same time, this camera
fixity exacts a qualification of, or at least a reflection on, the sort of attention
it commands: the camera's rigid stare directs our awareness to the
70 Nothing Happens
minutiae ofthe action, but as soon as Jeanne leaves the frame, the camera's
fixed position discloses our attention as one utterly focused on the human
presence.
Akerman's interest in Jeanne's presence has been likened to voyeurism.14
But this interpretation is only possible if one assumes that the camera's
fixed position is a strategy based on a (character-identified) limit: the
impossibility of following the supposed object of attention-Jeanne-out
of the frame. The fixity of the camera in Jeanne Dielman, however, is not
confined to special situations; it restricts one's vision consistently. Besides,
we have not been granted access to the diegesis through a point-ofview
structure ofcamera shots. Our sole means ofidentification is with the
camera. Indeed, the film is firm in its denial of identificatory processes.15
By reinforcing one's curiosity about human presence, Akerman ultimately
discloses the anti-anthropomorphic thrust of hyperrealism. The
fixity of the camera position is a self-limiting strategy that implicates the
spectator beyond the play of identification. Its fixity represents a frame,
the better to see what is shown-Jeanne, but also the table, the sink, the
dishes.
The "traditional" scene is usually equated with human presence, or at
least with its imminent appearance. In Jeanne Dielman, however, as the
unwavering camera truncates or elides human bodies, it participates, from
the very start, in an economy of excess and lack. When Jeanne leaves the
frame, the camera's poised stare placates the curiosity for human presence
through what visibly becomes a hyperreality. Displaced onto sets and objects,
the camera's extended gaze enhances the effect of defamiliarization
produced by Akerman's literal representations. Objects and spaces gain an
effect of presence that is entirely devoid of metaphysical or symbolic significance.
Akerman imposes a sense of gravity and physicality on both
people and objects as they are anchored on screen. And as these images
stimulate our awareness ofthe texture ofdomestic objects, it is as ifwe had
gained an extrasensorial dimension. The difference between one fixity
that restructures perception and emphasizes cinematic elements and another
that redirects our curiosity to a missing presence might seem minor.
But in Jeanne Dielman, the tension between these two possibilities allows
a perceptual energy directed at the scene to be transfigured into a proto-
narrative.
This anti-anthropomorphism in Akerman's stance, this descriptive
thrust that equates objects and human beings, this sense first and foremost
ofthings "being there" for one's attention, is shared with the creators ofthe
nouveau roman. For Alain Robbe-Grillet, the indexical image can block
The Equivalence ofEvents 71
interpretation or metaphysical projection. In his essays he discusses how
his supposedly "direct," and in a way limited, presentation ofthe referent
is intended to counter significance. "Formal description," he says, "is
above all a limitation: when it says 'parallelepiped,' it knows it achieves
no Beyond, but at the same time it cuts short any possibility of seeking
one."16 Robbe-Grillet's strategic use of verbal description, based almost
entirely on the visual sense, offsets any transcendental or psychological
undertone.
What Roland Barthes, in his essay "Objective Literature: Alain RobbeGrillet,"
calls "formal description" provides striking analogies with Akerman's
effects ofliteral representation, insofar as both approaches engage in
a blockage of symbolic meaning: "The description of the object somehow
exceeds its function ... and at the very moment we expect the author's
interest to lapse, having exhausted the object's instrumentality, that interest
persists, ... bringing the narrative to a sudden, untimely halt and
transforming a simple implement into space."17 Literalness, or the use
of real-time action, is Akerman's cinematic equivalent of the description
based on visuality that Barthes perceptively discerns in Robbe-Grillet's
work. It is the way Robbe-Grillet leans on the visual sense that creates the
effect of objecthood he desires.18 As Barthes writes, "This preference for
the visual enforces some curious consequences, the primary being that
Robbe-Grillet's object is never drawn in third dimensions, in depth: ...
[it) has no being beyond phenomenon: it is not ambiguous, not allegorical,
not even opaque."19 Considering Robbe-Grillet's and Akerman's mediumspecific
modes of objectification, it is important to emphasize their shared
antipsychological thrust. Both Robbe-Grillet's literature and Akerman's
cinematic hyperrealism are constructed upon selected reductions and amplifications.
Robbe-Grillet's project of using qualifiers and nouns relating
solely to the visual sense is echoed in Akerman's films through the device
of extended duration-a device reflecting a phenomenological understanding
that relies on the hyperbolic foregrounding of one specific sense.
However, although Akerman intimates, as it were, an extra dimension
through her hyperbolic reductions, the supplement produced through
these concerted restrictions is radically antimetaphysical, as it is with
Robbe-Grillet.
The emphasis on the sense of sight is significantly related to the doubling
of referentiality implicit in description. Conventionally, description
is a form oflanguage that stands merely as a recording-a sort ofbypass of
more elaborate processes of signification. It is a mode of expression, then,
that doubles the work of reference implicit in language itself. In a visual
72 Nothing Happens
medium such as film-and hence the importance of Robbe-Grillet's insistence
on a description based on vision-this referentiality is the "natural"
given of indexical representation. And as it is dwelt upon through description
or duration, it can only yield an excess, one that belies, as hyperrealism
does, the illusions of "objectiveness." Instead of using language in a
patently connotative way, objective literature, literal art, and Akerman's
minimal and hyperrealist cinema all insist on amplifying what is implicit
in any indexical language: its rendering of a first, "immediate" meaningits
referent.
Yet through the unsettling effect of excess description, Akerman approaches
an abstract concreteness that unbalances referentiality. There is a
sort of metamorphosis: the sharpness of the depiction borders on the hallucinatory.
Akerman's hyperrealist style crosses a certain threshold of intensity.
An oscillation between recognizing the familiar and being estranged
from it is one of the central features ofJeanne Dielman. This effect
of making strange through representation is part of the hyperrealist aspect
of Akerman's style: the extreme concentration on a certain set of images or
gestures over an extended period of time leads to a basic questioning ofthe
conventions sustaining the identity between reality and representation.20
Distended temporality is inseparable from Akerman's particular brand of
abstraction, from her hyperbolic indexicality.
The use of repetitive pattern in the film seems to imply an abstract
category or tag. Yet the film's enhancement of the visual and aural senses
frustrates a categorical grid, enforcing a nonconceptual modality of perception.
Resisting a subsumption of repetition in an abstract notion (that,
for instance, of calling the actions in Jeanne Dielman "housekeeping"),
Akerman refuses to employ what Rosalind Krauss calls "the single example
that would imply the whole" and opts instead for" accounts of events
composed by a string of almost identical details connected by 'and.' "21
Referring to the work of Sol LeWitt, Samuel Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet,
Krauss names their proposals of concrete description and ateleological
listing an "absurd nominalism." Of these works in general and that of
LeWitt in particular she remarks,
The experience of the work [LeWitt's Variations ofIncomplete Open
Cubes) goes exactly counter to the 'look of thought. ... whether diagrammatic
or symbolic, [classical expressions of logic) are precisely
about the capacity to ... imply an expansion with only the first two
or three terms, ... to use, in short, the notion of etcetera.22
Krauss continues,
The Equivalence ofEvents 73
The babble of a LeWitt serial expansion ... has the loquaciousness of
the speech of children or of the very old, in that its refusal to summarize,
to use the single example that would imply the whole, is like
those feverish accounts of events composed of a string of almost identical
details connected by "and."23
Krauss's analysis points to the kind of dissolution of synthetic formulations
that critics have also found in Robert Morris's minimalism and
Robbe-Grillet's literature. In a more general way, Akerman's avoidance of
abstractive processes also defines some of the strategies of "defamiliarization"
(ostranenie) proposed by the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky. For
Shklovsky, "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they
are perceived and not as they are known ... to make the stone stony."Z4
Thus he proposes making the familiar strange by not naming the thing
known-proposes the replacement of its name by concrete description.
Art, he says, is characterized by such evasion, which reflects an attempt to
counter a process of perception that has become automatic-an "algebraic
method of thought" where one apprehends "objects only as shapes with
imprecise extensions," where one knows the object "by its configuration"
but sees "only its silhouette."z5 Here we find one of the recurrent themes
explored at the intersection of phenomenology and modernism.26 This is
the compass point by which Akerman's work steers: it is a matter of substituting
the knowledge of an object for a "vision" ofit, calling attention to
its materiality through a "roughening" of its language.
Still, when one analyzes Akerman's use ofreal-time representation as a
reflexive strategy, one finds that its effects far surpass a simple calling of
attention to the stoniness of the stone. Literal rendition of events undoubtedly
creates a "roughened" cinematic texture, but what matters in Jeanne
Dielman is the specific dimension of Akerman's "making strange." What
demands address is the connection between the enhanced cinematic materiality
of her work and the thematics of automatism and obsession compulsion
that run through it.
Bracketing Drama: The Other Scene
If I have insisted until now on a reading of Jeanne Dielman based on the
defamiliarizing effect of duration, I should also say that the film's narrative
is not composed completely of extended shots of housekeeping. There are
indeed many such scenes shown in their entirety: Jeanne making her bed,
laying a white towel carefully at the bed's center, waiting at the post office,
74 Nothing Happens
buttoning her robe, folding her son's pajamas. There are also the extended
dialogues-qua-monologues. But, some ofthese scenes are presented to us a
second time; these "repeats" are usually cut so that they begin in medias
res, leaving it to our memories to provide the full action out of what we
have just seen forty or fifty minutes earlier. And besides these partially
elided scenes-which, given our memory of a recent, similar scene, work
as complete sequences-Jeanne Dielman presents complete, almost comical
elisions, such as Jeanne's walk around the block with her son after
dinner. The two figures leave along one side of the street; they vanish in
the dark; the camera shifts to face down the street in the other direction;
they reappear from the dark and reenter the building-the entire sequence
taking something less than thirty seconds.
In addition, a series of very short shots punctuates the long takes of the
household and lets us see, though only barely, the clients Jeanne receives
every afternoon. Though there are other ellipses in the film, these are its
most significant. As Jeanne receives her clients, the camera's low height
truncates their bodies. The camera is positioned by the apartment door
with the bedroom door in the background; one sees Jeanne's body from her
chin down, taking the customers' coats and hats. The truncation of the
frame is so extreme that we can see the men's (and Jeanne's) full upper
contour only as they follow Jeanne toward the bedroom door.
The fixity of this framing is obstinate. Throughout the film, the camera's
stare marks a refusal to give the characters centrality. This same refusal
defines the subtractive gesture that sets up Akerman's elisions of the
scenes inside the bedroom. For between those moments by the apartment
door-as she receives first the client, then later his money-another door is
of central importance: the door ofthe bedroom, which Jeanne approaches
with the client. They enter, and he closes it after him. The camera remains
facing the corridor and the door. 1\vo seconds later the light gets darker
abruptly, in a faux jump cut that marks the passage to a later moment:
Jeanne opens the bedroom door and leaves with the customer. The ellipsis
is diegetically justified, with the natural passage of time-the period from
late afternoon to early evening-implied by the difference of light within
the shot. Thus it is only the suddenness of the shift from lighter to darker
that in any way produces the effect of ellipsis.
This shift in "time," moreover, is effected simply by switching offthe set
lights. Actually a switching off of lights pervades the film: Jeanne has a
mania for turning off the lights before she leaves any room, even if she is
leaving for just a few moments. The perversion of the "naturalness" of
filmic conventions in these temporal ellipses is therefore double. First,
The Equivalence ofEvents 75
there is a refusal of the gradual passage of time usually connoted by the
cinematic ellipsis-Akerman's ellipses are abruptly performed rather than
evoked. At the same time, the turning offand on of lights has already been
introduced through Jeanne's obsessiveness and frugality, so that the artifice
of Akerman's ellipsis is naturalized-we are already acclimatized to
these switches of light. We have come to see them as normal. Yet it is only
Jeanne's borderline behavior-her naturalness runs mechanically-that allows
such a perfect, and radical. perversion of cinematic naturalism on
Akerman's part.
The bedroom scenes that would provide a literal, continuous temporality
for these episodes are elided. The ellipses are basic to Akerman's nontotalist
bent in cinematic representation. For she does not mask the fact
that she is suppressing the bedroom scenes-she actually displays it, with
mastery and purpose. The stubborn linearity and homogeneity of Akerman's
treatment of every scene allows these unseen scenes to fuse with
those of the housekeeping routines. Through this homogeneous texture,
Akerman construes an equivalence of events: among her other routine
housekeeping chores, Jeanne hides the signs of prostitution. This diegetic
indifferentiation is further reinforced by the similarly matter-of-fact way
in which the filmmaker treats both the prostitution episodes and the cooking
chores.
Actually Akerman's elisions parallel Jeanne's own concealments, adding
to the effect of order that Jeanne tries to impose on her life. Cleaning
and hiding here stand for each other in perfect homology. This hiding,
though neutralized-mingled with the peeling of potatoes and the
babysitting-is recorded and shown. Still, through the manner in which
she shows Jeanne hiding, Akerman builds a peculiar complicity with the
character. We are led both to sense and immediately to forget that these
men, doors, and money represent a major possibility ofrupture in Jeanne's
routine. This forgetting is encouraged through the way their presence naturally
and rapidly gives way to other "nondramatic" events, shown in
long take. When Jeanne carefully puts away the money she has earned in
the soup tureen that sits at the center of the table, midway between bedroom
and kitchen, for example, this gesture takes its place among the long
and detailed shots ofthe home routine.
Jeanne Dielman can be perceived as creating a complicity between narrative
procedures and narrated acts and gestures. Akerman shows her
empathy toward Jeanne's story by neutralizing the importance, in the hierarchy
of spectacle, of the fictive obscenity in relation to "minor" housekeeping
events. Little by little, this complicity is made apparent, poised as
76 Nothing Happens
Jeanne carries the pot of burned potatoes, Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dieiman, 23
Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of
New Yorker Films.
it is on unstable ground. The starting point of this imbalance is the rupture
ofthe homology that had unproblematically correlated narrative and story
levels: on the one hand, the order and repetition of housekeeping tasks
shown in long take, on the other, flashes ofvery short scenes, vestiges, that
cover up what is "out of scene"-the obscene.
When Jeanne closes the door after a client, her hair is tousled and the
potatoes have burned. The event, dramatically minimized, that stands
elliptically between closed doors pushes into the long take, disrupting its
order. It is here that the film shifts its course. After the first link is established
between Jeanne's disheveled hair (the obscene) and the burned
potatoes (the scene), there is no way back. This connection is signaled by
the first major change in camera position: for the first time, the camera
stands by the oven, facing the door. It lingers there for a few seconds before
Jeanne opens the door. Distraught, she stops, leaves the kitchen, goes into
the corridor, stops again, and returns. And as the camera reverts to its
original position, filming from the door into the kitchen, Jeanne starts
one of cinema's greatest choreographies of displaced anxiety: she doesn't
know what to do with (the fact of) the burned potatoes.
It is also at this point that the system of editing is deranged. Through the
first half of the film, Akerman establishes a sequence ofallowing Jeanne to
finish her activities, leave the frame, and turn off the light before the director
cuts to another shot. Here, instead, Akerman cuts in medias res, while
The Equivalence ofEvents 77
Jeanne is still in the kitchen and moving toward the door. From this entrance
to the kitchen on, all of her obsessive order runs amok. She will
later open the bedroom window before turning on the lights, and she
wanders into and out of the bathroom twice, all the while holding the pot
of potatoes, undecided as to what to do with this evidence of misconduct.
In Jeanne's logic, the burned potatoes cannot be turned into mashed potatoes:
the evidence must disappear completely, leaving no residue. And
the menu must be restored as initially planned.
After this scene in Jeanne Dielman, all the activities to follow are played
out as lacking in precision in relation to the way they were performed
earlier on, during the first and second days of the film's action. The perverse
notion of balance in Jeanne Dielman is given away by the fact that
this scene bisects the film in two halves. Exactly ninety-five minutes into
its run, the film starts almost paradigmatically to display every routine
action as potentially faulty. On the third day, a tragicomic roster of hesitations
emerges. These hesitations bear direct relation to a particular time:
Jeanne constantly checks to see what time it is, confirming the fact that
she has started to perform her activities earlier and has lost her habitual
precision.
The pervasion of the scene by what is outside the scene, and the subsequent
disruptions of the order that Jeanne has established in her routine,
are not felt as a sudden inflection, though they bring about a change in the
process of addressing the spectator. It is exactly when our attention has
become in a sense trained to distinguish minor differences in the "sameness
of the scene" that we are answered on a diegetic level, that ruptures
start to show in the hitherto carefully constructed and untroubled analogy
between filmic structure and story. Yet after the initial sequence, with the
burned potatoes, where the system falters along with Jeanne, the camera
maintains its center. With one important exception-when Jeanne goes
into the kitchen for scissors to open a gift she has received, the camera
position is similar to that when she finds the burned potatoes-neither the
framing nor the editing pattern changes in the subsequent scenes. This
uniformity allows us to perceive, in the profilmic, the sign itself of alteration.
We become aware of the passion that might exist under Jeanne's
calm expression, and we retrospectively start to read this seemingly unchanged
expression as reflecting the growing anguish of silence.
The keyhole view that Chantal Akerman denies us is a displaced presence
in this film. The extended duration of the shots no longer points to a
nondramatic action but starts to function as the locus par excellence ofthe
drama's eruption.
78 Nothing Happens
For the first two hours, all in Jeanne Dielman is startling order. This
rigor supports a comparison of the film's structure to a game of "What is
wrong with this picture?" The rhyming of formal and structural tone with
the profilmic event in leanne Dielman is akin to the strategic engagement
of the spectator's expectations in structural film. As minimal art, structural
film reduces the number of elements involved in its scrutiny. Structural
film offers a paradigm (formal repetition, seriality, etc.) through
which the viewer can reconstruct its governing system, and in a way predict
its "narrative"; it thus invites one to read the development of the film
as a "natural" sequence of events, as an organic match between profilmic
and cinematic orders. The interplay between recognizing the utter arbitrariness
of this sequencing and noticing that which might break its expected
pattern is a basic component ofthe structural film's vocabulary and
intention.27
Akerman sets a formal and a behavioral paradigm only the better to
expose its underside. The narrative is predicated on the difference between
the first two days and the third day of Jeanne's routine. In its didactic
exposure of the fragility of order, this discrepancy implies a moral tale:
a fork falls, dishes remain sudsy, the brush flies as Jeanne shines the shoes,
and she arrives either too early or too late to each of her routine stations.
Objects seem animistically fraught, with a will of their own, and time,
Jeanne's motor, starts being felt (by her and by us) as the reverse and
constitutive side ofboredom: as impatience and anguish.
It is on the third day that, because of an initial derangement of Jeanne's
chronology (she wakes before her alarm clock rings), we see her sit apathetically
at the kitchen table, then suddenly go to the back balcony, pick
up a broom, leave it, and return to the chair. She stands up again, taking
some coffee from the thermos bottle. She pours in some milk, and ... the
coffee tastes bad. She tastes the milk, brings out the sugar, carefully choosing
perfect cubes which she joins symmetrically in a tiny rectangle before
putting them in her drink-and the coffee still tastes bad. Then she starts
making more coffee from scratch. Her apathy is given a purpose-to wait
for the coffee to seep slowly through the Melita filter. Thierry de Duve has
described this figuration of time-the water seeping through a domestic
apparatus shaped rather like an hourglass-as a representation of one of
the temporalities administered by Jeanne and by Akerman. Providing a
metaphoric level for all the film's scenes in real time, the Melita coffee
scene constitutes an image of "time as entropy, as irreversibility. "28
The extra activity does not rebalance Jeanne's chronology. She sits in
an old mustard-colored armchair, taking its shape and faded tone, only
The Equivalence of Events 79
Duration in Jeanne Dielman: Coffee filter as hourglass, Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne
Dielman. 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 BruxeJ/es (1975). Framfl enlargement, courtesy
of New Yorker Films.
breathing. It is on the third day of the film's narrative that we watch Jeanne
sit for long periods of time, doing nothing, then abruptly standing, or
doing something unnecessary (like cleaning the bibelots) or unusual (like
trying to play with the neighbor's baby, who normally sits alone as Jeanne
has her snack). If, at a certain point in the film, we begin to suspect a
change in the pace of what we've been watching for two and a half hours,
this has to do with the introduction of signs of anxiety, shots where the
action is in "disaster mode." In Jeanne Dielman, the disruptions in the
scene are relatively small; they could be analogues for the images that
classic analytic editing would privilege, through cutaways and close-ups,
as suggestions of something about to happen.
Nevertheless, in showing all of Jeanne's vicissitudes-small disasters
such as a falling fork, the loss of her usual coffee time, a baby howling-in
an unchanged medium long shot, Akerman fixes these signs in the present
time oftheir dramatic and material repercussions. Such mishaps are not to
be read as forebodings, then, although they eventually function this way.
To the extent that they are dramatic, it is through their actual noise and
visual disturbance. The unease is felt through the disruption of the pace of
the earlier scenes, with their untroubled movement (for the spectator) and
domestic order (for Jeanne). The fact that Jeanne Dielman involves the
spectator's attention in what in the hierarchy of spectacle is a minor her-
80 Nothing Happens
meneutic chain leads more to the viewing of what is happening than to
the prospect of what will happen. Although we have learned to decode
Jeanne's routine, and thus know what to expect in the order of events,
Akerman's episodic narrative structure holds surprises having nothing to
do with the notion of a turn of events. One adjusts very slowly to the
fact that the irruption of differences holds the promise of some dramatic
change. In Jeanne Dielman, the suspension of expectation generates another
kind of suspense: the film experiments with the possibility of an
attention to silence, blankness, and minor events but not as either a sign of
some form of asceticism (a moralistic standpoint against traditional narrative,
for example) or the absolute precondition for or even announcement
of drama (like the stillness that reinforces the suspense of a thriller).
Jeanne Dielman constitutes a radical experiment with being undramatic
and, paradoxically, with drama's absolute necessity.
The Murder, and, and, and . .. : An Aesthetics of Homogeneity
Inertia. It is precise that "events take place. "-Michael Snow, 196729
The scene in its duration charges itself like an electric condenser as it progresses
and must be kept carefullyinsulated against all parasitic contacts until a sufficient
dramatic voltage has been reached, which produces the spark that all the action
has been directed toward.-Andrri Bazin on The Magnificent Amberson's kitchen
scene30
"No longer write about people's lives," Jean-Luc Godard says in Pierrot Ie
Fou, through Jean-Paul Belmondo, "but only [about] what goes on between
people in space ... like colors and sounds.":l1 Snow's work, the
other major influence on Akerman's films, adds another level to Godard's
phenomenological approach.32 He says of his film Wavelength (1967)
that it
attempts to be ... a "balancing" of different orders, classes of events,
protagonists. The image of the yellow chair has as much value in its
own world as the girl closing the window. The film events are not
hierarchical but are chosen from a kind of scale of mobility that runs
from pure light events, the various perceptions of the room, to the
images of moving human beings.33
The documentary, and hence historical, element in structural film was
noticed as early as Manny Farber's 1970 description of Wavelength as "a
straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have
The Equivalence of Events 81
lived and gone bankrupt."34 The notion ofa narrative in embryo contained
in Farber's phrase is given fuller extension in Annette Michelson's 1971
essay "Toward Snow," a concerted gesture toward reinscribing the question
of narrative within independent, structural film:
As the camera continues to move ... forward, building a tension that
grows in direct ratio to the reduction of the field, we recognize ...
those horizons as defining the contours of narrative, of that narrative
form animated by distended temporality turning upon cognition toward
revelation.35
Wavelength's camera movement of progressive revelation, which Michelson
reads as a sort of epitomization ofa suspense narrative, constitutes the
perspective proper to a phenomenological "reduction of field." A protracted
zoom and an extension ofthe visual field over a precise fixed focus
shape the film. The shot affords a hyperbole of indexical information; it
also affords a cumulative intensification that is structurally analogous to
the teleological movement of narrative.
In considering the potential connections between structural format and
narrative processes, one might ask at what point an event should be considered
dramatic within structural film, and whether intensity can in itself
constitute drama. The literature of structural film refers constantly to external
contingency as the "other" to the impassive camera. P. Adams Sitney
points to dawn as the "one exterior event that does leak in" to Ernie
Gohr's Serene Velocity (1970);36 Stephen Koch points out an easy-to-miss
event in Warhol's Empire (1964), the moment at dusk when the lights of
the Empire State Building'S top thirty floors are turned on.37 At a certain
moment in both these films, what has so far been seen as a natural progression
breaks into a sign, a difference.
There is an affinity between this difference and the climactic moment of
drama. If we look for this affinity within the context of minimalist art, we
find it referenced in an epigrammatic scene presented by Robert Morris in
1961. Krauss describes this performance as follows:
The curtain parts. In the center of the stage is a column, standing
upright, eight feet high.... Nothing else is on the stage. For three and
a halfminutes nothing happens; no one enters or leaves. Suddenly the
column falls, three and a half minutes elapse. The curtain closes.38
The ironic display ofthe presence effect ofliteral sculpture, here evinced
as theater, is also manifested, though differently, in structural film. The
performance element sought in structural film-the seepage of the exhibi-
82 Nothing Happens
tion context onto the text, and vice versa (the flicker effect, the sound ofthe
projector, light particles, the addition of dust and scratches to the film)-is
given an extra turn in Snow's work: the performance situation is acknowledged,
in much the same way that Morris pulls the curtain to "communicate"
conventional drama. Snow recognizes and incorporates the single
element relegated backstage in the performances of structural-minimalist
film: dramatic content. He stages instances ofcontingency as fragments ofa
would-be plot.39
In Snow's work, human events hint at narrative in episodic spurts without
ever embracing continuity or motivation. The explicitly simulated
fight shown in the afternoon party in Back and Forth (1969) cues the rest of
the activities in the film as posed events. The performances in Back and
Forth lack density and are not to be measured against naturalistic conventions.
Their consistent rarefaction (mock violence, posed gestures) is construed
in opposition to the marked physicality and resolute rhythm of the
camera. As Snow states, "Oppositions are drama."4o
Snow gives his narrative semblances quite strong connotations as allusions.
The very sparseness of narrative markers in the scene reveals the
specific role that narrative assumes in his aesthetic.41 The fact that narrative
in its phenomenological and structural aspects is so strong in Snow's
work shows that, for him, the use of narrative mementos functions as a
counterpoint to the cinematic transformations in the body of the film,
illustrating in an expository manner the equivalence of figurative and literal
orders suggested in his statements. Snow's work is relevant here, however,
mainly as a means to rethink the relations between the narrative
memento constituted by the episodic (the various human occurrences in
Back and Forth and in Wavelength) and a narrative intensity resulting
from a structural insistence in a single direction (the zoom and the intensification
of sound in Wavelength, the syncopated speeding in Back and
Forth).42
From Hotel Monterey (1972) to Jeanne Dielman, these two kinds of narrative
(one made up of the episodic or discrete event, the other based on
accumulation or structural intensification) are articulated as equivalent
in Akerman's work. Episodic, discrete events such as the orgasm, the murder,
and even the disturbances in Jeanne's routine are dedramatized. Dramatic
expectation is built up simultaneously with a distanciation created
through the use of extended real-time shots. Illusion and fact are made
equivalent. They are, however, both redirected within a different sort of
(predetermined) narrative. Akerman gears the literal shots ofJeanne's routine
so that they have a cumulative force, and indeed move toward a narra-
The Equivalence ofEvents 83
tive climax pertaining to an entirely different, because fictional, registerthat
of the murder scene. The murder scene makes clear the traversal of
two distinct temporalities: one, the linear direction of the narrative, its
irreversibility in real time (the seeping of coffee through a filter, for example,
is a structuring image in this mode); the other, a temporality that
corresponds to the episodic events in the film, those instances that let one
foresee a change of course and fate, the timid workings of drama.
Both Akerman and Snow use a death scene as the main event that stands
in for the figurative order of narrative. One should, however, distinguish
between the stakes of the representation of death in each of these filmmakers'
work. A comparison with Godard is in order here. In Breathless
(1959), for instance, Godard presents Michel's death as the director's reluctant
compliance with the mandates of closure in classical narrative: even
before Belmondo "decides" to die, the claim that simulation is intrinsic to
the representation of death has already been made. Then, through a protracted
choreography of fall in long take, the camera tracks Belmondo's
body from a distance, framing and enhancing the spastic movements of his
spectacu\,pr run. This shot creates an inspired homage to the artifices of
cinematic performance.43
This is precisely the sort of death that Snow demands in Wavelength.
Death here is a stylized event and comes, as it were, from a different and
generic narrative space (that offilm nair, for instance); Hollis Frampton's
fall after dying contributes to a great lineage of stylized performances of
death in cinema. But then the camera does not stop at the dead body but
proceeds unblinkingly over it. The scene as a whole purports to be a signifier
of nothing more than narrative per se. Thus the presentation of death
ironically twists the significance of anti-illusionistic gestures of allusion:
while Godard sets up a process of intertextuality that refers to specific
filmic texts, Snow's film transforms narrative (with its hints of plot motivation)
explicitly into the other of a structural project-a matter of alter-
textuality.
In Jeanne Dielman the murder scene is crucial in more than one way.
First of all it clarifies what a hyperrealist narrative might be. In the film's
system, it is the murder scene that displays the highest degree of fictiveness;
in doing so, it sets off the fictional element latent within the literalness
of the domestic scenes-it foregrounds, in other words, the fictional
and illusionary aspect of all the images. Since violent death is complicit
with the very arbitrariness of fictional narrative,44 Akerman's use of a narrative
cliche activates, as it were, a second layer dormant under her narrative
of domesticity.
84 Nothing Happens
The notion ofthe cliche is helpful in understanding the subversive powers
of cinematic hyperrealism, its peculiar sandwiching of literalness and
representation. Suggesting a condensation of thematic redundance and
serial reproduction, the term "cliche" refers to a platitude, a phrase flattened
out by repeated use. In its original meaning, it referred to a matrix for
serial graphic reproduction. The layering of repetition and actuality invoked
by a cliche indicates its social range: a cliche is inevitably involved
with the prior resonances of a given form or representation. The fact that a
specific phrase or mode can still communicate through and despite its
redundance speaks of the cliche's force. Its potential effectiveness in film
lies in the recognition of the difference that the cliche can still meaningfully
suggest.
Jeanne Dielman continuously evokes the feeling that its narrative
spreads over, selects, and recombines elements of another, fully constituted
narrative. The film seems to stretch over a conventional narrative
and to displace its melodramatic affect, otherwise conspicuously absent,
into banal and mundane gestures.4S At times, an action like brushing
shoes, or waiting for water to boil for coffee, seems to take on the dramatic
intensity of one of those incidents in a '40s Hollywood melodrama when
someone slaps someone's face or waits anxiously for a lover. (Jeanne's
playing with the baby, on the other hand, hovers between comedy and horror
film.) It is as if Akerman, instead of reproducing a charged image (of a
Campbell's soup can, say, or of the Empire State Building)-instead, even,
of making references to narrative events from other film work (the kind of
reference constituted by Godard's pop gesture in Alphaville, 1966)-had
incorporated stretches of classical narrative at the basis of her own modified
drama.
The film's narrative setup-a widow, living with her adolescent son,
works in the afternoons as a prostitute taking clients in her home-and
dialogues are blatantly founded on the absence of the father. Sylvain explicitly
mentions his desire to defend his mother from his father's fiery
sword (hurtful penis), indicating an oedipal scenario that the film exposes
almost as if to dispose of it, be done with it, before going into the heart of
another narrative, one whose texture is provided through Jeanne's solitary
dealings. I will discuss this form of distributing information in more detail
in the sixth chapter. For the moment, however, the particular quality of
Akerman's process of allusion may in part be accounted for by the way she
brackets the psychoanalytic references that inform her film and still makes
them work to energize her drama.
The invocation of a second layer of meaning is constantly present in the
The Equivalence of Events 85
film and, psychologically interpreted, represents the unconscious, which
surfaces through lapses and breakdowns. Without entirely discarding this
meaning, I would like to consider this second layer first of all as a symptom
of a repression with definite ideological implications. One can better
understand the direction of this representation of repression if one takes
the domestic movie melodrama as the main matrix for Akerman's hyperrealist
narrative.
The family melodrama, aimed at a female audience, is Akerman's generic
cliche, understood as the already loaded basis for her narrative transmutations.
A shared trait between melodrama and Jeanne Dieiman is
the hint of a specifically gendered psychological pressure (which, however,
is left unexpressed in Akerman's radically nonpsychological representations).
This psychological pressure has social correlates; indeed,
the subversive potential of melodrama lies in the genre's emphasis on
"an emotional dynamic whose social correlative is a network of external
forces directed oppressingly inward."46 As Linda Williams rightly claims,
"Rather than raging against a fate that the audience has learned to accept
[as in tragedy], the female hero [in melodrama] often accepts a fate that the
audience at least partially questions."47 The melodrama, then, becomes an
indirect indictment of social pressures.
Given its formal resolution, Jeanne Dieiman could best be described as
at most a distant relative of the domestic melodrama. But the setting and
scenario, the emphasis on inertia and social paralysis, and mostly the
undercurrent of sexuality, stated even as it is repressed, all allow Akerman
to flesh out some ofthe melodrama's premises. Akerman and the directors
of melodrama share a desire to exact an understanding of social determinants,
an outcome paradoxically dependent on their narrow focus on individual
crisis. The resolute refusal in the melodrama to state a problem in
any terms other than those of emotional and familial conflicts is magnified
in Akerman's film by her intensification of interest both in the individual
and in a nonpsychological representation.
Jeanne Dieiman disallows a realist reading-where the stratum beneath
the surface would stand for an essential, repressed event. It borrows its
intensity from the memory of conventional melodrama and of that genre's
emotional outbursts (and repressions). It directs this energy toward an
alternative character construction. Provisionally, however, I would like to
link this energy to the notion of a singular pathology, an energy that moves
the character's actions in a realm both social and private. Neither of these
realms, however, is the sale cause of those actions.
In a filmic treatment as literal and devoid ofpsychology as that ofJeanne
86 Nothing Happens
The Equivalence of Events 87
Dielman, the sense of a double reference is triggered mostly because the
film resorts to an actual narrative cliche-the "climax" represented by the
murder. This "climax" forces us to rethink the status ofsuch a scene, since
the film otherwise seems to preclude traditional fictional strategies. It is by
including this scene at all that Akerman creates the sense of a doubly
layered narrative. Yet she shoots the murder scene in Jeanne Dielman in
such a way as to derange a conventional dramatic hierarchy.
For the first time in the film, we get to watch the bedroom scene. Jeanne
sits at her dresser, unbuttons her blouse, and carefully folds it. The following
shot shows us her orgasm-from a slightly higher angle but still in a
medium long shot. Next we are shown Jeanne in her initial position at the
dresser, this time buttoning her blouse, while the john, a man with Arabic
features, looks at her as ifslightly puzzled, then lies back on the bed. In the
mirror-which takes up the entire picture frame except for the bottom,
where the lower part of the dresser appears-we watch Jeanne getting
dressed. Her eyes lowered, she tucks her blouse into her skirt; she looks
down, then stands up, still smoothing her skirt, and in a continuum from
this gesture her hand goes from her skirt to the scissors, which are lying on
the dresser. She picks them up and leaves the frame. Seconds later she
reappears, falling with all her weight on the man and sticking the scissors
into his neck. Then she removes them from his body and again leaves the
frame. As she passes unseen, she replaces the scissors on the dresser.
The tension between what we understand the action to mean and the
purposive continuity of Jeanne's movement from getting dressed to murder
makes this scene remarkable. At this downplayed "climax," Akerman
inverts the valences oftemporality operative in her film: the necessary yet
potentially reversible design oftragedy, and the irreversible temporality of
real time.
The film's murder scene is a powerful example ofthe subtle dislocations
that Akerman effects within an overall textural homogeneity. By incorJeanne
smoothes her shirt, Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles (1975). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of New Yorker
Films.
Jeanne picks up the scissors, Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles (1975). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of New Yorker
Films.
Jeanne stabs the john with the scissors, Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Die/man, 23 Quai
du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of New
Yorker Films.
88 Nothing Happens
porating this obviously fictional scene in a film marked by literalness, she
doubles the arbitrariness suggested by the act of murder. 1\vo different
registers-literal and fictional-are joined, made equivalent, but there is
no apparent break in the film's cohesive texture or narrative consistency.
Up until the murder scene, everything that happens is literally done as
well as enacted. Indeed, the distinction between a literal gesture and a
performance is canceled by the nature of the actions shown: as Jeanne
peels potatoes and washes the dishes, the potatoes get peeled and the
dishes get clean. At the same time that the orgasm and the murder are
dramatically downplayed, then, they present the "obscenity" within the
film system as being first and foremost founded on the leap from presentation
to representation.48 It is the surface equivalence between literal task
activities and a nonspectacular orgasm and murder that makes for the disturbance
the scene provokes. Even though the sequence of events seems
justifiable in terms ofcontent, the formal equality that the film proposes in
the representations of cooking and of murdering smoothly but irrevocably
upsets the apparently seamless causality of this narrative, its apparently
homogeneous texture.
The arbitrariness in this shift between literal and fictional registers constitutes
the film's major subversion. (I will return later to the locus of this
subversion-to the scene ofthe crime.) Still, this shift cannot fully account
for the film's disquieting quality. As Judith Mayne suggests, "There may
not be an exact and identifiable cause for the murder of]eanne's client, but
the threat of randomness, of an interruption which is not immediately
regulated and defined within cycles of repetition and ritual, looms over
the film from the outset."49 Indeed, throughout the film a specific series
of events operates as a generic "threat of randomness," a threat to the order
both Jeanne and Akerman so carefully keep. The murder, in fact, is
only a privileged disturbance within a film system already saturated with
unease.
The Automaton: Agency and Causality in Jeanne Die/man
Not only routine activities but such elements as light and sound seem to
escape the rigid diegetic and cinematic orders. And in a way it is Akerman's
confusion of these two realms, the "within" and the "outside," that
is subversive: one does not know to what point the filmmaker is "in control."
The erratic hum of a motor, for example, may break into the scene
seemingly without notice. It can be seen as an example of the eruption
of an uncontrolled "nature" into the film's order, which absorbs that
The Equivalence of Events 89
eruption. Or else, more simply, it can be considered as an enlargement of
the material complexity of the field that Akerman makes available for
consideration-just as the flickering of a neon light across the dining table
at night can be recognized, appropriately, as a counterimage to the regulated
turning on and off of lights that characterizes Jeanne's frugality.50
On another level, the refrigerator's white noise and the neon light can be
considered as traces of the profilmic randomness intrinsic to some structural
film. Such randomness is supposed to create a friction against an
unswerving filmic structure. These sounds expand the visual and aural
filmic field, promoting a reading of cinematic materiality that, in Akerman,
is clearly redirected toward what Mary Ann Doane terms a "suspense
without expectations."51 The dawn at the end of Gehr's Serene Velocity or
the windows in Snow's Wavelength hold a similar suggestion of uncontrolled,
"natural" disruptions. More subliminally, however, the erratic
eruptions in Jeanne Dielman work as reminders of an autonomy not entirely
controlled by Jeanne's compulsive ordering.
It is almost with a shock of recognition that Mayne tells us how she long
overlooked the fact that in the kitchen in Jeanne Dielman there is sometimes
one chair by the table, sometimes two, and never any explanation for
the change. "Is it possible," she asks, "that the creation of order, of such
precise and seemingly controlled framing and mise-en-scene, is not only
so strong but so seductive that blatantly disruptive details such as this pass
unnoticed?"52 The sense of threat that we feel as we watch the film, in
other words, derives not only from our perception of disruption but from
our complicity with the character's desire for normality, a complicity we
may only recognize retroactively.
Akerman marks a divorce from Jeanne's orderliness and from the film's
formal precision by allowing Jeanne's material world to be pervaded with
a sense ofrandomness. This "threat ofrandomness" is embodied at several
points in Jeanne Dielman by a sort of animism on the part of the objects in
Jeanne's home, an animism that can be seen as the objects' necessary, "organic"
intrusion on the artificiality of cinematic procedures-as the natural
element within a rigidity ofform (Akerman) and of behavior (Jeanne).
Animism-the attribution of conscious life to material forms of realityserves,
in part, as a metaphor for a sort of randomness: a material order's
seeming resistance to being tamed. Jeanne's breakdown on the third day,
for example, is staged mostly as a struggle against objects.
Let us consider the effects of animism within the story, its significance
for Jeanne. Many behaviorist accounts of psychology report that recurring
traits of an obsessional compulsive are an intolerance of ambiguity-the
90 Nothing Happens
tendency toward symmetry, overpunctuality, meticulousness, frugalityand
that the greatest fear of obsessive compulsives is to admit to their own
actions, to a will that is their own.53 Desire is presented as an external
demand and is shaped as a set of rules, orders, and obligations that would
seem to preclude the subject's sense of autonomy. In the film, objectssoapsuds,
a button, a brush-move seemingly at their own will and irrespective
of Jeanne's conscious desires. Thus they represent the main
eventuality that a compulsive behavior pattern is supposed to fend off:
autonomy.54
The notion of animism helps explain the disquieting quality of Jeanne
Dielman in yet another respect as well. The film's overall lethal quality
depends on a series of related concepts: the very fabric of this uncanny
tour of domestic bliss is constituted not only through Akerman's doubling
ofreferentiality-her hyperrealism-but from the obsessive compulsion to
repeat and from the drive for stasis-present through Jeanne. The sense of
a displaced, uncontrolled autonomy is theorized in Freud's "The Uncanny."55
This text deals with the reverberations of the desire for and fear
of stasis as it is displaced onto the external world. Coincidence, the appearance
of the double, deja vu, as well as passing misrecognitions of
something or someone quite familiar, are seen as figures for the uncanny, a
perverse compulsion on the part of nature to repeat. The fright of misrecognition
incited by the figure of the automaton, its uncanniness, has to
do with one's perception of how much the effect of animation-where
intentions unquestionably issue from an interiority-might be in fact created
from a set of a priori, mechanical, external rules. Here the link between
an obsessive compulsive behavior and the automaton is uncovered.
The automaton is a figuration for the anxiety lying behind the need to
objectify desire. And it is this displacement that guarantees the implication
of the spectator in his/her complicity with a desire for stasis and
order. Akerman figures the precariousness of the subject's sense of autonomy
by having inanimate objects-the external world-express themselves
against the subject. She thus objectifies the obsessive compulsive's
distorted sense of autonomy, breaking her own initial complicity with the
character's desire for control.
The notion of the "disquieting familiar"56 is particularly cogent in a
film about domesticity, the scene that Akerman recalls experiencing as a
little girl observing her own mother's gestures, intently and from a certain
distance.57 What is familiar and domestic Akerman reveals as utterly
strange; in this resurfacing of estrangement she invokes the uncanny. The
situation and theme experienced through the film are literally defamiliar-
The Equivalence ofEvents 91
ized. Where the.family melodrama synecdochally caricatures domesticity
through such devices as aprons, cakes, and dishes, Akerman insists on the
familiarity ofthe domestic scene to the point where she creates one that is
unbearably alienated.
The main condition for the emergence of uncanniness is a hesitation
between two states: a dichotomy ofanimate and inanimate (clearly related
to the fear of death). As the best examples of the uncanny, Freud quotes
Jentch's (1906) discussion of figures of the automaton-those instances of
"doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive or conversely
whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate."58 Describing "the
impression made by waxwork figures, artificial dolls and automatons,"
Freud notes "the uncanny effect of epileptic seizures and the manifestations
of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the feeling that
automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed beneath the ordinary
appearance ofanimation"59 (my italics).
All these figures imply a realistic representation, where animate and
inanimate vie with each other in a balanced simulacral effect of "mechanical
processes at work beneath the ordinary appearance of animation."
Indeed, on a formal level, it has been recognized that the uncanny is most
liable to result from a homogeneous, realistic texture. Freud himselfrefers
to the amplification ofuncanniness effected by a setting of"physical reality."60
Once placed in an imaginary or fantasy setting, he argues, a story or
event has less chance of evoking uncanniness, for there is no hesitation
between the imaginary and the real. The phantasmic reverberation of
an image is increased by a realist context-one in which the uncanny
figure (image, scene) is only minimally detached from its background.
Conversely, the uncanny is virtually nonexistent in a fairy tale, which is
already framed as fantastic. Thus John de Andrea's naked hyperrealist
sculptures, which fail to blend with their surroundings (unlike Duane
Hanson's fully dressed hyperrealist types, which can almost be mistaken
for unusually motionless people), do not present an uncanny effect.61
In her analysis of Hanson's hyperrealist sculptures, Naomi Schor refers
to three-dimensionality as contributing to the uncanny effect that characterizes
hyperrealism.62 This "added dimension" is one in which the detail
or "accessory has been promoted to a radical centrality."63
With cinema, of course, we have no third dimension. Yet the excess of
det&.il apparent in the extended, scrutinizing gaze of a film like Jeanne
Dielman founds the reading of the hyperrealist image on a similar and
constitutive uncertainty: the illusion of naturalistic representation promises
the animate, promises reality, at the same time that its excessiveness
92 Nothing Happens
suggests an artificiality that can pertain only to the inanimate order of the
inorganic. This, of course, is the order of the cinematic surface.54 Hence
the perverse autonomy ofthe inanimate objects in Jeanne Dielman should
mainly be seen as a figuration of the uncanny, which informs the film at
the level of its style and texture-its hyperrealist images.65 At the same
time, the disquieting quality imparted by hyperrealism is in perfect accord
with the obsessive compulsiveness of the film's central character, Jeanne,
who, in her daily rituals, seems to live at the lowest level of self-definition
or autonomy.fi6
Since the film establishes a rigid correspondence between the order of
content and the order of cinematic structuring, Jeanne's mistakes in her
own routine constitute only the most blatant cues for her emerging autonomy.
These slips are not, of course, in the same class as the irregular
appearance of sound, light, or chairs. The refrigerator hum, the flickering
neon, the error in continuity respecting how many chairs there are in the
kitchen-all can be seen as Akerman's basso commentary on the autonomy
of the cinematic order vis-a.-vis Jeanne's own, failing autonomy. Nonetheless,
what these animistic spurts signal is the intermittent coexistence,
within the film's system, of different orders of events in an extremely
unstable balance. And at least in part, this precariousness is attendant on
the wavering between the literal and the symbolic registers intrinsic to
minimal hyperrealism.
This instability is made evident with the scene of the orgasm and murder.
By occupying what was formerly an absent scene, a bracketed space,
this scene stands as evidence of some hidden possibility. It introduces
both the purely fictive register ofrepresentation (as opposed to Akerman's
up-until-then literal renditions) and the character's automatism. What
needs to be noticed is the linkage between what might be perceived as the
character's automatic (in the sense of mechanical and unwilled) gesture
and Akerman's aesthetics-her privileging of a serial accretion that seems
blind to the different orders of events (figurative and literal) and aligns
them as the same.
The associations of minimalism and hyperrealism with obsessive compulsion
chart the formal and political reach of this blindness, this subversive
equation of different orders of events-this aesthetics ofhomogeneity.
Against the art that preceded it (which, if it reversed or suspended Cartesian
logic, did so through a process of negation based on absence or on the
absurd), minimal art suggests an alternative that is antirationalist without
being irrational. In fact this art operates through an excess of rational
order-an excess, however, that at the same time seems arbitrary in that it
The Equivalence of Events 93
follows the dictates of nonteleological, manic addition. The relentless cataloguing
ofgestures and shots possible within a restricted grid is an example
of this assertion of an alternative logic-not irrational but overly rational.
Krauss links this process of serial singular instantiation (what she
calls an "absurd nominalism") with a system of compulsions that addresses
itself to the "purposelessness of purpose, to the spinning gears ofa
machine disconnected from reason."67 Her perceptive analogy between
minimalist accumulation and the rituals of obsessional logic can be taken
further in Jeanne Dielman.
Akerman's reliance on the concrete presentation of action as it happens
in time, her refusal of cinema's usual abbreviations, is an intrinsic part of
her twisting of logic and causality. Yet although she displays the murder
scene in exactly the same way as she does all the other scenes, thus reinforcing
the notion of a cumulative and nonteleological seriality, the interest
of her minimalism lies in its simultaneous dramatic inflection: in her
use of a content that is not meant to preclude signification. If, for Beckett,
Molloy's sucking stone might work as well as any other object to circulate
within an obsessional logic,"" for Akerman domestic tasks and the afternoon
prostitution are not quite interchangeable-not, at least, as much as
Jeanne could have wanted (and Akerman formally proposes). Jeanne DieJman
takes the obsessional order to its "logical" consequences: pathos.
Thus the film deranges the pure alogic ofminimalism through a leakage of
melodrama.
Through a gesture entirely contained within a preestablished melodramatic
order of sudden reversals, and within the heroic determination (and
asceticism) that defines a gesture as tragic, Jeanne stabs her client after
having an orgasm. Yet the way in which Akerman shows this scene qualifies
the dramatic tone ofthe events: the action happens as if it followed the
dictates of an external yet regulated order (the linear, irreversible passing
of real time). Jeanne performs the murder as if it were one more necessary
action within a series of routine timed gestures. Redesigning drama, Akerman
purposefully skips the representation of causes. For motives she substitutes
a series of automatic, alienated gestures, all with a similar affect.
And although these gestures each pertain to a different, independent category,
she makes their sequence radically continuous. By thus simulating
their equality to the utmost degree, Akerman defiles the significance of
both drama and banality. If the tragic is defined by the possibility of predicting
as well as retroactively confirming the fate ofa given character, one
could say, along with de Duve, that the static conditions of tragedy are
present in the film but not its dynamic conditions.69 The film presents all
94 Nothing Happens
the conditions for the emergence of classical tragedy: a single space, a
linear chronology, a single character. But the characters in Jeanne Dielman
are not moved by acceleration, by an internal force. In fact they barely
move, shifting in space through constant motions-the motions of habiUo
Our initial question about the surplus generated by an overly rigid notion
of balance can at this point be posed anew, though it needs to expand
and encompass another, related question: within Akerman's aesthetics of
homogeneity, does the "purposelessness of purpose," or Jeanne's repetition
compulsion, function as the counterpart of Akerman's formal strategies
of description and literalness'? If so, how does the murder scene fit
into this scenario of repetition and literalness?
At issue is the difference between an autonomous, willed gesture and a
mechanical, meaningless repetition. Though the entire film seems fraught
with a deathly texture, a "lethal quality," the main figuration of this mood
is clearly the murder scene. More acutely, this scene marks the operative
perversion ofthe film-a perversion related to its reading and reception.
It is interesting to note how much of the critical readings of Jeanne
Dielman are provoked by Akerman's perverse mimicry of psychoanalysis's
theater of visibility in her structuring of on- and off-scene events. The
film can be seen as structured on a model of the manifest and the latent.
Most immediately given is a filmic structure based on a dichotomy between
visibility and invisibility: extended takes of housekeeping actions
(the scene) are opposed to very short takes and off-screen vestiges for the
elided actions of prostitution (the obscene).
Claire Johnston's analysis ofJeanne Dielman, for instance, indulges in a
terminological slippage whereby "absence" connotes both a visual and
aural phenomenon and a psychoanalytic construct. Here is Johnston's interpretation
of the events leading to the murder:
A repressed sexuality erupting as jouissance. setting up a series of
parapraxes, creating both the disorganization of physical space and
temporal gaps. This eruption of the semiotic, the drives. closed off
from our view and unnarrated, ... constitutes an expenditure without
exchange within the economy set up by the film text. As such it
must be annulled in the act ofmurder. in the abolition ofthe phallus.71
The analysis is in certain respects indisputable and is voiced, with slight
variations, by several other feminist critics.72 My suspicion of it grows,
paradoxically, from its adequacy: I am suspicious of the ease with which
Akerman's work is read as perfectly matching two different orders of
discourse-one formal and cinematic, the other theoretical. This homo-
The Equivalence of Events 95
logical tendency issues from a methodological error and is based on the
essentialist fantasy of making a theoretical concept, the unconscious let
us say, cinematically visible. In most readings of the film, it leads to a
subtending determinism. One should be careful not to reduce Akerman's
work to a sophisticated structure that frames or makes visible the disruptive
element, be it a gesture, a sound, or a drive. Jeanne Dielman may lend
itself to a reading ofthe dichotomy between a dry, minimal background (of
withheld gestures and camera movements) and a visual disturbance (in
the expression of compulsion, which is then privileged as a surfacing
repressed meaning). This structural dichotomy is then transferred to the
division between conscious and unconscious, where the "obscene" represents
the repressed. But such a reading is reductive to the extent that it
takes the eruption of "repressed pleasure" (the "acte manquee," as Akerman
calls the orgasm and murder) as the event ofthe film.
In "Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments," Jayne Loader sets out to
"correct" Akerman's film-perfect, in her opinion, but for the inclusion
of a "sensationalist murder," an unnecessary event introduced in the film
for purely rhetorical reasons. For Loader, Akerman succumbs "to the demands
ofthe traditional narrative film form that requires a bang-up ending
and the culture that requires a neatly packaged and thoroughly acceptable
message."73 In a very different response, Brenda Longfellow debates both
the dispassionate murder and the orgasm that precedes it in terms that
relate each to the other, and that link Jeanne's motives and the rhetorical
effectiveness of the film. In Longfellow's view, the murder scene has two
possible readings: as a negation either of Jeanne's desire or of the law. In
either case, it stands as "the one singular act of unbridled affirmation, of
violent refusal."74
This kind of feminist reading ofJeanne Dielman privileges the eruption
of the character's autonomy as a sign of a (social) system in crisis. Are
Akerman's formal politics indeed restricted to this notion of autonomy?
Jeanne's affectlessness can certainly be co-opted through a psychological
reading, yet I would read the "purposelessness of purpose" (suggested by a
nondifferentiated accretion of gestures) as pertaining not to the logic of
"character"-to a psychological breakdown-but to the film's hybridization
of tragic and minimalist logics. Under the guise of a homogeneous
texture, these logics operate at cross-purposes, stating the significance
of intensity, excess, and evidence as a viable alternative for psychological
representation. The borderline status that characterizes Akerman's
diegesis-characters are perceived as compulsive, alienated, mutant-can
actually be seen, in this connection, as part of a larger affliction of the
96 Nothing Happens
filmic system. The film's ateleological accretion (of shots, of movements)
offers no guarantee of stability. The supplement (the arationality) generated
by the character's manic obsession with order, as well as by Akerman's
"blind" stringing together ofcooking and killing, is the matter.
The mutual exclusiveness between a literal and a symbolic meaning
constitutes what Paul de Man has called an allegory of reading. The language
conventions ruling a traditional experience of image and text (conventions
that would direct our reading either to the literal or to the metaphoric
or symbolic sense) can in certain instances be subverted through an
imposed, flickering reading. For example, to take one of de Man's points,
the question "What is the difference'?" could refer to an interest in the
difference itself (between this or that) or could be taken rhetorically to
constitute a questioning of the validity of the question itself; to constitute
an in-difference. To verify the effectiveness of this allegory of reading in
Akerman's cinematic minimal hyperrealism, we would have to ask what
kind of closure, if any, is attained through the stroboscopy of mutually
exclusive-literal and figurative-registers in Jeanne Dielman.
The unsettled referent ofthe question "What is the difference?" can help
us perceive the nature of the reductionism involved in a causal reading of
Jeanne Dielman, a reading entirely through the fictional register. Such an
interpretation would undoubtedly point to the orgasm and the murder as
the film's circumscribed and discrete loci of recognizable "differences":
the determining factors for the character's actions. But the in-difference
latent in the other inflection of the phrase "What is the difference?" disavows
this reading. Akerman's repeated statements on the equality of traditional
dramatic scenes and images "low in the hierarchy of drama" directly
address the attempt to reduce the film to a naturalistic plot of cause
and effecV5 Instead of making the expected explanation of Jeanne's gestureo'6
Akerman has consistently defended her decisions about the murder
scene as a needed narrative effect:
Certain people hate this murder and say "you have to be more pure. If
you show a woman doing dishes, you shouldn't show a murder." But I
don't think that's true. The strength of the thing is to show them both
in the same film. And it didn't end with the murder. There are seven
really very strong minutes after that.77
Indeed, one can be tempted to assign the film's hermeneutic key to this
last, seven-minute shot oflife at its minimal denominator. The lethal quality
ofJeanne Dielman is perfectly epitomized in this suspended ending-a
shot of Jeanne almost motionless. This long take of Jeanne sitting in the
The Equivalence ofEvents 97
living room reinstates the significance of the in-differentiation to which
the film has referred all along-in the repetition compulsion ofthe character's
gestures, in the series of slips in activities carried on automatically.78
If the "spectacle of mere functioning life" keeps us breathing in sync
with the breathing in Warhol's film Sleep (1963),79 the light flickering on
Jeanne, mysteriously crossing her face, as she sits at the dining table after
the murder, establishes the possibility of viewing the flickering of a wearied
emotion. The last shot-"the seven really very strong minutes after
that"-communicates the throbbing state we traverse with Jeanne, conveyed
in her unforgettable expressions and gestures. Yet once again, any
"sentimentality about the end" is disallowed by the preceding murder
scene. And Akerman's recourse to that scene in part reflects her desire to
avoid an open-ended structure, a lack of closure that would "boringly"
repeat the film's nondramatic beginning.8o One needs, then, to rethink the
equivalence of the two images of death proposed in the film-first, a homeostatic
apathy that is a kind of death and, second, the murder-as the
flickering poles of an irresolvable either/or, of a stable irresolution. The
ultimate inability of the character's obsessive compulsion to paste over an
unco-optable alterity-the arbitrary senselessness of the murder scenemarks
the resistance ofJeanne Dielman to any kind ofpsychological deter-
minism.
Joan Copjec's theorization of the relations between the notions of the
automaton, causality, and the real in Jacques Lacan helps us understand
the potential subversiveness of the film's ambivalent conclusion. Her
positing of inertia (through Freud and Lacan) as an antievolutionary notion
is especially interesting in this respect.81 Inertia is that "which opposes,
suspends, the evolutionary, temporal continuity on which a vitalist
idealism such as Bergson's is conceptually based and which ultimately
depends on a hidden teleology, a determinist belief in a Primary Cause
always at work erasing the possibility of any new beginning."82 Jeanne
Dielman resolutely denies teleology. The film's ending, in its grand figuration
ofinertia, suspends circularity; this end is not a return of (in the sense
of a cathartic return to) the beginning.83
The quasi-mechanical attributes of Jeanne/Delphine Seyrig's performance
preclude as well as necessitate arbitrariness. Though the lack of
psychological motivation in Seyrig's performance sabotages a reductionist
reading of the orgasm and murder scene as the repressed event of the film,
her seeming automatism justifies, in the narrative, the arbitrariness of the
change of registers-Akerman's/Jeanne's "purposelessness of purpose."
The murder scene constitutes the real excess to this literalist-descriptive
98 Nothing Happens
tour de force. In affirming its necessity, Akerman is not only answering to a
political, feminist demand for closure. The murder scene constitutes the
transfiguration of the banal-not only of reality, but of narrative. To represent
a narrative cliche under the aegis ofliteralness is to reclaim fiction
as one more element in the unending series of"and, and, and" that propels
the film as pure accumulation. The telos of this accumulation becomes a
matter of the kind of difference one is willing to stop at in experiencing
repetition.
I want to return to the notion of the automaton, through which, we saw
above, a vague threat of animism is introduced into the film's texture and
events. We should consider one more distinction: Copjec notes that while
our current sense ofthe word "automaton" refers to a mechanical effect, a
movement performed "as if by some motive power, but which in fact is
monotonous, routine and without intelligence," for the Greeks "automaton"
was "an adjective which, applied to a person, meant acting of one's
own will, of oneself ... applied to events, happening ofthemselves, without
cause, accidentally or naturally."84 Through Jeanne, Akerman correlates,
without entirely collapsing, the current and ancient meanings of
"automaton." In the process she brings out the internal fissure, the threat,
lying behind the automaton:
If we are always threatened by the fact that some part of this body
(symbolic) might escape our attention, this is because language always
produces an excess of meaning.... The excess which Lacan
calls the object small a is the non-symbolizable product of symbolization
itself. It is the little kernel ofnonsense, ofthe real which Freud so
persistently sought in every hallucination, the cause to which the
subject is subjected.85
This threat, Copjec points out, is often negotiated "by recourse to one form
of determinism or another. Even in the absence of my conscious attention,
my arm will move automatically (we see how eventually the two senses of
automaton coincide), I tell myself."86
Jeanne Dielman voids the eventuality ofthis coincidence. Thus the film
figures the discrepancy between the two versions of "automaton" as a
wound at the heart ofthe representation ofintentionality: as a short circuit
in the possibility of a deterministic (and essentialist) reading. Instead of
leading to an ultimate cause (whether for the character's gestures or for
Akerman's), the film is a liminal representation that insists on the problematics
of causes.
Through the perverse homology of two distinct images of death-one
The Equivalence ofEvents 99
inert, the other active-Akerman adds a structuring ambivalence to the
film's representation. For the question of whether Jeanne acts through a
monotonous, routine, nonintelligent movement-automatically-or instead
acts of her own will-autonomously-resists interpretation.87 This
ambivalence does not impede the film from affirming a feminist aesthetics.
It does suggest, however, how the film's blinding clarity goes beyond a
mere rhetorical effectiveness.
4 EXPANDING THE "I"
Character in Experimental Feminist Narrative
Modern feminism . .. is sociological in its character as it is in its historical development.
It cannot escape the torments which spring from speaking for a collec·
tivity. ... landed with the identity of women as an achieved fact of history and
epistemology, [modern feminism] can only swing between asserting or refusing the
completeness ofthis given identity.-Denise Riley. 1988'
The notion ofidentification has a problematic status in the modernist film.
Producers and critics of antinaturalist film tend to consider issues of narrative
and character construction in negative terms, flatly rejecting conventional
psychological constructs. The problematics of interiority, for
instance, are obviously inadequate to discuss a cinema that so clearly
distinguishes its characters-when figuring them-from their flesh-andblood
referents. The tension present in the awkward movements of Bresson's
models and in the voice-over that expresses a character's subjectivity
in a monotone; the disjunction in Marguerite Duras's India Song (1974)
between the dancing silent bodies and the voices that fill up an entire
empty room with gossip, composing a narrative atmosphere; the body as
the cypher of an untranslatable language in Leslie Thornton's Adynata
(1983), a comment on orientalism-these are examples of how the body
has differently served experimental narrative projects. The representation
of the body entirely bypasses psychological motivation and spectatorial
identification, furthering a narrative or a nexus of ideas. Yet as these alter-
Expanding the "I" 101
native bodies perform a function that goes beyond the negation ofconventional
motivation, their positive role needs investigation.
I focus here on an instance of experimental narrative in which the construction
ofidentity. and hence the notion ofcharacter, is particularly delicate:
experimental feminist film. If individual characters are charged with
the need to represent a collective identity-that of women, for instancethe
question becomes, How is one to create a positive, potentially plural
representation that nevertheless does not aim to achieve a totalized status?
This question becomes all the more urgent in the late '60s, when the feminist
goal ofmaking the personal political seems to converge with the intellectual
revision of totalizing systems that began after 1968. This revision of
"universal" representation of course includes a reassessment of Hollywood
narrative and a need to unmask that cinema's univocality.
The notion ofrepresentativeness is at issue in several experimental feminist
films, narrative as well as documentary. In politically or socially oriented
film, an essentialist, bloated version of representation can range
from the allegorical to its flip side, the average or standard. The allegorical
option may be exemplified by the overly loaded signifiers in "Pride" and
"Gluttony," the sections of Seven Women Seven Sins (1988) directed by UIrike
Ottinger and Helke Sanders. Here, naturalism is traded for a symbolic
and stylistic overcharge, a willed reduction that is perhaps inherent in this
project. A film like Lizzie Borden's Working Girls (1986), on the other hand,
makes its signified the average or neutral. In an attempt to create an ideological,
tokenistic panorama about working girls' lives, each role is reduced
to a principal signifying trait. But the idea ofthe typical-ofthe common
denominator within diversity-is best exemplified in such feminist
documentaries ofthe late '60s and early '70s as The Woman'sFilm (1969), a
compilation of interviews in which mostly working-class women-black,
white, and one Chicana-talk about their lives. Kate Millett's Three Lives
(1971) is another, similar example. These films represent privileged instances
of the meshing of cinema and politics-a consciousness-raising
process shared with the spectator.2 In an attempt to articulate multivocality,
they feature a variety of idiosyncratic voices, yet they make these
voices coalesce into a bland collectivity. In doing so they compromise
crucial polemical issues-class, race-in favor of a problematic notion of
solidarity.3
To historicize the inevitable meeting of cinema, avant-garde practices,
and feminism, Laura Mulvey, one ofthe most influential proponents ofthe
"second phase" offeminist film practice, evaluates these films ofthe "first
102 Nothing Happens
phase": "Their weakness lies in limitation of the cinema verite tradition
... [in the) assumption that the camera ... by registering typical
shared experiences can create political unity through the process ofidentification."4
To escape the immediacy ofwhat she sees as a basically expressive
use of the medium, Mulvey proposes a radical fonnalism and a complex
and sophisticated use of theory-psychoanalysis, deconstruction,
semiotics-as structuring models. For the filmmakers of the second phase
of feminist filmmaking, the various ways in which meaning is produced
can be unmasked through theories based on the splitting of the sign (into
signified/signified), the workings of the unconscious, and the active presence
of ideology in language.5 Using a distancing cinematic vocabularylong
takes, extended frontal addresses, quotations, manipulated imagery,
tableaux configuring layers of significance-these directors' films reformulate
conventions of address, trying to replicate by fonnal means the
themes discussed on the soundtrack (sexual difference, for example). In
different ways, Mulvey's and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (1978)
and Penthesilea (1974), Sally Potter's Thriller(1979), and Yvonne Rainer's
Lives of Performers (1972) or The Man Who Envied Women (1985) exemplify
this cinema's attempts to enunciate a theoretical discourse.6
It is important to examine how films that distance themselves from the
essentialist thrust of the militant feminist documentary deal with the persistent
demands to represent a feminine collective. How does the filmmaker
handle the demands ofrepresentativeness-the political dimension
of subject representation, the very quest of feminism-without falling into
another, perhaps more elaborate form ofessentialism? How endemic to the
feminist project is the question of identification? Using Rainer's cinema
as an example, I would argue that the use of cinema to illustrate a thesis
(feminist, social, deconstructive) necessarily displaces the question
of identification. Rather than suggesting an identity between image and
reality (the realist representation under attack), this analytical cinema
matches image to idea (or theory).7 Formal tropes become illustrations of
ideas, the progressive distantiation that the camera assumes toward its
subject in Penthesilea, for instance, standing for the notion of a distancing
effect. Such equations of formal devices with concepts ultimately become
allegorical figurations.8
In this chapter I shall be concerned with two experimental narrative
films from the early '70s that issue from a common minimalist heritage:
Rainer's Lives ofPerformers and Akerman's Ie tu il elle (1974). The latter
film makes clear use ofthe vocabulary ofminimalist performance found in
Rainer's perfonnances and writing ofthe late '60s and early '70s: serial ac-
Expanding the "I" 103
cumulation, neutral characters/performers, and tasklike activities culled
from everyday life-all tactics in a purposeful project to strip gesture and
movement of symbolism and intentionality.
In her essay "A Quasi Survey of Some 'Minimalist' Tendencies ..."
Rainer taps into a major minimalist issue in drama and performance: how
does one neutralize the humanist and romantic implications ofan artwork
that depends, as dance does, on the human body?9 The art of the '70s
tended to efface the self; indeed a minimalist motto ran, "Stand, walk, run,
eat, show movies or move or be moved by some thing rather than oneself."'o
The displacement of a plot motor or character motive to a "thing
rather than oneself" has an extra function in Rainer's films: it conveys a
disbelief in an essential subjectivity, whether of author or of character.
Rainer thus establishes a link between minimalist strategies and a larger
question addressed by deconstruction and by Lacanian theory: that of the
(dis)appearance ofthe subject in representation. This ambitious program
is dissected in my analysis of Rainer's film.
Akerman and Rainer stand at the intersection of European antinaturalism
and the American '70s avant-garde. Indeed, each borrows distancing
techniques from the cultural traditions of the other: Akerman defined her
project most clearly after living in New York in the early '70s; Rainer seems
to have followed the opposite trajectory, moving from American avantgarde
dance and performance to a distanced narrative that appropriates
Godardian and Brechtian techniques of quotation and juxtaposition. Yet
both Akerman and Rainer have an investment in narrative, and both owe a
debt to minimalism. In their work, theoretical debates on the"death of the
author" intersect with a formal praxis: a proposal of alternative representations
ofthe subject in experimental narrative film.
Rainer's and Akerman's cinematic strategies share an antipsychological,
dedramatized program, yet are clearly opposite. The hyperbolic literalness
and unswerving though corroded linearity of Akerman's cinema distinguish
it clearly from the vertical, associative mode of Rainer's work,
which is marked by such features as the use of collage and heterogeneous
material.11 Akerman's Je tu il elle condenses author and performer, effecting
an internal disjunction in the characters' "presence." Rainer's
aesthetic of heterogeneity, on the other hand, demands a dispersal of
authorial enunciation through the voices of many performers (in Lives of
Performers) and through different material inscriptions (Film about a
Woman Who . .. , 1974, Journeys from Berlin/1971, 1980, and Privilege,
1990). Both Rainer and Akerman inscribe their presences in their films,
yet, at the same time problematize authorial inscription. For me, these
104 Nothing Happens
directors' contrasting means of redesigning the relations among author,
character, and performer raise the following question: how does the centrifugal
associative thrust of heterogeneity fare against the centripetal, literal
strategies of homogeneity in shaping each filmmaker's claim to stake
out a social dimension of the personal that bypasses the conventional
rhetoric of "representativeness"?
The Lure of Center in Rainer's Work: A Cautionary Tale
I like to think that I have a careful screening process operating to exclude personal
material that applies uniquely to my experience. ... (when and ifI become aware
of a prevalence of intestinal difficulties in the population of my audience, then
maybe I will consider dealing with that as materialI)-Yvonne Rainer12
Rainer's essay "Looking Myself in the Mouth" makes explicit one of her
major concerns in confronting cinematic narrative-the avoidance of the
myth of a unified subject, with its attendant reliance on a distinct character,
author, narrator.
In Lives of Performers, Rainer's first film, she proceeds paradigmatically.13
The seriality of Rainer's film is her way of facing down the dangers
of narrative, which are condensed in the key notion of identification.
As soon as a statement or section of dialogue threatens to become a convincing
fiction, to acquire the weight of belief, it is replaced by another.
Dramatic development is traded for a fuguelike accretion of discourses
(variations on private relationships among artists). Editing and camera
movement do not analyze a continuum in order to recreate its totality;
rather, one body and utterance are constantly replaced by others, which
have the same syntactical function. Rainer's vertical substitutions in the
film's structure open up narrative to essayistic excursions.14
Rainer overlaps two distinct but related issues. She simultaneously
negates the fictive unity of author, character, and narrator and claims,
through the same set ofrepresentational strategies, the positive attribution
of a deindividualized, collective enunciation. In Lives of Performers she
clearly lays claim to a collective voice, beginning with the plural of the
film's title and continuing with the abstracting strategy of making the
performers interchangeable. Nobody is to stand for one position or point of
view. The film carries this uncertainty most interestingly in the intermittent,
aleatory connections between an individualized subjectivity and a
body intended as "neutral." Though the ultimate direction of this neutrality
seems unclear, here as in The Man Who Envied Women, it certainly
Expanding the "I" 105
constitutes a simple, negative answer to mechanisms of identification.15 A
narrative is drafted, but character and body perform a ballet ofmisencounter.
Neutrality in these films, rather than transmuting the self into the
collective, becomes a function of the dispersal, even the defection, of
the self.
The warring aims of making a character credible and "depersonalizing"
her burden Rainer's narratives with a split between personal invocation
and a wariness of the "purely personal." Given Rainer's need simultaneously
to disperse and to disclose the personal and private, one needs to
pay constant attention to her distribution and redimensioning of the "I."
The terms of Rainer's ambivalent stake in self-effacement, however, must
be evaluated more precisely. How are they inflected by theory? What are
the chances ofher distributive tactics' promoting a collective enunciation?
Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism may clarify the cultural and social
grounding of Rainer's aesthetic of heterogeneity. Undermining the
conventional assurance of a text's unified origin and source, the dialogical
text absorbs different voices without masking or neutralizing their marks
of class, race, and age.16 Dialogism opens discourse to a "hidden interior
polemic" characterized by the "active influence of another's word on the
writer's word."17 This undermining ofthe individual in favor ofthe collective
is precisely what Rainer seeks through her strategies ofredistribution
and reallocation of texts, genres, and voices.
Rainer's aesthetic of heterogeneity is to be understood as a compromise
between the moral and theoretical imperatives oferasure (the avoidance of
traditional representations ofwomen) and visibility (the need to construct
an alternative, positive image for women). Again, one is confronted with
the issue of visibility. Cinematic representation is intercepted by a feminist
polemic that disparages visuality itself, assuming that the very act of
looking is contaminated by essentialist, patriarchal values. Implicit in
Rainer's preoccupation with avoiding the kind of identification with character
(or else with herself as author) created in classical cinema is the idea
of what Mulvey calls the "to-be-Iooked-at-ness" of women,18 as well as
the bracketing of authorship performed by Roland Barthes, Foucault, and
others.
Another issue in Rainer's loud rejection of identification is the proper
role of autobiography-that is, the narrativization and visual construction
of a self. Within the feminist tradition of making the personal public two
different models of self-presentation can be mobilized: psychoanalysis
and consciousness-raising group gatherings. Both are fundamentally autobiographical,
and both may demonstrate the range and the limitations of
106 Nothing Happens
the dialogical possibilities of a narrative of the self. What is each model's
potential for representativeness?
Implicit in the consciousness-raising model is the goal of exemplarity.
Accounts are gathered from a number of people; as they are edited,
thematic associations among them are supposed to construe a kind of generic
autobiography, its main function being to smooth out differences, to
evince solidarity. The psychoanalytic model reverses this perspective:
though it, too, is based mainly on the personal account, it privileges the
recovering of nuances, repetitive structures, slips. ambiguities, and points
of resistance. Psychoanalysis reverses the construction of the self-or,
rather, the collective self-sought in feminist documentaries such as The
Woman's Film: it exfoliates gradations from a subjectivity known from the
start as constituted solely in this very process of displaying multiple, contradictory
facets.'9
Rainer's format of juxtaposition and heterogeneity is consonant with
this notion of a self-presentation in negative. Of all her works. Journeys
from Berlinl1971 best articulates psychoanalysis as a setting for a disowned
language. Here the interweaving of history and story in the analysand's
discourse is echoed in a montage that slides from the visceral to the
critical. The discursive rambling, voiced by the analysand. suggests a subjectivity
made up from bits and pieces taken from books. diaries, and
articles, in an ill-disguised malaise of civilization.
In this appropriation of the discursive texture of psychoanalysis to simulate
the "contesting claims of politics, feminism, morality, psychoanalysis
and personal needs. desires, fears and myths,"20 the status of the various
issues discussed is left in question. Rainer's use of psychoanalysis as a
formal model is, moreover, founded on a common misconception: it presupposes
an analogy between modernist strategies of distanciation and the
split nature of subjectivity.21 The connection Rainer makes between a certain
cinematic praxis and psychoanalytic theory serves two correlate purposes.
First it enshrines a mode of reflexivity based on a displayed heterogeneity.
claiming visual and aural breaks of continuity as privileged
antinaturalistic strategies. Second, and on the other hand. it enlists Lacanian
theory in the equivocal function of connoting the Real of subject
formation. thus validating what are in fact purely formal analogies between
two very different orders of representation: while filmic representation
has a fictional referent, psychoanalytic theory has as its referent the
reality ofthe subject.
The recruitment of poststructuralist deconstruction or Lacanian theory
in support of formal heterogeneity is based on the assumption that the
Expanding the "I" 107
presence of fissures and breaks within the filmic text in itself evidences
the disruption ofthe subject. The critical and practical reduction of effects
of defamiliarization to these formal devices is, of course, highly questionable.
One can even question the implicit assumption that the juxtapositional
mode is unequivocally deconstructive. Moreover, the subversiveness
of deconstruction is itself controversial. In The Tain of the Mirror:
Derrida and the Philosophy ofReflection, Rodolphe Gasche calls attention
to deconstruction's critical and formal slippage into neutrality.22
Rainer's aesthetic of heterogeneity is shaped as a formal and ethical
ambivalence between, on the one hand, multiple possibilities of actionas
her cinema generates its various choreographed positions and camera
angles, it epitomizes potentiality itself-and, on the other, the romantic
tone that emerges from text and voice, layered in a continual process of
revision and analysis. But the deconstructive potential ofthis ambiguity is
qualified; Rainer may create a surface of contrast and discrepancy, but her
use ofambiguity and cliche ultimately neutralizes any intended "truth."23
Her relentless pursuit of contradiction is answered by the sollipsistic
speech of the analysand in Journeys from Beriin/1971: "Why won't someone
get me off the cusp of this plague, this ellipsis, suspension, anticipation,
this retraction, denial, digression, irony, ... the self-contemplative
self, and the personal as a ... slave ofautonomy and perfectibility."24
Psychoanalysis functions in Rainer's work as both a formal mode and a
corrective project,25 The personal as a "slave of perfectibility" is supposedly
in agony in these films. In a critique of Rainer's romantic attempt
at deconstruction, Bruce Andrews describes the films as "decontextualized
without being recontextualized except in formal clutter. The limits of
this, once you extend it to the political realm, is its tendency to valorize a
kind of dematerialization. "26
The allegorical thrust of a project that reflects the desire to illustrate or
somehow give form to dispersal and effacement is evident. For how is one
otherwise to represent an abstract idea (Independent Woman, Sensitive
Artist, Contradiction of Bourgeoisie) while transcending the concreteness
of the indexical image? Rainer's work participates therefore, in what Paul
Arthur has accurately referred to as a "will to allegory" in New Narrative
film.27 Taking Rainer's The Man Who Envied Women as his main example,
Arthur shows how its various attempts to avoid essentialism through
decontextualization all aim toward the shaping of new, capitalized, essences.
Lost in this form ofallegorical figuration are the particularities that
convey what is properly named "personal."
One should at this point distinguish the notion of allegory described by
108 Nothing Happens
Arthur from its recent revaluations (by Paul de Man, Craig Owens, etc.)
deriving from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama.28
Here Benjamin opposes allegory to the sublimating romantic symbol. For
him, allegory's modernity lies in its store of fragments with distinct and
traceable histories. Allegory in Benjamin's sense requires a hermeneutics
akin to that of collage; it demands a knowledge of the historical and cultural
references invoked by the multiple images that form that fragmentary
composite. But Rainer's work reduces the potential for exegesis implied in
Benjamin's conception, congealing the power of allegory in easily graspable
tableaux. This is not to deny that the redeeming value of allegoriesas
carriers of history and as vehicles of detail, as opposed to the idealist,
totalizing transcendence of symbol-may remain inherent in the potentially
subversive powers ofheterogeneity as a mode.
The ways in which Rainer's juxtapositional aesthetics lead to decontextualization,
and ultimately to reified allegory, demands further investigation,
for the replacement ofthe concrete with the general is not a necessary
consequence of collage. In several of her films Rainer's juxtapositional
inclusiveness hints at very concrete and personal problems. The issues of
gentrification included in snatches of documentary footage in The Man
who Envied Women or the interviews on menopause in Privilege remain
the strongest interventions about such issues in experimental film. The
goal of juxtaposition in the work of Rainer, Bruce Connor, Godard, Leslie
Thornton, Peggy Ahwesh, and others is to subvert abstraction through the
inscription of snatches of political and social history. As we shall see with
the analysis of Godard's Two or Three Things I Know about Her, such
inscriptions can be the main channel to historicize the films' issues.
The question facing experimental film, particularly those films engaging
with narrative and character, remains, regarding feminism, that ofrepresentativeness.
If in principle a juxtapositional aesthetics allows for a
broader range for associations and, conversely, if Akerman's exclusive
focus on a single character's trajectory seems to preclude the formation ofa
social panorama, are there any rules for the articulation of private and
social realms in one or the other mode of filmmaking?
We have discussed the dangers in supposing that multiplicity guarantees
representativeness, a mistake made clear in politicized documentaries
ofthe '70s. We have also seen that paradigmatic linkages and dispersal
of authorship do not distill, necessarily, a purer version ofWoman. At first
glance, Rainer's rejection of "intestinal problems" as a theme seems consistent
with her programmatic attack on expressions of interiority, and a
natural outcome of her minimalist agenda. Yet the boycott of certain as-
Expanding the "I" 109
pects of life as too personal to deserve representation staunches Rainer's
initially daring idea of using autobiography to convert emotional investment
into analytic distance. Screened by a test of (supposed) collective
interest, the personal is drained of its idiosyncrasies, becoming a token of
itself-"the personal." One could venture that Rainer's proscription ofthe
"purely personal" clarifies Akerman's challenge, standing, in a way, as the
backdrop ofAkerman's positing of particularities.
The Eroded Index: Uminality in Je tu ;1 elle
If one indefinitelyruns up against the same set ofsingularities, one can feel confident
that he has drawn near the singularityofthe subject's desire.-Serge Leclaire29
Particularity is the finger, that of a woman showing to her lover her obscaena.
-George Bataille30
The process of dispossession set in motion by Akerman's films leads us to
wonder over the possible relations of minimalism, in its move toward
equivalence and neutrality, and the scene envisioned by Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari-one in which every proper noun is collective and there
is no subject of enunciation.31 Foucault summarized this radical thought
in the form of a "manual or guide to everyday life":
Do not demand ofpolitics that it restore the rights ofthe individual, as
philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product ofpower.
What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication
and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the
organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator
of de-individualization.32
This process of "de-individualization" is crucial in Je tu il elle. The film's
sociopolitical thrust derives from its peculiar representation of the subject,
which cannot be recognized through the usual standards of typification,
where common traits issue from multiple voices.
I have suggested that Akerman's and Rainer's focus on the personal in
their works has as its necessary supplement a spillage into the social. I
have also denied that there is an immediate correlation between neutralizing
the personal and giving the subject a collective status. The insistence
on the individual and on psychology, if only to negate them-whether in
theory (Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault) or in form (Brecht, Jean-Luc Godard,
Rainer)-implicitly acknowledges these categories' centrality in our present
conception of the subject. The very language of Foucault's concept, in
110 Nothing Happens
which the particle "de-" precedes "individualization," shows the difficulty
of formulating the link between an anti-essentialist conception of
the subject and a collective representation. Rainer's proposal of the term
"a-womanly" at the end of The Man Who Envied Women attests to precisely
these difficulties. Is an anti-essentialist representation already part
of an alternate conception of tpe individual in which the personal and the
political are seen as integral to each other? Perhaps the answer to that
question lies in conceiving of neutrality not as conventional representation
in which subjectivity is stripped of its particularities, but as a liminal
phase in the representation of the subject, one that might or might not
issue in a collective enunciation.
Ie tu il elle addresses an essentialist conception ofthe subject on several
levels. Where Rainer's distributive tactics diffract a single consciousness
through several material bodies, Akerman's process of de-individualization
results from an untenable accumulation of functions in a single body.
There is no compromising ofone function at the expense ofthe other. This
accumulation creates a fissure in the body's supposed unity, forcing one to
read several conflicting registers of identity with equal acuity: that of author,
performer, and character. This internal disjunction puts pressure on
the notion of identity and altogether precludes syntactical disruptions
such as voice-over narration or breaks in continuity.
More important, Akerman confronts the negative aspect ofneutrality by
taking particularity to its limit, to the point of eccentricity. Besides presenting
a generic "anti" stance-antipsychology, anti-interiority, anticausality-Akerman's
radically unstable representation of subjectivity proposes
the possibility of a "mutant" being.
Ie tu il elle is structured in three parts.33 In the first part, the "time of
subjectivity," fixed shots record the activities of the film's main character
(played by Akerman): writing, wandering in her room, lying on her mattress,
eating powdered sugar from a bag, looking out of the glass door and
at times at the camera. A voice-over (Akerman'S own) describes the scene
but makes no attempt to be true to the image on screen. The film's second
part, the "time of reportage," shows Akerman in a truck with "He," the
truck driver. This section features less voice-over, long silences, and two
extended monologues by the trucker. Where the film's first part is totally
without context, the "time of reportage" has a full and detailed social
texture-the world of roadside bars and truck stops. To complement this
precise scenario of transience, the truck driver gives an equally precise
verbal rendition ofhis domestic and sexual life.
The film's third part, the "time of relationship," shows Akerman arriv-
Expanding the "I" 111
ing at the apartment ofa female friend-her former lover. Three long takes
in medium shot show their lovemaking. In the film's first two parts, Akerman
occupies an ambivalent position-a neither-here-nor-there as neither
subject nor object ofthe film. Here, however, the involvement and absorption
of the two women with each other and within the diegetic space is
absolute. Akerman amplifies the sound of colliding bodies and ruffling
sheets, making the lovemaking scene concrete and stylized. The awkward
sound and distanced camera position (without cut-away shots or closeups)
qualify Akerman's assimilation in the scene: they situate the authorial
presence as split between performing the action and directing it.
The film's structure may be compared with the rites of passage described
by Arnold Van Gennep,34 three-phase situations in which one is
first alienated, then suspended in a transitional, liminal phase, and finally
reintegrated in a new social status or rank. The rite's first phase comprises
symbolic behavior denoting the individual's or group's separation from an
earlier status, or from "a set of cultural conditions (a 'state')."35 The second,
liminal phase is an in-between state, a neither-here-nor-there. Van
Gennep characterizes liminality as a moment in which those undergoing
the rite of passage are refashioned, losing their individual traits, so that
they may prepare to assume their new social role. Accordingly, they are
submitted to "levelling and stripping processes": they "usually wear only
a strip of clothing or even go naked to prove their lack of any property,
insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, nothing that may distinguish
them from their fellow initiands."36 Individuals are thus ground
down into a sort of homogeneous social matter. Then, in the third stage,
they are absorbed into a hierarchical society of prescribed norms and behavioral
codes.
The model assumes a process of integration and development which,
however, is clearly mocked inJe tu il e11e. For the film voids any notion ofa
closure, or of the kind of normative behavior that would be arrived at in
the third phase of a rite of passage. Nor, for that matter, can its first and
second parts be equated exactly with a moment of separation and then of
liminality. Instead, the film displays a purposeful indetermination in relation
not only to the positions of character, author, director but to that of a
fixed sexual identity. Mobility is privileged over finality. In fact the film's
epigrammatic image is of directionless mobility: liminality is posited not
as the ground for a future, delineated, identity but as an image of a mutant,
transient one.
One can better understand the scope of Akerman's transgression if one
expands the concept of liminality onto her formal strategies. If the film's
112 Nothing Happens
confused (and suspended) temporality, for example, upsets the very representation
of identity, it also suggests the progressive potential of liminality.
For, as Victor Turner remarks on the liminal in sociocultural process:
"Since ... liminal time is not controlled by the clock, it is a time ... when
anything might, even should, happen."37
The film's first challenge to the idea of fixed identity lies in Akerman's
presence as performer, which subverts the autobiographical fallacy not
through a poli-vocality or a declaration of neutrality but through the confrontational
tactic of the "pseudo-evidence of the visible."38 This term
refers to Akerman's explicit and yet stylized presentation of the sexual act
in the last part ofthe film. In fact it applies to the overall sense of display in
Akerman's mise-en-scene-a process that shows objects and performers in
a sort ofhigh definition. Adding to this minimalist distinctness and apparently
overt display, Akerman's presence as the film's "I" creates an internal
tension and indicates a voided subjectivity. "It was a matter ofputting
across a 'malaise,' " said Akerman when asked about why she acted in the
film. "I started to direct an actress and soon I noticed that her perfection
went against the project. I also thought [it] more appropriate ... to oppose
the mise-en-scene's rigidity with my own uneasiness."39 Still the psychological
sobriety of her minimalist style only intensifies the multiple registers
of this tensile persona.
With a physicality closer to performance art than to conventional cinematic
narrative, fe tu iJ elle revises notions ofcharacter, not so much negating
as suspending them. Akerman's performance straddles the conditions
of author, director, and performer. That she uses a fictive name Julie, not
for the character but to name herselfas a performer in the film, subjects her
signature to a peculiar dispossession: in printing the fictive name Julie in
the credits along with that of an actual actor and actress, and in disregarding
the need to give this "performer" a last name, Akerman declares her
anonymity. This is part of the liminal phase of a stripping down of rank
and status and is pervasive throughout the film. Akerman even includes
the credits-that supposed neutral area, where extradiegetic data authenticate
presence-in her "identity crisis"; though the mock signature "Julie"
stands for "Je," or "I," and for a shifting amalgam of character, author, and
performer, the effect is of slightly caricaturing a crisis that runs deep in
the film.
An Alogical Fitful, Evidence
The film actually starts by announcing its trajectory as a defection: over
the first image, ofa young woman sitting in a cramped room with her back
Expanding the "I" 113
to the camera, the voice-over states, "And 1left" (Et je suis partie). Thus the
narrative begins in medias res and with a process ofreduction. Next Chantal,
as 1 shall from now on call Akerman as she performs in the film,40
pursues a series of activities that are consistently repetitive and without
context. Both she and the room are stripped down. For example, she
moves a mattress to each corner of the room in turn, in a ceaseless shifting
that constitutes an inventory of positions possible within the limited repertory
imposed by fixed-frame and eye-level shooting.
The leveling down in the first part of the film is presented as a bracketed
moment in which the symbolic system falters along with all forms of
social placement for the character. We are given no clues about what the
character does or where she comes from. Given the film's condensation of
author with performer, Chantal's self-inflicted seclusion can be seen as
shaping a movement of subtraction. Minimalism here becomes a willed
form of defining the self. Less is more, but estrangement here is more than
merely formal.
The writing in Je tu il elle breeds continuous mismatches in the logic of
referentiality. There are always disjunctions between the description in
the voice-over and what is seen on screen. Over the film's first image-a
room with a bed, a desk, and the chair on which Chantal sits-we hear, "A
small white room on the ground level where 1 rest motionless, attentive
and lying on my mattress." On the "third day," which does not correspond
to the third image, we see a slightly different arrangement of furniture,
with Chantal sitting motionless at the desk, while the description of the
fourth day, "1 moved into the corridor and lay on my mattress," matches
Chantal lying on the mattress and facing the camera. Then, over this same
image, the voice-over says: "Empty, the room seemed large to me." Some
shots are intercut through fade-ins, and some ofthe description is spoken
over the black leader that separates the shots.
As the film progresses, Chantal is seen pushing furniture out ofthe room
and, later, taking off her clothes. Wandering around, she gives this abstracted
space the weight of an experiential space, a space of literal rather
than metaphoric dispossession. These initial shots map the limits of the
character's enclosure. Filming in axes perpendicular to the walls, Akerman
performs a descriptive tour of each ofthe room's four sides. As she positions
herself and the mattress in relation to the camera, she is recording
herself in the process of constructing a mise-en-scene: she is physically
and optically charting the space. Her single prop, the mattress, becomes a
compositional element-she lies on it or sits in its shadow as it leans
against the door. The simplicity of her movements and of her relationship
114 Nothing Happens
Disjointed description, Chantal Akerman in Ie tu jJ eIle (1974). Frame enlargement,
print courtesy of World Artists Release.
with this prop can be likened to the "purposive, directed concentration"
with which Rainer uses objects in her task-oriented performances.41
The external world is inscribed in this room by the large glass door that
occupies one entire side of it. The voice-over describes a man looking into
the room; a few shots later we see him passing this door (barely, though). It
is also at this point that the sole line of dialogue in French passe simple is
uttered: "Les gens ne passerent guere" (hardly anyone passed by). This
tense used solely in literature places Akerman's speech suddenly on a
plane of narrationY Changes of weather are announced and then seen
through the door-"It snowed for four days." Over the fixed shots of Chantal,
one also hears off-screen street sounds (car noises, children playing).
This blurry external calendar is made to correspond to a hazy internal
temporality-the subjective time of waiting and breathing, which suspends
"logical" time. Yet the mismatch of verbal and visual description is
not an expressive device. This opening section ofthe film is not an impressionistic
account that might ultimately be co-opted as part of a subjective
perspective. Quite the contrary: gradually sapping temporal referentiality,
Akerman forestalls the possibility of a stable subjective view.
The film's system visibly fails to account for the precise, logical adjustments
between verbal description and indexical image. As if dis-
Expanding the "I" 115
closing the nature of her subversion-an undermining of indexicalityAkerman
relays unverifi!lble information: "The first day, I painted the
room blue.... on the second day, green," she states over the film's black
and white images. No shots can account for the truths given in the verbal
track. And the use of deictics such as "first day," "second day," "days
later," verbal pointers that mean something only in relation to a specific
person or time, increases the temporal vagueness.
Intermittently, Akerman does establish an exchange between verbal
statement and visual referent. The snow, or a man passing-images both
announced and seen-are examples of congruence. Still, even when Akerman
uses as definite a figure as the phrase "I knew twenty-eight days had
passed" (an unequivocal reference to menstruation), the film's referentiality
fades into the incommensurability between description and image.
Rhythm-"I played with my breathing"-gives way to waiting. Each activity
or nonactivity ends with a pose ofrest before the next image fades in.
Self-absorption alternates with frontal address, while the voice-over comments
ironically on the active, provocative status of waiting. Involving
duration as well as a deflection of drama and motivation, waiting serves as
a punctuation: "I spilled all the sugar over the letter, lay down, and waited.
I waited for it to pass or for something to happen, that I believe in God or
that you send me gloves to go out in the cold."
At times, the choice of a specific rhythm "depends" on the visual track,
which posits an objective reality. When Chantal states, for example, "It
started snowing and I thought life was at a standstill anyway and I had to
wait for the snow to stop and melt," she is taking her lead from the external
world. But while this verbal reference to an objective reality-the
snow stopping-seems to predicate change, objectivity has long been fissured,
through a consistent undermining of indexicality's power to yield
certainty.
Different levels of abstraction and of concreteness operate simultaneously
in Je tu il elIe. Though it is mostly in the relation of sound to image
that one becomes aware of the anchoring process of reference, both sound
and image themselves have an abstract quality. Through its abstractive
powers, verbal language designates both small and large units of diegetic
time-moments, days, the menstrual cycle. In its seemingly arbitrary connection
to the visual track, it creates a sense oftemporal abstraction. Meanwhile,
the visual track is displaying instances of real time-the precise,
singular moments of a certain activity. While one could claim an iterative
status for the relation between image and narration, the irregular groundings
of description indicate a truly upset temporal reference.
Conventionally, voice-over description admits multiple and different
116 Nothing Happens
orders of denotation. Temporality in film is usually backed up by the
referential system: images confirm the truth ofa stated time, through shots
of clocks, for example, or times of day (morning, evening), or seasonal
changes. Or, less obviously but just as conventionally, the temporal system
is built on internally coherent, synchronized sets of images and statements,
so that deictic expressions such as "days later" acquire a value in
relation to the subject and tense of the utterance, and thus effectively
advance the narrative's logic.
Deictics and shifters are the family ofterms that ground the subject only
as he or she utters his or her position-"I," "you," "later," or "there." In Je
tu il elle, however, deictics and shifters suggest their own, potentially
dysfunctional core; they are used toward the demise of subjectivity. The
deictics and pronominal shifters in the film have an utterly subversive
relation with the image. They seem to be on call, performing rituals of
abeyance along with Chantal/Julie.
The pronominal abstraction of the film's title suggests Akerman's strategy
of displacement. Both Chantal and the blocks of which the film is
constructed (its shots and its three parts) seem to wander. The film may
follow a linear order, but almost from the start, this order suggests the
falsity of the notion of progression. The strict succession of days gets lost
in the "defective" indexicality. In fact, the listing and the accumulation of
shots and phrases, and the insistence on naming, only confuse the temporal
order, suggesting an utter indifference to which shot, description,
sentence, or relationship comes first or last.
Narboni suggests that Je tu il elle denies progression by hinting at cyclicality,43
but the idea that Chantal's departure from her lover at the end of
the film is a cyclical return to the film's initial statement-"And I left"-is,
I believe, an error. As Narboni himself admits, the film has nothing to do
with the cycle's common suggestion of a "falsely open product" that is in
fact "perfectly static and centered."44 Instead, Akerman's films create a
sort of "simulacrum of cybernetics," issuing "a cosmogonic order of formation
and engendering of the world":
Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman are semblants of the creation of the
world: the first day, the second day, the third day; distribution, ordering,
classification and naming, separation in time and space, introduction
of disorder in order, of blockage in the eternal return, puissance
ofchaosmos.45
I have discussed this "introduction of disorder in order" in connection
with Saute ma ville and Jeanne Dielman. Akerman's work simulates a
Expanding the "I" 117
Manic addition: Chantal tacks pages onto the floor and fills up the space between
Chantal and Akerman, the bed and the camera, Chantal Akerman in Je tu jJ elle
(1974). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of World Artists Release.
"creation of the world" that is perversely alogical. As a careful process of
naming and listing (by filmmaker and characters alike) takes precedence
over what is being named, ordering turns logic into its reverse. In Je tu il
elle as in Jeanne Dielman, meaningless additions of elements, gestures,
and actions charactetize a minimalist project of logic.
Hence the recurrently failed connections between verbal and visual reference
are only the initial clue to the film's systematic disproportion.
Examples of discrepancy abound. Both Chantal's obsessive eating of sugar
and her writing to her lover are part of a cycle of solipsistic productivity:
over shots of her at work, we hear her say in the voice-over, "I wrote him,"
"I wrote him three pages," "Then I wrote him six pages to say the same
thing again." Quantity-of eaten sugar, pages written, camera shots-is
cleaved from significance; mounting numbers don't mean progress. The
vacuous accumulation of letter pages is a symptom of the "absurd nominalism"
of Akerman's cinema discussed in chapter 3. Her relentless cataloguing
of the gestures and shots possible within a restricted grid is
another example of this alternative logic-not irrational, but overtly arational.
Where logic demands a general or representative example, Akerman
uses literal description. At the same time, her "absurd nominalism"
ensures the equality and continuity-the textual homogeneity-of her
118 Nothing Happens
minute variations on gestures and actions. This surface equivalence ensures
the inscription ofalogical "difference" in Akerman's films.
Chantal writes three, six, eight pages, then crosses her writing out. But
crossing out is simply another mise-en-scene for writing, a shift in the
direction ofthe pencil. The actual writing process is that ofthe film we are
watching.46 The lack of congruity between effort and result, writing and
meaning, is repeated and clarified in the sporadic connections between
verbal and visual reference.
Just as important to this corroded referentiality is the abstraction of the
filmic image itself, an image oflack, homogeneity, repetition-attributes of
both visual and conceptual abstraction. The images in Ie tu il elle don't
cancel representation; they reveal scene and character starkly. But referentiality
is imploded, for though reality is entirely apparent, even naked, it is
represented as simultaneously faltering and excessive, discontinuous and
repetitive, circular and nontotalizing. Overt display creates an aporia
of evidence-we see all of the room, all of the character, all of the lovemaking-yet
this "all," this totality, is denied, through the sparseness of
the visual elements, the cleansing of anecdotal events and, most important,
the resolute assertion of particularities.
"Here Is": Redundant Description
The film's second part shows Chantal after she has left her room (through
the glass door, which is left partly open) and taken a ride on a truck. This
section is filmed mostly at night, and a switch to a grainier film stock gives
it a different visual textureY In the truck, Chantal occupies the edge ofthe
frame, leaving center screen to the driver, who also does most ofthe talking.
The voice-over gives way to extended silences broken by his long
monologues. Chantal listens, her ambivalence toward him defining her
dual role of participant-observer. We observe her uneasiness in "his"
spaces; she stands out in the roadside bars, with their male camaraderie.
The border between the two characters' social worlds is diegetically coopted
as the kind offeeling out ofterritorial differences that takes place in
seduction scenes. And in a way this encounter can be seen as an interesting
flirtation. This does not preclude, however, an additional externality:
it is in this sequence, precisely because of its supposed neutrality and
objectivity-what Akerman calls "the time of the Other"-that Chantal's
position is most drastically represented as irreducibly double (character
and director) or liminal. Her position in the frame-cornered at its
fringes-is a literal embodiment of her purposely unsettled status: between
director and performer, she short-circuits character.
Expanding the "I" 119
Interestingly, the figuration of Akerman's liminality in the truck-driver
scenes encompasses the realm offilmic production. In a bar, in silence, she
and he intermittently watch TV; but the viewer can only tell what they're
looking at by its soundtrack, which could be that of any American action
series. Externality appears here as a disparity in sound quality, which the
film's diegesis only barely absorbs. In the context of Europe's import of
American television, and ofAkerman's independent mode of film production,
Ie tu il elle gets a multilayered soundtrack only through cannibalization.
In this scene the gap between her silence and an overabundance of
sound (present in former scenes as she listens to the trucker's prolixity)
ironically parallels the production conditions; Akerman's sparse, minimal
use of sound (as much by choice as for economic reasons) is countered by a
foreign excess.
In the film's first part, the alternation of subject and object is cued by a
mismatch-between sound and image, profilmic and cinematic registersthat
is as consistent as it is arbitrary. In the second part, the "time of
reportage," syntactical disjunctions give way to a precarious absorption of
Chantal's presence within the diegesis. But Akerman's deliberately failed
acculturation to the trucker's milieu keeps her in a borderline position.
Her unsettled status comments on ethnographic practices in cinema, first
by taking "he," the truck driver (male, and from a different economic and
social stratum), as the Other, second by raising the possibility ofa methodological
flaw. Akerman's "inquiry" continuously falters between a subjective
and an objective perspective: "I felt like kissing his neck," she says,
over an image of the trucker from the back, as she lies down to rest.
The integrity and contextual depth of the truck driver's monologues
attest to Akerman's respectful externality.4" Of all Akerman's writing,
the truck driver's speeches are perhaps the most brilliant. As Akerman's
monologues often do, they span a long stretch of time. Personal history is
loaded with specificity; Akerman refuses a generic characterization, and
the detailed realism of the trucker's accounts qualifies the irony of her
silence and her confinement within the frame, without negating it. She
underwrites his "truth" even as the obliqueness of her presence sets it in a
kind of parenthesis.
This second section of the film abandons the disjunctions of the first
part, but Chantal's constrained presence in the diegesis creates a kind of
filmic indigestion, forcing one to recognize a liminality that is both formal
and thematic. The important moment when Chantal masturbates the
trucker marks the complexity of her position between performer and director.
This is the single instance in the film in which she is entirely
outside the frame;49 it is also the one moment when the trucker looks
120 Nothing Happens
Redundant description, Niels Arestrup in Je tu jJ eJle (1974). Frame enlargement,
print courtesy of World Artists Release.
directly at the camera, briefly confirming her double status as both character
and director.50
Still, this conventional antinaturalistic strategy wouldn't be as disturbing
ifthe glance that acknowledges Akerman's place didn't follow a major
reversal in the film's address. As Chantal services the trucker, Akerman
exploits all the subversive potential of redundant description. Along with
an on-screen narration of the action off-frame, the trucker indicates preferred
rhythms for the hand job-faster, slower. After climaxing, he bends
his head over the wheel and says, "1 am putting my head on the wheel."
This sudden conjunction of description and gesture creates a rift in the
film's discourse. The redundancy of statement and action suggests a reverse
kind of disjunction from the temporal disjunctions of the first part of
the film, in which voice-over descriptions have named the scenes to come
or just seen.
It is after this moment that the trucker looks briefly at the camera, provocatively
suggesting that disjunction is not necessarily an effect of separate
tracks (aural and visual) or spaces (diegetic or cinematic). If temporal
disjunction and a peculiar relation between text and image are the operative
tensions in the film's first part, in the second part the conjunction of
gesture and description (the bending of the head and its announcement)
Expanding the "I" 121
identifies disjunction as inherent to verbal description. The "here is" of
the cinematic image is doubled. By insisting on the fragility of the index,
which consistently fails to yield more than mere verisimilitude, Akerman
construes a formalliminality.
fe tu il elle addresses the complexities of referentiality by gradually
creating a truly decentering status for Akerman's image in the film. The
film progressively exposes the precariousness of the presence conventionally
constructed in cinema; Akerman reveals how both disjunctive
and conjunctive strategies further a stable system of reference that confirms
subjectivity, whether the register is realist or anti-illusionist. Instead
one might suspect the film's alternate agenda and relentless pursuit by its
title. Its twisted indexicality and its positing of ever more sophisticated
modalities of disjunction have but one intention: to stage the representation
of subjectivity as inherently relational.
A Mock Centrelity: An A-Individual Singularity
In the film's third part, the "time of relationship," Akerman completes a
gradual surrendering of the control that she retains in the first two parts.
Without recourse to frontal address, voice-over narration, or clinging to
the edge of the frame, she refines the terms of her liminal position by
switching disjunction onto her own physical and filmic presence. In this
last section, she creates an internal disjunction, introducing a new pressure
on the representation of the "I"-one that precludes a visible distinction
between the representations of Chantal and of Akerman.
The clumsy in-sync description of an image that is also presented visually-the
double "here is a head leaning on the wheel"-announces what
is to come. After a mocking indexical excess, Akerman resorts to hyperindexicality.
Only by resolutely placing her body center frame can she preempt
the sole "completion" the film ever delivers: that of a fully displayed
presence, which is, however, internally fissured.
"It's me," says Chantal, at the buzzer of an apartment presumably inhabited
by someone who knows her. Later she gets a straightforward rejection:
"I don't want you to stay," says the other woman to Chantal, who responds
by getting up and clumsily getting her zipper stuck-"refusing" to leav(). A
comic formality deflects drama; seduction rituals become regressive, turning
into a feeding activity punctuated by Chantal's voracity-"Encore!"
she repeats. Then she puts aside her sandwich and reaches for the other
woman's breast. Three long takes of their lovemaking follow, in medium
long shot. The camera is placed at different distances in each of the shots.
122 Nothing Happens
And the quality of the women's movements in each shot defines distinct
instances of passion, intimacy, and tenderness.
These shots mark a shift: in the film's first two parts, Akerman's place
is peripheral; here, there is an energetic equality between the two performers.
Her new centrality, however, does not fully assimilate her into
the diegesis. On the contrary: the long takes, exaggerated sound, and distanced
camera create a focus, a channeled spot of attention, on Chantal's
performance. The difficulty of sustaining lovemaking under such scrutiny
may help one understand Akerman's boldness here: the force of this scene
lies in its eccentric contrast to that other mode of hyperbole, the porn film.
The scene contrasts with the "inexhaustible variety of sexual rapport" that
the porn film usually pursues by desperately varying its shot angles.51 It
also defies Bazin's taboo on representing sex: Bazin saw an ontological
obscenity in filming unique events like death and lovemaking, and thus
inscribing them in reproduction's circuit of repetition.52
The subversiveness of Jeanne Dieiman, too, appears in the breaking of a
realist taboo-in the murder scene, which necessarily but abruptly shifts
presentation into representation. Akerman is consistent, then, in applying
stress to realism's weak spots. Through a conjunction of the long take
(which, for Bazin, was basic to realism's ability to ground evidence) and of
literalness (realism's main quandary), Je tu il elle perversely pushes the
love scene to the brink of a realist or pornographic obscenity.
In this the lovemaking scene is exemplary, intimating as it does a crossexamining
of realism by literalness. The actuality of lovemaking is revealed
to the spectator's scrutiny. And it is precisely the curiosity to see
more, a curiosity vested in idealist notions of realism, that Akerman addresses
in staging the record ofreality-or what will be seen as reality-as a
selective hyperbole. Rather than framing sex romantically, Akerman amplifies
its concreteness, including both her and the other performer's body
as part of the material play.53 The scene's intensity is an effect of sheer
concentration-the camera's fixed stare, the amplified sound, the shots'
extended duration.54 The scene's harshness lies in the uncompromising
challenge of a literalness that undoes preconceived notions of representation-most
forcefully, those of gender and sexual identity. Akerman remarks,
"The scene might appear violent because it is presented as simply
and naturally as if it were a relation between a man and a woman and one
expects generally that one might channel the desire between two women
through an explanatory scene that might justify it."55 Her lack of such
explanation, on top of her sharp display of the body, wrenches the indexical
image away from serving as illustration.
Expanding the "I" 123
Overvisible lovemaking, Chantal Akerman and Claire Wauthion in Je tu if elJe
(1974). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of World Artists Release.
Ie tu iJ elJe progressively asserts literalness and concreteness over cinema's
main bearer of humanist and essentialist significance: the human
body. Insisting to the point of excess on the body's materiality-through
sound, lighting, and so on-the film upsets any possible notion of lesbian
"triumphalism."56 The sexual scenes with first the truck driver, then the
female lover, have often elicited comparisons that imply a greater equality
in the lesbian relationship. Judith Mayne, for instance, writes, "In contrast
to the scene with the man, where Akerman appears to occupy positions on
both sides ofthe camera Simultaneously, in the scene with the woman she
is quite definitely situated within the frame. " 57 The description is accurate,
but I would point out the covert ideological implications ofthe notion
of a "definite" centrality, which surely suggests an idea of growth from an
alienated sexual identity to a stable one.
Although one might recognize, with Mayne, Akerman's refusal to let the
film be categorized as a lesbian film (a refusal indicated by the film's use of
shifters in its title). the lure of a teleological reading is obviously strong. It
leads in Mayne's text, to a continuous elision between defining the film's
lesbian components and at the same time trying to respect Akerman's
resistance to this kind of categorization. Akerman promises resolution but
124 Nothing Happens
never delivers it. It's true that her alleged narrative of disjunction and
alienation ends on a note that simulates closure and unity. Yet to perceive
the film as a "disjunct body" reaching "completion" is to assume an essentialist
optic; given the ideological weight borne by the scene ofthe lesbian
encounter, one should pay all the more attention to Akerman's strategies
for avoiding an essentialist telos for both character and film.
Answering the question of whether the trucker's role as a foreigner relates
to Julie's gaze as a homosexual, Akerman remarks that to pose such a
question would suggest that a woman with no homosexual experience
would see the trucker differently.58 In line with this anti-essentialist claim,
Ie tu il elle persistently voids a reading of Chantal's marginality as a fixed
identity. The final shot of her leaving her female lover is only one of the
images that rejects an ascribed essence for her.
Akerman's shifting positionality in Ie tu il elle clarifies the significance
of the borderline behavior of characters throughout Akerman's work.
Nonetheless, we have yet to address the persistent flirtation of Akerman's
characters with eccentricity. It is in fact quite difficult to find an account of
Ie tu il elle that does not at some point slip into a psychoanalytic diagnosis
ofChantal. What is this irresolvable crux provoked by Akerman's representation?
In some readings ofthe film, Chantal is seen as narcissistic, a condition
to which her use of the glass door of her room as a mirror is just the
most obvious clue. The obsessiveness ofher gestures is constantly emphasized:
they are disconnected from specific objects, and there is an obvious
contradiction between her excessive focus on particular activities and the
irrelevance ofthe final results. To Brenda Longfellow, Chantal is a hysteric,
whose "repeated ingestion of sugar" and "excessive outpouring of writing"
constitute an attempt to fill a "psychic core of emptiness."59 In using
Kleinian terminology, Longfellow confirms the tendency present in other
writings to read both character and film psychoanalytically. But the status
she accords Chantal's letter as a "transitional object" is a perfect example of
a psychoanalytic reading that completely disregards Akerman's minimalist
strategies of interminable, "senseless" addition.60 Similarly, in noting
the ritual quality of the film's first section, Mayne remarks that "there is,
simultaneously, undeniable obsessiveness as well, particularly as the compulsive
eating ofthe sugar is concerned. The scene suggests both calm and
torment, peaceful solitude and turbulence."61
Chantal's alternately mechanical and focused relation to food and work,
as well as the connection established in the film's third part between her
desire for food and her desire for her lover, have also led to extensive
analysis of the mother-daughter nexus (in its dual function of nurturing
Expanding the "I" 125
and love) in relation to homosexuality. As Mayne suggests, "This link
between food and sex evokes clinical diagnoses of homosexuality as regressive,
as arrested development, as the desire-for women-to fuse with
the maternal object. "62
Such diagnoses are utterly essentialist and normative. They posit Chantal
as bearer of, or lacking in, motivation, as if she preexisted her filmic
representation. Minimalism's tactics of disproportion-its ateleological
serial gestures, for instance-are translated within the restricted terms
of expressive transparency. Thus a formal and behavioral radicalityexpressed
as repetitions of gestures, actions, and procedures-is given a
negative valence, becoming that which is abnormal, alienated, irrational.
After Mayne recognizes what evokes "the radical otherness of lesbian
identity" in Ie tu ii elie, she quickly acknowledges that"Akerman affirms
the significance of 'regressive' orality as informative of, rather than working
against, female representation and creativity-whether these take the
form of writing a letter or making a film."63 If, in short, Chantal displays
recognizable pathological traits, it is crucial to see how these traits posit an
alternative representation of subjectivity. The bareness of the ambiance,
the lack of clues by which Chantal's body can be situated in a social space,
intimates an abstraction that is immediately contradicted by her various
obsessive tics-truly idiosyncratic gestures. Akerman's stylized poses and
framings, as well as her character's unsettled status within the diegesis,
preclude the recognition of a pattern through which these repeated gestures
and activities could be stabilized as instances of an identifiable state
or condition. The tics of character or of author cannot be pinned to a
motivational structure and thus resist the notion of exemplarity, or of a
singularity ultimately co-opted as eccentricity.
Ie tu jJ e11e is not a rite of passage; it does not suggest an increased
socialization in Chantal. Rather, it proposes an instability between private
and collective, internal and external, subject and object, author and character.
The rift between the aural and the visual tracks in the film's first part
suggests a gap between two formal logics that arc suspended and made
incongruous throughout the film. Indeed, Ie tu jJ e11e procures less the
shock ofdisjunction than an interstitial space between the disparate logics
of abstraction and indexicality, anonymity and systems of nomenclature.
The characters' sole identification is through their position vis-a.-vis each
other. Pronominal shifters can thus be seen as posing a question immediately
relevant for the performative disarray in Ie tu jJ e11e: one relative to
a subject!object position.
The shifter presents an instance of liminality between concept and in-
126 Nothing Happens
dex similar to that characterizing Akerman's cinema. The wavering between
the figurative and the literal registers of an image are in this sense
one of the most marked instances of this structuring ambivalence. While
shifters and deictics purportedly give access to a precise presence-that of
a subject, event, or object-they actually exist only as an instance of discourse,
that is, of utterance. A shifter has only a "momentary reference. "64
Yet by upholding this precarious index of presence, fe tu il elle promotes
the very instability that lies at the core ofthe representation of the subject.
Moreover, the film's reliance on the shifter suggests the possibility of a
representation that would transform the very idea of individuality. For its
perverse insistence on a discontinuous indexicality constantly reminds us
of the paradox Benveniste found in the shifter:
[Shifters] do not refer to a concept or to an individual. ... there is no
concept T that incorporates all the I's that are uttered at every moment
in the mouths of all speakers.... How could the same term refer
indifferently to any individual whatsoever and still at the same time
identify him in his individuality?65
The reach of Akerman's formal politics lies in her response to Benveniste's
question, a response that does not stop at the paradoxes of a
logical or linguistic order: she answers by proposing a liminal representation
of subjectivity. Akerman takes to task the issue undergirding the
shifter: that of the potential indifferentiation, or generality, contained in
the very signifier of individuality. Hence the film's title and its performance
of momentary references are far from innocent. In fact, through
Chantal's combination of anonymity and eccentricity, fe tu il elle advocates
an a-individual singularity. Akerman's representation of liminality
secures both the communitarian qualities of homogeneity and anonymity
(signaled in the film by the blurred signifiers of place, class, etc.) and the
singularity (represented through Julie's eccentricity) that propels the individual
to an expansion of social limits. Should a definition of this singularity
still seem vague, Narboni sketches what its discourse might be:
"discourse in the fourth person ofthe singular, that is, neither a histrionics
of subjectivity (the "I") nor the despotism of the interpolation or demand
(the "you"), nor the objectifying horror ofthe nonperson ("he/she")."66
Akerman's insistence on her characters' quirks, as well as on their literal
representation, challenges the universal status of totalizing representations.
There is no one quite like her, this "her" being a pure cinematic
being destined to behavioral and stylistic repetition, structured through a
series of shots that defy conceptual reduction through their "absurd nomi-
Expanding the "I" 127
nalism" as well as through photographic indexicality. On the other hand,
the utter impossibility of a "pure" indexicality, without abstractive or
conceptual resonances, is acknowledged and staged in Akerman's film as
the drama ofthe shifter. The question becomes, How much formal abstraction
can these bodily presences stand without becoming ciphers of meaning?
And how does Akerman's style-her minimalist reductions, sound
amplifications, and so on-alter the very core ofthe representation of individuality?
These questions, confronted a year later in Jeanne Dielman, are
discussed in the next chapter.
5 "HER" AND JEANNE DIELMAN
Type as Commerce
In the works of 0 greot reolist everything is linked up with everything else. Eoch
phenomenon shows the polyphony ofmonycomponents, the intertwinement ofthe
individual and social, of the physical and the psychical, of private interest and
public affairs. And because the polyphony of their compositions goes beyond immediacy,
their dramatis personae ore too numerous to find room in the ploybilJ.
-Georg Lukacs'
It is possible to see Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
as representing a case of the kind explored by Godard in Two or Three
Things I Know about Her, an examination of the social implications of
prostitution, Jeanne's reasons for taking afternoon clients at first seem
amenable to the same social and economic analysis to which Godard exposes
his protagonists. But the ten-year period that separates Godard's
film from Akerman's demands an understanding ofthe differences in their
use of a woman's quotidian and the mytheme of housewife/prostitute to
portray a broader social and economic picture.2
For Barthes, a myth (or a "mytheme") is a unit of signification that is
ready to be appropriated as a signifier in a different context. It is an image
made pregnant by prior sociocultural inscriptions and usages. The
charged, layered nature of a mytheme such as housewife/prostitute is
suited in different ways to both Godard's semio-philosophical quest and
Akerman's hyperrealism. A comparison of Akerman's fixed focus on
Jeanne Dielman with the ambitious compass that Two or Three Things
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 129
proposes for "her" (the actress Marina Vlady, the character Juliette Janson,
and the city of Paris) suggests the filmmakers' different processes. Because
the housewife/prostitute mytheme condenses sociocultural meanings
that go beyond literal injunctions, because, in short, it carries with it a
history, I want to explore how Godard and Akerman's cinematic strategies
and political and aesthetic contexts inflect their use of this image as the
initial layer for their representation of type. In part, Akerman's work is a
reshaping of the notion of the hero advanced by neorealist cinema. The
neorealist aesthetic (at least as propounded by Zavattini and De Sica) is
anchored, like Akerman's hyperrealist aesthetics, by a proscription ofmetaphoric
links and of visual or aural associations. The focus on a specific
space and time and the desire to avoid ellipsis lead to an exclusive attention
on a single character. Thus topicality not only becomes synonymous
with a restricted spatial and temporal focus but exemplifies neorealism's
narrow political potential for full representativeness. Bazin's acknowledgment
that in neorealism "only rarely are the masses seen as a positive
social force," and that when the masses are represented it is as a foil for the
hero, to bring out "the theme of the man in the crowd,"3 leads Pascal
Bonitzer to claim that "to recognize this is the same as to say that the hero
of neorealism is a petit-bourgeois, which is indeed the case. "4
Neorealist rhetoric is shaped by a binomy of indignation and solidarity-perhaps
a necessary segue through the postwar situation. The inflammatory
heroization of the anonymous individual found in most of Zavattini's
manifestos is a direct effect of a postwar climate in which the notion
ofthe hero still retained currency. The neorealist construction ofthe "typical"
depends on a changing ground. Seen against the backdrop of multiple
markers of adversity, neorealism's characters are shown to remain loyal to
their plight and principles. As we watch Umberto's plight unfold over the
few days covered in Umherto D, we foJlow a series of situations meant to
delineate Umberto's personal qualities-his dignity, his love for his dog,
his care for Maria-as constant against the various difficulties he encounters.
Thus the variations in site, character, and situation serve as a foil for
the authentication of worker and petit bourgeois in a restricted, unalterable,
humanist repertory of behavior and morale.5 For Bazin, what underlies
neorealism is a sensitivity to social issues, but his perceptive analysis
of Umberto D reveals the quality of the neorealist hero's engagement:
Since the real time ofthe narrative is not that ofthe drama but the concrete
duration of the character, ... the film is identical with what the
actor is doing and with this alone. The outside world is reduced to be-
130 Nothing Happens
ing an accessory to this pure action, which is sufficient to itself in the
same way that algae deprived ofair produce the oxygen they need.6
The relations between the "outside world" and the character's "pure action"
epitomize realism's political dimension, its avowed desire to engage
reality. This trade between the individual and his or her social sphere
underlies the main issue addressed here: the representativeness of a given
character-the notion of type.
My revision of the notion of type calls for an investigation of the context
ofJeanne Dielman's existence, and of her cinematic shape. I will rely on a
comparative analysis of Two or Three Things and Jeanne Dielman, always
bearing in mind the protagonist's centrality in these films, and how this
centrality is transacted through a cultural and social politics.
Both Jeanne Dielman and Two or Three Things qualify the notion that
the outside world is merely "accessory." This seems most obvious in Godard's
inclusion of a vast range of realities in his collage films, but it is
equally important in Jeanne Dielman; it is crucial to recognize how Akerman's
relentless focus on Jeanne generates more than a "totally subjective
perspective." Lest the relations between the social world and the individual
seem facilitated by Godard's centrifugal aesthetics and hampered by
Akerman's hyperbolic focus, I will investigate how Akerman brackets and
redistributes personal and social history, channeling this economy of disjunction
through Jeanne's body.
Jeanne Die/man contains few secondary characters or groups who might
amplify the scope or the representativeness of Jeanne's daily life. This
sparseness, however, charges Jeanne's presence with social resonance.
Every action and utterance is refracted through her. And her opaque physicality
accumulates the charge of other, transient characters. (The clients,
of course, are the very image of transience, "depositing" their bodies and
cash with Jeanne, then leaving.)
The dialogue with the neighbor at the door is especially significant here.
While in a first version of the film's script this and other characters appeared
in subplots, here the neighbor remains unseen. We hear her talking
to Jeanne through the half-open door. The scene presents the same disjunction
between a voice and its source that we get in the film's monologuelike
dialogues: an excess of information and a monotone delivery
dissociate speech from the speaker. The neighbor'S monologue describes a
visit to the butcher and parades her doubts about what to buy, her child's
day-care, her husband's approval; it concentrates to the point of hyperbole
the triviality of a woman's quotidian decisions. This is certainly the prin-
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 131
cipal instance in which we perceive Jeanne's life as it is shared by other
women. Akerman's skewed representation of a collective identity reveals
how radically she redistributes the weight ofher narrative and the valence
of its characters. giving Jeanne a presence that inevitably comes to be seen
as representative.
Godard's films demand montage, Akerman rearranges continuity editing
in an economical. minimal display intercut by doors and elisions.
Where Godard adds, Akerman subtracts. Yet both are deeply interested in
the effects of accumulation. We need to see how both filmmakers' use of a
type charged with prior social inscriptions (housewife/prostitute) is inflected
by their political and aesthetic contexts.
For Example, "Hern : Godard and the "Natural" Sign
During the course of the film-in its discourse. its discontinuous course, that is-I
want to include everything, sports, politics, even groceries.-Jean-Luc Godard7
Two or Three Things seems to respond, two years after the fact, to the
French ministry of culture's demand that Godard change the title of his
film Une femme mariee (A married woman, 1964) to La femme mariee
(The married woman), so that the film would be seen as dealing not with
French women in general but with a particular woman. Other modernist
realists besides Godard-Flaubert with Madame Bovary, Brecht with
Kuhle Wampe-had had to confront the law over the issue of a character's
social representativeness." Godard agreed to change his title in 1964, but
Two or Three Things engages the reduction implicit in the change by addressing
the issue oftype directly. Godard makes Juliette a collective paradigm
so that his film, an amplification of a case study, might have the
status ofa sociological essay. He said, "The story ofJuliette in Two or Three
Things I Know about Her will not be told continuously, because not only
she, but the events ofwhich she is part, are to be described. It is a matter of
describing 'a complex.' "9
Godard's avowed desire to describe a " 'complex' and its parts," and the
choice of a character to be examined "in greater detail to suggest that
the other parts also exist in depth,"'O would at first seem to follow the
nineteenth-century literary codes of the realist type as analyzed by Georg
Lukacs. For Lukacs, the successful realist novelist exposes "the multifarious
interrelationships between the character traits of his heroes and
the objective general problems of the age."" And indeed, Juliette Janson
"grapples with the most abstract issues of the time as [her] own personal
132 Nothing Happens
and vital problems."12 Yet it is for a number of reasons impossible to make
Godard's type fit Lukacs's unremittingly essentialist type entirely. To Lukacs,
for example, an abstract view ofreality must be anchored in a subjective
center, in a "character's point of view." For a "character's own capacity
for intellectual generalization degenerates into empty abstraction if
the relationship between abstract thinking and personal experience escapes
the reader, if we do not experience this relationship along with the
character."13
Lukacs's two-pronged attack on naturalism and modernism illuminates
how both these literary movements upset an essentialist conception of
realism. Discussing Zola's writings and his method of observation, Lukacs
indicts "the leveling inherent in the descriptive method": "The loss of
inner significance and hence of any epic order and hierarchy among objects
and events does not stop at mere leveling. . . . something much
worse ... results-a reversed order of significance, a consequence implicit
in the descriptive method since both the important and the unimportant
are described with equal attention"14 (my italics). Not only does
the descriptive allow an unwelcome eruption of the minor, the quotidian,
then, it gives narrative an anti-anthropomorphic unbalance, decentering
the essenialist thrust of Lukacsian realism.15
Godard's films remain compendia ofeverything that offends the Lukacsian
doxa. Godard's main transgression of the essentialist conception of
character lies in his desire to put everything in cinema, his savage equalization
of different realities. He gives description a truly decentering, antihierarchical
power, probing the surface and the details of a scene both
verbally and visually. But it is finally the superimposition of this impulse
over the image of a human being, and the utter fragmentation provoked by
this imposition, that most bluntly defaces the intellectual physiognomy of
the Lukacsian character.
In representing Juliette as split between a not-so-interior interiority and
an equally flat exteriority, Godard defiles the basis ofessentialist realism: a
character's "own" motivations.16 He shifts constantly among different registers
of address-direct dialogue within the diegesis, obtuse dialogue
across the camera, the relay of feelings through interior monologues that
almost "touch" the next, matter-of-fact sentence (''I'll come by at 6 p.m.").
These devices are so nuanced and unexpected as to implode any possible
"organic" or "integral" portrait (though they could equally be seen as
reaching for a total depiction). Juliette's references to fragmentation, to
indifference, are significant here: they direct one not only to a precise
notion of alienation in modern society but also to the body's inability to
accommodate so much meaning.
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 133
The antipsychological thrust of both Godard's heterogeneity and Akerman's
homogeneity is not incompatible with an alternate sort of humanism.
Crucial to understanding Godard's and Akerman's anti-essentialist
humanism is the issue of type, which is suggested by the decentering
centrality that both Two or Three Things and Jeanne Dielman accord the
figure ofthe woman.
Although Lukacs's attack on modernism helps considerably in understanding
the threats that tattics of decentering pose in representation generally,
we are focusing here on the peculiarities of cinema. We therefore
return, with some urgency, to one of our major concerns: how can cinema
represent a concept, idea, or collective group through the particularizing
agency of its indexical image and sound? To address this question properly,
I should restate my specific interest: the shared ground between the
desire to investigate everyday life in modern society and the channeling of
this cinematic inquiry through a female protagonist.
As Denise Riley has argued, the very concept of"women" as a collective
entity has historically had to carve out its wavering identity in parallel to,
and at times in the cracks of, the concept of humanism. This is still the
structuring impasse offeminism.17 So I want to refocus the problematics of
type and of humanism through an investigation of the specific cinematic
uses of "woman," the particular that, in its reach for a plural representativeness
("women"), poses the greatest instability to traditional humanistic
notions. The particularities of a character or of a person's identity are
compounded in cinema by the indexical nature ofthe photographic image,
by cinema's resistance to abstraction and conceptualization. This is the
crux confronted by Godard's and Akerman's cinema.
The epigrammatic force of Jeanne Dielman with its simultaneous proposal
of an image for a woman's quotidian and of an alternate, conception
oftype, suggests three interrelated questions. The first concerns the cultural
determinants that link an individual woman to an alienating social
corpus (urban capitalist society, the middle class); the second relates to
how a social critique can be advanced through this nexus. The third question,
seemingly residual to the other two, is nonetheless crucial: what is
left of the woman (and for the woman) after her use as type? Or, better,
what remains ofthe particularities of"woman" after abstractive processes
push her image into a web of signification predetermined by the specific
agendas "she" must serve? Given the placement of the woman in their
films, both Godard and Akerman must answer these questions.
My privileging of particularities issues from an instinctual aversion to
emblematic representation, to ciphers of meaning embedded in concrete
images. This aversion approximates Bazin's proscriptions on the meta-
134 Nothing Happens
phoric and the abstract in cinema. Yet the lure of the residual-present in
such expressions as Rosselini's "irrelevant detail," Bazin's "little fact,"has
been my main target in criticizing the totalizing bent ofneorealism. As
I argued earlier, neorealism only reinstates another sort of allegorical representation:
its embrace of the concrete feeds an abstract yet anthropomorphic
entity, the Human Being.
With this proviso about my leanings toward the particular and the concrete
in representation, the issue remains how concrete the concrete is in
cinema. I will trace this question by tentatively mapping a growing recognition
that particularities are as much a parallel effect of abstraction (since
we remain in the realm of language and representation) as they are its
residual essence.
Let us start, then, with Two or Three Things. Godard drew the idea and
some of the material for the film from a study on prostitution in big housing
complexes that was published in two issues of the Nouvel Observateur.'8
Both newspaper article and film make explicit connections among
the reurbanization plan of the city of Paris, the government's decision to
build housing complexes, and the desire to buy consumer goods. An idealized
image of comfort, they argue, is always sold at a slightly higher price
than new residents of the housing complexes can afford; hence the need
for occasional prostitution. Prostitution is seen, then, as a pervasive consequence
of the boosting of the capitalist economy and its promise of comfort
in mid-'60s France.
Two or Three Things displays one ofGodard's favorite theses: selling out
is so pervasive in capitalist society that prostitution is its proper allegorical
manifestation. Godard claims, however, that if he "filmed a prostitute
it was to put the fact [that the Paris region was administered as a brothel]
in evidence," for he could have made a film "about a worker or technician
... who [in doing for money what he doesn't want to dol behaves no
differently three quarters of the time."'9 Since Godard thinks he could
have made his point through other alienated types besides a female occasional
prostitute, his choice of character demands particular attention.
Omitting to question his decision to focus on a woman, Godard casts
that decision as "natural." Actually, the idea of prostitution as exemplary
had considerable currency in the extensive mid-'60s analyses of everyday
life as a site of alienation. The connection of prostitution with capitalism
is inflected by the remnants of a left-wing puritanism. A cluster of themes
informs it, most ofthem appearing in the links discovered by semioticians
and sociologists among the fetishization of commodities, "femininity,"
fashion, and women. Laura Mulvey and Colin MacCabe comment on the
"Her"andJeanneDielman 135
fact that Godard continuously slides "between an investigation of the images
ofwoman and an investigation which uses those images"20 in a highly
problematic semiotic trade: "Godard's analysis ofthe place of the image in
relation to consumption ... succeeds in linking the oppression of capitalism
and the alienation .of sexuality.... although it shows up the close
relations between sexuality and an economic system, it finally reproduces
the equation between woman and sexuality, which at another level it displaces.
"21 Mulvey's and MacCabe's critique is corroborated in at least two
discourses that are basic to Godard's mid-'60s representations of women.
One is Henri Lefebvre's sociological inquiry into everyday life; the second
is the semiotic and structuralist appropriation of woman as sign, as "exchange
value."
Lefebvre, in his Everyday Life in the Modern World (1971), refers to
women in a clear attempt to ground the notion of the quotidian in social
specificity. These remarks, however, take up only two pages of a 206-page
book. He says, "Everyday life weighs heaviest on women.... they have
their substitutes and they are substitutes ... ; they are the subject of everyday
life and its victims ... and it is at their cost that substitutes [beauty,
femininity, fashion, etc.] thrive."22 Lefebvre may acknowledge that an understanding
of woman as both consumer and consumed is fundamental to
the reading of a "bureaucratic society for controlled consumption," but he
is enmeshed in a theoretical blur that somehow makes the victim of a
social development its main signifier, and even, perhaps unwittingly,
its cause. Lefebvre wants to link consumer society with the "collapse of
referentials"-the free floating of signs (his examples are "smile" and
"nudity") voided of their referents, yet activating the desire to consume.
But his analysis proceeds through attributes associated with the "feminine,"
and his characterization of women as sign is inherently moralistic.
Supposedly to describe the actual situation of women in consumer society,
Lefebvre uses the term "substitute" to install women in an arbitrary
circuit of commerce. But the arbitrariness of this economy is a stretch,
carried over from the assumption in semiological inquiry that the sign is
nothing more than a conventional, "arbitrary" notation. Far less arbitrary
here are what William Empson calls "compacted doctrines": doctrines
taken for granted, terms or mythemes-woman as consumer/consumed,
for example-that are "pregnant" from prior use. As Empson writes in The
Structure of Complex Words, "What needs attention are the assumptions
of the period," the background of ideas that allows one to understand a
particular usage of a word without dissociating it from the "doctrine" or
"practical politics" it carries.23 The peculiar positioning of woman as "ex-
136 Nothing Happens
change value," for example, can be shown to result from a problematic mix
of anthropology and structural analysis. Claude Levi-Strauss's defense of
himself on charges of misogyny reveals some of the contours of that mix;
he writes, in Structural Anthropology (1958),
Of course it may be disturbing to some to have women conceived as
mere parts ofa meaningful system. However, one should keep in mind
that the process by which phonemes and words have lost ... their
character of value to become reduced to mere signs will never lead to
the same results in matters concerning women. For words do not
speak, while women do; as producers of signs, women can never be
reduced to the status of symbols or tokens.24
Quoting this disclaimer in her essay "Woman as Semiotic Object,"25 Christine
Brooke-Rose responds to it in much the same way that Mulvey and
MacCabe respond to Godard, and that I do to Lefebvre's problematic sandwiching
of "women" in his moralizing discussion of "femininity" and
alienation in everyday life. Brooke-Rose deconstructs the apparently innocent
association between woman and sign:
I am naturally not arguing against [Levi-Strauss'sl description of the
facts in the societies studied.... I am merely noting a certain relish in
those facts and, here, an amusing speciousness and bad faith in the
arguments used in defense, which even attributes the "ambiguity"
[Le., the confusion of values with signs, as in my polemic] to the
reactions of those who protest.26
Inflecting Godard's "consumption" of woman as sign is the generalizing
spread of semiological analysis into sociology that took place from the mid
'50s to the mid '60s, a trend enmeshed with a humanism informed mostly
by Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology. Both are clearly present
in Two or Three Things, perhaps the last "perfect" staging of these discourses'
harmony. On the other hand, it is symptomatic that Godard's
work comes at a point where an immersion in daily politics-the major
militant mode of the late '50s, and a way to counter the idealism of the
postwar period-mixes with the '60s critique of consumer society. Analyzing
Godard's use of the figure of the prostitute, John Kreidl distinguishes
between Godard's sensitivity to women as sociological entities and his
attempts to document the "fictionality" of such star actresses as Brigitte
Bardot.27 Godard's enthrallment "with the reality/irreality split evinced
by the average middle-class woman of Western culture in the 1950'8"28 can
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 137
be historicized as the need on the part of intellectuals within patriarchal
culture to come to terms with their own complex mingling of Marxistinflected
morality and fascination with image consumption.
The double investment of Two or Three Things in the sign and in the
figure of the prostitute deserves sustained attention.29 Godard's cinematic
and sociological formation leads him to investigate woman as sign on two
levels: her transient agency as both actress and real person occupying a
floating place in consumer society. It was part of Godard's process in Two
or Three Things to make Vlady answer impromptu questions that he asked
off camera. These reflex responses give her frontal addresses and replies a
tone of forced confession. Turned into a sign of society's alienating power,
woman is on trial. Turned into a cinematic sign, she has to answer to more
than her position as alienated consumer; she has to answer to her lack of
agency.
Godard's heterogeneous aesthetics shape an allegorical figuration whose
main term is Vlady's body. It is particularly significant that this body is
both used as a relay of registers and meanings and characterized as that of
a woman and occasional prostitute. For allegories can only be formed
through imagery that is "pregnant," and that has been severed from its
original context and motivation. Only a body whose agency is bracketed
can allow the "allegorical transmutation ofagency into imagery. "30
Thus Godard's film faces an aporia intrinsic to allegory as a structuring
mode. Vlady/Juliette is grasped as a capitalized "Her" that also signifies
both city and brothel. This signifying buildup demands that the collusion
of Vlady's body with that of a prostitute be taken as both expected and
historically produced. To the degree that the objects ofGodard's semiological
and social analysis are media imagery and alienation, one can see him
as replaying Barthes's critique of the image's transformation into myth.
Myth makes a cultural and historical moment "natural," misrepresenting
it by asserting its ahistoricity, and making it stand either as an exception or
as a too-generic assertion. By providing the particulars of a certain history,
Godard aims to disable the notion of naturalness. Godard's haste to report
on something happening actualizes and re-presents Barthes's dissection
of myth.
Halfseriously, Godard once remarked that as a document, his film could
have been commissioned by Paul Delouvrier, the man responsible for the
reurbanization plan. Actually, Godard's participation in his historical moment
was indeed so concrete as to beget, if not a government commission,
then a role in a public debate on prostitution with J. S. Geours, an eco-
138 Nothing Happens
nomic official ofthe French government. This televised debate, broadcast
with an interview with a drug addict and occasional prostitute, is telling
not only ofGodard's rhetorical abilities but of his strategic concerns.
First, Geours argues that drug addiction and prostitution are atypical
exceptions bearing no relation to society at large. Then, sensing the shakiness
of his ahistorical position, he adds a generic comment on a distant
historical moment: occasional prostitution for economic reasons in the
nineteenth century. By contrast, Godard, the agent of Geours's defensiveness,
is relentlessly topical. Not only does he argue for the typicality of
occasional prostitution, he relates it, through two real-life examples cited
in his film, to a specific social and historical circumstance. He also reveals
his own subjective reaction, insisting that what is shocking to him is that,
unlike Geours, he finds these cases "natural"-logical consequences of a
social formation. What is shocking to him, Godard claims, is that he is not
shocked.
Here I'd like to pause: Godard doesn't stress the "naturalness" of these
two cases of prostitution simply to unmask Geours's hypocrisy. I began
by questioning the "naturalness" with which Godard took the image of
a woman, housewife, and occasional prostitute as an allegory for the social
condition of France in the mid '60s. Now I'd like to read this emphasis
on "naturalness" as the very crucible of Godard's complexity as a
filmmaker.31
A number of analyses of Two or Three Things deal at length with Godard's
approach to the "natural" image, referring specifically to the constant
questioning of the indexical and analogical images that defines his
anti-illusionist stance.32 Certainly a principal meeting point between Godard
and Barthes is their shared attention to the insidious "rhetoric of the
image," and particularly of the photographic image directed toward consumption.
But there is another, perhaps equally important way in which
Barthes can help us understand Godard.
In 1975, in a short note titled "Ambiguous Praise of the Contract,"33
Barthes wrote, "Since this contract [by which language, narrative, and
society all function] is generally masked, the critical operation consists in
deciphering the confusion of reasons, alibis, appearances, in short, the
whole of the social natural ... to make manifest the controlled exchange
on which the semantic process and collective life are based."34 He continues,
"At another level the contract is ... a bourgeois value which merely
legalizes a kind of economic talion." And "at the same time ... the contract
is ceaselessly desired as the justice of a world finally 'regular.' "35 To
problematize the quandary furthered by these latter meanings of the con-
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 139
tract (contradictions less easily resolved than the deconstruction of myths
he mentions first), Barthes too resorts to an idea of the "naturalness" of
prostitution: "The model of the good contract is the contract of prostitution.
For this contract, declared immoral by all societies and by all systems,liberates
in fact from what might be called the imaginary embarrassments
01the exchange"36 (my italics). The force ofthis argument lies in its
suggestion of a reality that seems to elude deconstruction. It introduces
prostitution as the natural contract, its naturalness invalidating the hypocrisy
of all other contracts as it assumes an exchange without moral
constraints.
Like Barthes, Godard recognizes the impossibility ofunmasking all contracts.
This is the thrust ofhis response to Geours. But, also like Barthes, he
has to qualify his praise of the contract (understood here as ranging from
linguistic to social contracts); it has to be "ambiguous." By the mid '60s,
and in the context of his existential Marxism, Godard cannot be purely
cynical, cannot condone "naturalness" tout court as the limit of demythification.
He profits from the "naturalness" of prostitution to enhance his
agonistic impulses. His stance is inherently demythologizing, taking the
ambivalence of this contract-made-nature-prostitution-and representing
it as a historical and economic contingency.
Two apparently contradictory movements are in place here. One is an
overloading of signification through a cumulative process that merely reproduces
mythY The second, brilliantly staged through Godard's urgent,
secretive, complicitous tone of voice in 1Wo or Three Things, represents
subjectivity as history incarnate-as absolute contemporaneity. His whispered
comments and the precise economic and sociological data they provide
seem to complement juliette's voided quality, her weariness, and
propose an alternative to them. What can be seen as a facile, even equivocal
use of the mytheme of the housewife/prostitute can be reread as the
needed counterpoint for a historical and subjective consciousness presented
as endangered.
This is finally how the film embodies a phenomenological humanism.
Godard represents reality as it loses its power to shock, as it slides from
a precise historical conjunction into an allegorized and frozen image of
capital. That he simultaneously allegorizes the individual and the artist
as subversive potentials only enhances the film's pathos. 1Wo or Three
Things has to balance a critique of society with a generalizing humanism,
and this compromise necessitates a "naturalness" that is didactically displayed
first as myth, then as its breakdown. Clearly a woman's quotidianand
its reverse, prostitution-constitutes an image potent enough to sus-
140 Nothing Happens
tain a representation with social and political overtones in both 1966 and
1975. But Godard and Akerman differently address the "naturalness" of
this mytheme. A feminist position on the thematics of housewife and
prostitute is perforce distinct from Godard's. A feminist's consideration of
the couplet "housewife/prostitute" is predetermined by gender solidarity,
as attested to by feminism's various debates on prostitutes' legal and medical
rights.38 These discussions always exempt the woman from guilt,
whereas the sociological inquiries of the '50s and early '60s (Lefebvre
being a strong example), subject her to a peculiar casting of doubt. Feminists
might use the dyad "housewife/prostitute" politically and rhetorically,
but they can never reduce it to a metaphor.
Jeanne Dielman: An Exceptional Typicality
At this point we should chart how other cultural and political manifestations
contemporaneous with Akerman's deal with a collective representation
for "women."
When Akerman made Jeanne Dielman, the Belgian feminist movement
had been more active every year since 1972. Among other things, it had
mounted yearly demonstrations on issues ranging from contraception to
working conditions, strikes, and abortion rights. Besides creating gather.ing
places, maisons desfemmes, in every major city, feminists had founded
the magazine Les Cahiers du grit, described by Jacqueline Aubenas-Bastie
as aiming "to endow feminism not only with a theoretical apparatus but to
support the latter on the experiential sphere, on the witnessed fact. ... not
to make a journal of academic research cut out from reality but to sustain
this effort through the spontaneous expression of quotidian, of the 'me,
1.'" By 1975, the burgeoning (nonelected) feminist party had organized a
congress that had outlined a nineteen-point doctrine on discrimination,
the right to work, housewife salary, and other topics. The list included a
demand ofworker status for prostitutes.39
In 1974, a special issue of the French journal Les Temps Modernes (Les
Femmes s'entetent, edited by Simone de Beauvoir) charted some of the
period's shared feminist concerns. Most essays consisted of sociological
inquiries into the space reserved for women. Describing housework as
unpaid labor, the magazine argued that women were caught in a double
work schedule.40 In parallel to the consciousness-raising movement in the
United States, and to the privileging of the "me, I" in Belgium, French
feminism had its own confessional mode. Several of the short essays in
this special issue are entitled "reves" (dreams), implying a utopian per-
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 141
Jeanne "forgets," Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080
BruxeIJes (1975). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of New Yorker Films.
spective, or at least a different realm of complaint. The issue is striking for
its contributors' anonymity, a political tactic intended mainly as a refusal
of the patronym, which reproduces a male order. More than half the writers
sign only their first names. They also foreground a lyrical personal
voice (sometimes bordering on the inane) and resolutely avoid theory. One
Nicole, for instance, writes, "The domain of women is that ofthe table, of
nourishment, ofthe potato. It is the base vegetable, the least expensive, the
one spoken about the least, but which is peeled and arranged in a thousand
ways. How am I going to serve the potatoes this evening?"41
This brief essay, published in the same year that Akerman was working
on Jeanne Dielman, parallels her interest in repeated chores. Peeling potatoes
stands as a terse image of dailiness and repetition. Nicole's language
reflects this relation by citing a roster of activities: "Wash, iron, saw, turn
off the taps, open them, heat, clean, take out, put back again ... buy, eat,
throw out, put in order, derange," and finally "forget." Repetition is seen,
then, as creating a pragmatic amnesia-the lack of personal and historical
awareness that is necessary to keep women functioning. The only way to
keep repeating is to forget.
The notion of forgetting, then, is part of a critical vocabulary in feminist
rhetoric. But, as we've seen, Akerman defers judgment on Jeanne's
routine. She beautifully equivocates the issue of the character's lack of
awareness by formally filing all Jeanne's behavior under the rubric not of
"forgetfulness" but of "potato." Thus she asserts a skewed solidarity with
142 Nothing Happens
her character, a complicity that places her use of the housewife/prostitute
mytheme in a different register from Godard's.
In Jeanne Dielman, the impulse to record the minutiae of everyday life,
the recovering of "images between images," accords perfectly with a feminist
sensibility. Yet other things are equally important in the film: a plot
that almost epitomizes a certain radical-feminist discourse (a passive oppression
and a quotidian obliviousness are disrupted by a woman's violent
action-murder); the use of an image made pregnant by prior usages
(the housewife/prostitute mytheme); and the use of the actress Delphine
Seyrig, whose image reverberates with earlier European art cinema.
Akerman's choice of subject in Jeanne Dielman (as in Toute une Nuit
and later The Golden Eighties) fleshes out hyperrealism as a positive strategy.
Addressing a situation that has charged social ramifications but is
exhausted by its previous use (i.e., the alienated life of the housewife/
prostitute), Akerman proposes an alternate mode of undoing the myth:
that ofhyperbolic complicity. As in Two or Three Things, a supplementary
mythification erupts, one in accordance with her own film's period: activating
the assumptions of the time, Jeanne's "pregnant" quality registers
her as a victim of patriarchy. She epitomizes the feminist heroine, not only
because she takes action (the murder) but because, by taking the label of
housewife/prostitute, she is already defined within a specific feminist
repertoire. That label already has a different valence than in Two or Three
Things.
It is important to place Jeanne Dielman in this precise moment, in
which Akerman presciently embraces the structure and skeleton ofa feminist
rhetoric and thematics at the same time that her representational hyperrealism
disallows a freezing of "compacted doctrines" and "pregnant
images." Played over the dichotomy of housewife/prostitute, Akerman's
focus on a woman's quotidian is dictated by the need to reclaim singularity
for a reality bordering, by its prior use, on the category of the exemplary.
She performs this deliberate piercing of a pregnant image through her
detailed representation of her central character.
One of the main differences in this shift of "pregnancy" has to do with
Akerman's imprint of her own feminine and subjective values in the film.
On a number of occasions, she has recalled the memory of seeing the same
gestures performed again and again by the women of her family. That
memory must be allowed to inform a comparison ofJeanne's kitchen work
with that of two characters elsewhere: Maria in Umberto D, Juliette in Two
or Three Things. In Umberto D, Maria's kitchen activities fill the temporal
gap in the purportedly uninterrupted attention to Umberto. The scene
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 143
occupies exactly the time it takes the ambulance to come for Umberto after
his phone call. The effort to shift the hierarchy ofmeaningful scenes lies as
much in the extended focus on Maria's mundane activities as in the ways
in which exprf!ssive shots of Maria analyze a subjective crisis (her pregnancy),
preparing us to perceive Umberto's own drama with more acuity.42
As opposed to the dramatic effect procured through the uneventful neorealist
kitchen, Godard creates a quotidian that is allegorized, cramped
with allusions to major political and social issues. He uses the kitchen as
stagy scenery for one of Vlady's first frontal addresses. The aural background
for this scene is a typical male focus, politics-a radio broadcast
about Vietnam. Juliette has to fulfill her domestic duties, but as she washes
the dishes she turns toward the camera in a flat performance that seems a
comment on TV commercials. Godard intercepts this serious quotidian
with a sense of physical and existential fatigue: Juliette is tired. But the
scene's most striking aspects are its array of kitchen products-some of
which reappear, spread over a green lawn, at the film's end. Economy is
the issue that suspends the film's narrative flow, becoming in fact its main
theme as the urge or need to consume is first indicated in Juliette'S kitchen.
The notion of the mytheme as a unit of signification ready to be allocated
as a signifier is certainly appropriate to Godard's semio-philosophical
quests. Akerman's work complicates this notion. Her use of the readymade
image of housewife/prostitute at first seems congruent with her
hyperrealism, for her use ofan image charged with prior meaning creates a
second-degree representation. But the hyperrealism of Jeanne Dielman is
inflected by feminism and lays out a new position in relation to it. For
what finally places Akerman's work in a productive relation with feminist
politics is less the recording of repressed images of women's movements
than it is the way in which, by redesigning our attention to these movements
and reshaping the gestures themselves, she questions an essentialist
view ofwoman.
Jeanne Dielman subverts the notion ofthe representative type by asserting
it differently. Akerman has said that she wanted "to simplify a reality
to such a degree that on seeing Delphine Seyrig making coffee one sees all
women making coffee."43 Yet to describe Jeanne simply as a housewife
who works as a prostitute in the afternoons is to perform the kind of
reduction the film both provokes and refuses. Jeanne's repetitive routine
reveals both the general category that she exemplifies (housewife/prostitute)
and the singularities, the individual tics, that make her a unique
individual. As such, she would seem to conform to Lukacs's definition
of type as a mesh of the "particular individual traits" of the character
144 Nothing Happens
and "the traits which are typical of the character as representatives of a
class."44 The peculiar interplay in Jeanne Dielman between the abstraction
that arises from repetitions and their progressive accumulation as
difference, however, generates a shift in the conception of type.
In their essay "Une Certaine Tendence du Cinema Fram;:ais" (A certain
tendency in French cinema, 1975), Serge Daney, Pascal Kane, J.-P. Oudart,
and Serge Toubiana raise questions more relevant to our understanding of
Jeanne Dielman than Lukacs's analyses of nineteenth-century literature.
Investigating the issue ofcinematic naturalism, they are forced to consider
the significance oftype, stereotype, and the notion ofrepresentation in the
political and nominal sense of the term. How is a character made to represent
a group, a class, a certain minority? As Daney writes of the film
Dupont Lajoie,
The true "hero" of Dupont Lajoie is not an individual but a 'rio of
middle-class French men.... The art ofthe film consists in not effacing
the differences internal to the trio. These differences ... can help
to identify how, through a paradox that is not apparent, naturalism
necessarily secretes its opposite: typage.... For a character in Lajoie
to have a chance to acquire a certain exemplarity (to typify the Middle
French racist ... ) he has to take place between two poles ... inherent
to naturalist cinema: the stereotype and a certain atypie, the caricatural
and the natural, in short Schumacher and the representative
ofthe bras Tornade.45
Akerman aims for more than a negative attack on the representative type.
Not only does her work negate the conventions of expressive realism, it
renews the vocabulary of representativeness, exhausted by being caught
midway between the allegorical and the typical, caricature and nature."
She achieves this by shaping Jeanne as a peculiar exfoliation ofthe notion
of example. Most narratives are based on the "rule of individuation" by
which "in a bourgeois culture to tell a story means to speak about individuals,
killers or martyrs, heroes or victims ... while what is unthinkable
are the collective agents, the grouped-me."46 One appreciates Akerman's
construction of type, then-her pressure on a single character to typify a
group such as the class of housewives. One also appreciates how Jeanne
Dielman integrates the "rule ofindividuation" with "statistics ... the rule
ofthe anonymous group."47 Over a single character, Akerman accumulates
a representation ofboth the individual and a collective entity, yielding an
anti-essentialist image that corresponds neither to Jeanne Dielman nor to
all housewives.48
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 145
The denial of Jeanne as a sociological essence is performed not at the
expense of but through the bracketing of her background. Akerman provides
contextual, narrative information not only through blocks of verbal
address-the reading of letters, the neighbor'S off-frame monologue-but
through details, which give weight to her place and her presence. Furthermore,
inverting the rule of individuation whereby anonymous actors
strive to distinguish themselves as individuals, Jeanne Dielman uses Delphine
Seyrig-a striking, well-known actress-in the role ofan anonymous
woman.'9
Although exceptionally typical, Jeanne, as played by Seyrig, is above all
exceptional. Akerman's statements indicate the complexity of her construction
of type: "If I chose my mother," said Akerman, "it would only
be my mother."50 She develops this idea in another interview: "If I had
chosen a nonprofessional actress for the role of Jeanne, she wouldn't be
more than that single woman. Because she is an actress, she represents all
other women."51 Thus Akerman denies the naturalistic specificity that the
use of an anonymous actor or actress would usually convey. Hers is a
layered, defamiliarized specificity, a hyperrealist representation of type.
She 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 . .. "52 That another memory of Seyrig might
confront Jeanne in people's minds interested Akerman. In using Seyrig's
deeply resonant cinematic persona, she exposes her desire to subvert not
only naturalism, with its categorical essences (The Mother, The Housewife),
but also the realist notion of type (individual traits epitomizing
some collective configuration). In fact, she channels Seyrig's public resonance
through an extremely singular characterization.
Akerman avoids the idea ofauthenticity and of universal traits. She resolutely
inscribes Seyrig, this subtly foreign body, within a perfectly unified
background, and Seyrig's stylized performance, in tension with Akerman's
detail-saturated realism, inflects this space with alienation. The
linear narrative and Jeanne's visual integration with objects and spaces
barely accommodate Seyrig's presence. At the same time, the overall consistency
of the background is troubled by Akerman's hyperrealism, her
hypertrophy of descriptive detail, and her use of Seyrig's persona-a detached,
alien presence, neither here nor there. Seyrig's characterization of
Jeanne includes recognizable behavior but is distilled through a pattern of
stylization. The intense attention to details (formal and otherwise) superimposed
on a culturally given narrative matrix (melodrama) corrodes naturalism
from within.
146 Nothing Happens
Godard voids character affect both as an antinaturalist gesture and as a
representation of alienation in capitalist society. But Jeanne's affectlessness
is often taken, at least initially, as a personal difficulty in the character:
her automatism and obsessive-compulsiveness border on pathology.
By creating for her protagonist the precarious position of embodying both
agency and automatism, Akerman manages to respond both to the cliche
(Jeanne as feminist victim/heroine) and to its overthrow.
In 1Wo or Three Things, a critique of capital and a semiological investigation
converge in alienation. In Jeanne Dielman, the embrace of individual
specificity and the representational hyperbole of a character's behavior
(inflected, of course, by Akerman's procedures of repetition) push
the representation ofthe individual to the untenable point ofrepresenting
both a collective entity and a pathological case-i.e., a case more peculiar
and specific than any individual case. Clearly the pathology ofAkerman's
characters is a mimicked one. As in Bresson, a lack of psychological motivation
translates into a nonnaturalistic performance; the character's performance
is given an external motor, which resonates', however, with the
energy and randomness of obsessive compulsion proper (see Jeanne Dielman,
Je tu il elle, Saute ma ville, Toute une nuit, rai faim j'ai froid).
Clarifying the implications of Akerman's departures from conventional
type, Amy Taubin indicts the singularity (the obsessive compulsion) portrayed
in Jeanne because it hinders a generalization that might be pro-
ductive:
Are we to generalize from Jeanne to the oppression of many women
through their subjugation to activity which offers them no range of
creative choice? If so, Jeanne Dielman's pathology mitigates our willingness
to generalize.53
The issue oftypicality must matter deeply to a political movement such
as feminism. Indeed, Akerman's characters often invite criticism along the
lines ofTaubin's intimation that were Jeanne less obsessive, she might be a .
better feminist heroine.
It is interesting to note how the sociological brand of feminism that
would turn Jeanne into a typical housewife joins hands with formalist
criticism;54 their preference for the literal representation of the mundane,
unmarred by the necessarily fictive murder scene (discussed in chapter 3),
is an example. In "Death in Installments: Jeanne Dielman," Jayne Loader
criticizes this scene as unnecessarily compliant with sensationalist demands
for a "bang-up ending" and attacks the idea of "offering individual
solutions to complex social problems: kill criminals rather than abolish
"Her" and Jeanne Dielman 147
the causes of crime, kill rapists rather than rearrange the sexual power
structure that necessitates the act of rape."55 In relation to the sex scenes,
however, she believes that Akerman, by avoiding the presentation of such
unique, "personal" acts as the act of sex, maintains an illusion of generality
("all men are identical"). Loader reproaches Akerman for following
a model of realism, then betraying it. And in this respect, Loader points
to the crux of Akerman's representational radicality: her simultaneously
pared down and utter!y complex notion of example.
Examples can be formed through an interplay of multiplicity and iteration-a
single instance that stands for many similar cases. But examples
can also be given by rarity if they imply "a system of values and expectations
based on extratextual and textual ideas about frequency of occurrence
and normal behavior."56 At stake in Loader's complaint is the way
Akerman frustrates, in an unsystematic way, all abstractive and normative
operations related to exemplarity. On the one hand she negates the specificity
of Jeanne's male clients so that they become putatively identical;
on the other, Jeanne kills a specific, individualized man (rather than, in
Loader's phrase, "the sexual structure that necessitates the exploitation of
women"). Akerman plays with a notion of typicality that issues from recurrence
(similar framing for similar situations). Alongside and in tension
with this rhetorical, paradigmatic movement-the reprisal of similar
events-she privileges gestures and images that denote particularities, setting
up characterizations that are far from typical. Brenda Longfellow
sums up this seeming paradox: "Is [Jeanne] a hysteric or a feminist revolutionary'?
Perhaps the only answer is both, and simultaneously."57 The
"closeness" of Akerman's characters to the abnormal makes them able
both to assert the marginal and to elude marginality's attendant essentialism.
For if the pathological is unco-optable as typical or representative, it
is unco-optable as essence.
This, then, is one way one might read Akerman's radical detournement
of the notion of type as an average representative. Although she has often
said she wanted a distilled, "essential" housewife, her elaborate reductions
and layerings produce a Jeanne Dielman who resists categorization.
Akerman's strategies of defamiliarization and hyperbole lead her beyond
the conundrum of specificity toward what might be termed an exceptional
typicality.
The titles of Godard's and Akerman's films are as suggestive in their
articulation of both the singular and the general as their protagonists are.
The title Two or Three Things I Know about Her plays on the elasticity of
the shifter "her" to accommodate substitution and paradigmatic associa-
148 Nothing Happens
tion, to welcome the "outside world." The title Jeanne Die/man, 23 Quai
du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, on the other hand, makes an absolute nominal
and spatial claim that blocks the possibility of any shared reference.
The feminist documentaries of the '70s sought to blend particularity and
generality in a way that clearly shows in their titles' avoidance of surnames:
Joyce at 34, Janie's Janie (1970-71). A generic title was congruent
with a feminist agenda that privileged the shared anonymity of the militants.
But the title Jeanne Die/man speaks of singularity.
Nonetheless its assertiveness also seems to invite the notion of exemplarity
through the back door, as a supplement. Here, name and address do
not represent some pars pro toto; they cling to the film's texture as dislocated
appendices. The absolute particularity of its title colors the film in
the same way that Seyrig does, oscillating between concreteness and abstraction.
Title and persona unsettle notions of type and of representativeness
while suggesting a perverse compliance with these very notions.
Displaying the resistant friction that characterizes the modernist refusal
of essences, Jeanne can still be seen as a type, albeit in an unmapped,
nonessentialist register. Akerman's main feat is her definition ofa positive
and political valence for singularity. With Jeanne Die/man, she gives
direction to the liminality performed in Je tu il e11e. Without superseding
that work's unique mix of anonymity and eccentricity, Jeanne Die/man
installs the notion of de-individualization at the heart of an ongoing
politics-a feminism whose substance Akerman keenly redesigns.
6 FORMS OF ADDRESS
Epistolary Performance, Monologue,
and Bla, Bla, Bla
There was this, and then tiJis, and then this, and then this, nothing . .. one could
truly lean on.-Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman'
Oppose a purely intensive usage oflanguage to all symbolic or even significant or
simply signifying usages ofit.-Gilles Deleuze and Felix GuattarF
"If I make cinema, it is because of what I do not dare do in writing," says
Akerman, in her video Lettre de Cineaste (A filmmaker's letter, 1984). This
supposed timidity cannot, of course, be taken at face value, for Akerman's
writing is itself daring, sitting uneasily in a filmic narrative. Akerman's
mise-en-scene alternately claims a direct discourse for her character and
brackets his speech through blqnk delivery, long silences, and a skewed
frontality, A deliberately awkward distribution of text disallows a comfortable
fit between writing and speech, script and dialogue. Speech never
entirely absorbs discourse; the sense of authorship never completely dissolves
into a transparent third-person narrative. The writing itself straddles
verisimilitude (as in the truck driver's monologue in/e tu il eIle) and
an off-center quality with overtones of the literary (as in the use of the
French passe simple at one point in the voice-over early in the same film).
My concern in this chapter is to define the affinities among different
modes of verbal address in Jeanne Dielman, Meetings with Anna, News
from Home, and Je tu il elle. Letters, dramatic monologues, descriptions,
storytelling-all these forms tend to imply a person who is absent, and all
150 Nothing Happens
can be associated with a temporal or spatial obstruction. The letter, for
example, like the telephone conversation, signifies communication at a
distance, communication hindered. And the monologue puts the burden
of speech on one person for a long period of time, even though there may
be an on-screen listener. Actually, a sense of impaired communication
subtends verbal exchange in all Akerman's work.
Epistolary Performance: News from Home
My interest here is in Akerman's writing, in the way her treatment of text
perverts distinctions between discourse and story, meaning and affect,
and, finally, in how she redefines expressivity not at the expense ofredundant
information but through it. My initial focus is the letter, a favorite
Akerman form. Like other autobiographical texts, letters involve a continuous
commerce between textual and extratextual data. The border between
text and reality is figured, in the letter, as the real identities ofwriter
and of addressee. Moreover, the letter's seemingly unproblematic transit
between different orders of information and of verifiability creates the
"effect of the real" mentioned by Barthes: unexpected shifts in addressdirect
and indirect speech, confessions and reports-result in a rhetoric of
authentication. Letters stand midway between speech and writing, contact
and distance. They design what desire-and, moreover, what desire
for communication-can mean: the letter writer can only establish contact
with the addressee through the dynamic of a fissured, forever faulty text.
It is precisely this "faulty" quality that is insisted upon in narrativeoriented
films such as Jeanne Dielman and Meetings with Anna (which
use letters rather less extensively than News from Home does). Here, dialogue
is always out of scale with its context; the information it imparts is
always at odds with the intimacy or distance it implies. There is always
more or less said than the situation deserves.
Brenda Longfellow has described Akerman's cinema as an extended
letter to her mother.3 In one such "letter," News from Home, one finds
themes tp.at in significant ways underwrite the affect of all the verbal
addresses in her work. News from Home is a singular example of the
skewed self-presentation. The backbone of its soundtrack is found material,
a series of letters to Akerman from her mother; the way Akerman
makes this writing her own-listening to it, loving it, overriding it-may
stand as the model for verbal communication in her films.
Akerman's verbal exchanges tread a fine line between warranting attention
and, given their redundance, deserving neglect. One is made to hear
Forms of Address 151
and take into account what is said, even as the writing lapses into concrete
and redundant matter. The contest between releasing meaning and overpowering
it is nowhere more poignant than in News from Home. The film,
made on Akerman's return to New York from Europe in 1976, comprises a
series of long fixed-camera takes of Manhattan streets and subway cars,
intercut with a few pans and two long tracking shots near the end. The
structure is serial, additive-there is no buildup of dramatic tension or
telos. Orchestrating the litanylike quality of the film is Akerman's use of
sound, and especially of voice-over narration. As she reads aloud letters
her mother sent her during her first stay in the city, in 1972, these documents
rebound several times from the original time and space of their
writing: first as Akerman reads them, again as they are performed for
the film (1976), and again each time the film is projected. Reports from
Belgium-mundane bits and pieces, family gossip, the mother's moodsare
relentlessly revoiced at the site and time of reading, mapping a restricted
personal history. Thus the letter collapses the dual temporality of
autobiographical writing-a necessarily belated report on one's experience
of an earlier moment.
It is a twisted filial echo that voices the mother's plaintive words. "My
darling," Akerman reads in a heavy French accent, "hugs and kisses from
your mother who loves you." Or, "I live to the rhythm of your letters."
Speaking her mother's voice, Akerman creates a strange superimposition
of roles, unbalancing the fiction of autobiography. She ventriloquizes her
mother: "You always write the same thing and I have the impression you
don't say anything." To voice her mother's complaint becomes her response
to the complaint-her mother's writing becomes hers, and with a
vengeance. Yet this writing is less an answer to her mother than its voided
echo.
The significance of the twist is clear. The voice issues from and is directed
at the same place; it echoes from a paradoxical space, both source
and end, short-circuiting communication. The pronominal shifters "I"
and "you" ordinarily signal one subject in relation to another, but here
these carriers of subjectivity are shown as precariously rooted. News from
Home questions the notion of presence, of an evident, unified source for
an utterance, at the very moment at which difference and distance seem
abolished: the moment of voicing. Addresser and addressee are collapsed,
disavowing an essential identity for either. In phasing in and out from the
locus of writing (a Europe of named individuals and family relations) to
that of listening and performing (a New York of now crowded, now solitary
anonymity), Akerman complicates the voice-over's disjunctiveness.
152 Nothing Happens
The sound that accompanies her shots of subway doors and passing trucks
and cars seems referential, but is out ofsync with them. This "noise" interferes
seemingly randomly with one's ability to hear the letters, momentarily
shifting one's interest to the space in which Akerman supposedly
reads. Random weaving of attention through words (letters), referential
sound, and images-a common tactic in structural minimalist film-bolsters
Akerman's subversion of a fixed locus for the "1." The alienation
between image and sound parallels the disjunction between the mother's
space of letter writing and Akerman's space of performance-between the
foreign reality and New York. Intermittently muffled by the sound of the
city, the intimacy and warmth of the text claim closeness but spell distance.
It is precisely this distance that is worked out in Akerman's reading.
A question intrudes: how is one to think of displacement (the stated
theme of News from Home) or even of difference itself (between Europe
and the United States, mother and daughter, Yiddish and French,4 French
and English, speech and writing) when difference is phased out, compressed,
in the reading of the letters? For in reading them, in fact in translating
them into English, Akerman is appropriating and "signing" her
mother's writing, confirming the process through which the experiential
becomes public-what Jacques Derrida has called the "otobiography."5
Derrida points out that the signature takes place on the addressee's side;
"It is the ear of the other who signs," he says, referring to the structure of
textuality in general.6 Besides, "this testamentary structure doesn't befall a
text as if by accident but constructs it. This is how a text always comes
about."7
Furthermore, News from Home strips the letter of its materiality. I don't
mean just that there is no body to anchor it on-no images of, say, hand,
paper, pen, typing. Nor do I refer to the equally absent body from which
the voice issues. A more radical process than a play of absence and presence
(as, for instance, in Marguerite Duras's oeuvre) is at stake here. For
Akerman to give voice to her mother's letter raises ambivalent issues of
inheritance and of indebtedness: in order to sign them, she must appropriate
them, betray them. The original signature is erased, as if, through repetition,
one could bypass repetition. Akerman's voice silences her mother's
in a simulacrum of communication.
The appropriation of voice in News from Home thematizes the secondary
inscription present in all representation-the script. Under the psychological
guise of a daughter's resistance to her mother, it also thematizes the
demise of origins theorized by Derrida, for the voice always doubles what
is intrinsically double.8 Akerman's narrative brings the citational quality
Forms ofAddress 153
of utterance to a limit: instead of confirming meaning, repetition stops
making sense. It is symptomatic of her work to disturb questions of origin
and authorship through a mutual contamination of writing and performance.
The text has a writerly quality that disavows it as natural speech,
while the rhythm of the delivery suggests a materiality that qualifies its
content.
When asked about the monologuelike quality of her dialogue, Akerman
allows, "What interests me in dialogue is that it rounds up with
a rhythm ... a psalmody where the meaning of phrases does not make
sense."9 This interl!st in the text as rhythm, as concrete materiality, brings
forth its aspect of ecriture. Akerman cites Delphine Seyrig's reading of the
letter from Jeanne's sister in Jeanne Dielman as the single case when an
actress performed her text with the rhythmic quality she sought.lO Seyrig's
affectless reading of the letter encapsulates Akerman's concept oftext and
writing as existing solely in repetition. Up to that point, we barely know
anything about Jeanne; the letter is the first in a series ofinformational bits
oftext spread through the film. Yet Seyrig delivers it in a monotone, sabotaging
logic and grammar by forcing a rhythm on the words, as ifthey were
a musical score. In anchoring this delivery to the act of doubling that any
reading constitutes, Akerman signals, justifiably in terms of the narrative
(and the character's weary stance), the repeatable character of discourse.
This rhythmic quality is most apparent when the performance-that is,
the voicing ofthe script-is conceived and staged as a reading. In this case,
for example, letter and screenplay are momentarily collapsed as the pretext
for a monotone performance, much in the way one hears scripts read
mechanically at rehearsals (an alienation technique suggested by Brecht).
In Jeanne Dielman as in News from Home, it is in the act of reading that
Akerman's characters best achieve the chantlike quality she desires.
Jeanne Dielman exemplifies Akerman's treatment of text. Its extended
monologues, both in and out of the frame, share a quality with Seyrig's
reading ofthe letter: a chantlike delivery transforms compacted, excessive
information into rhythm, as voice-over description does in Je tu il elle and
News from Home. Given the frequent silences of Jeanne Dielman, the excess
of text in certain exchanges becomes all the more marked. The strategy
of extended monologues maintains the basic division of labor suggested
by a letter or a phone call: possible answers are already included in
the text. Jeanne Dielman also transforms the back-and-forth of conventional
dialogue into spaced, delayed exchanges-almost a discontinuous
sequence ofmonologues. As in Meetings with Anna, Akerman's dialogues
affect the timing of the action-reaction trope. Here, monologuelike speech
154 Nothing Happens
is the aural complement ofthe extended takes and the avoidance ofreverse
shots, which similarly transfer a response onto the audience.
Jeanne Dielman's spasmodic distribution of sound and silence evokes
the alienation between the characters. As Jeanne and Sylvain eat soup, for
example, their spoons ring against the plates in an orchestrated disjunction;
and this slight asynchronism, a departure from the back-and-forth
conventions of naturalism, is repeated in the imbalance of their long
monologues, which contrast with the monosyllabic replies of the character
listening. Again, Akerman rejects the use of extradiegetic music. Thus
all the sound in her films-a concrete score ofamplified diegetic sound-is
both content and matter, meaning and noise. "Noise" is understood here
both in the context of information theory, where it connotes an excess of
"chaotic" information that hinders signification, and in that of concrete
music, as an expressive sonic element.
The aphasic alternation ofsilence and monotone talk in Jeanne Dielman
exemplifies how Akerman approaches the text as expressive sound while
simultaneously using it to advance the narrative. She doesn't exactly refuse
to "telegraph" narrative information; rather, hyperbolizing this conventional
storytelling device through impacted, sealed-off blocks of verbiage,
she problematizes communication. It is less the verbal addresses
themselves than their distribution-density followed by rarefaction-that
jars. The usual formats of human exchange, the prescribed temporal alternations
of dialogue, are pumped out of their binding element-naturalness-to
create a gradual but unequivocal acknowledgment that words, as
soon as they are spoken, are void. This knowledge is sensed by both
speaker and listener, including the viewer ofthe film.
Akerman's bracketed speech engages one only at the expense of her
characters' motives and reactions. It makes one acutely aware of language
(whether written or spoken) as material, and only secondarily as meaning.
Meaning is entirely qualified by the rhythm and form of delivery. The
expression and rhythm of the mother's letters as read in News from Home,
or of the neighbor'S litany by the door in Jeanne Dielman, empty words of
their representational value. These verbal addresses claim their power in
the tension between an excess of narrative clues-Jeanne's past, the neighbor's
daily routine, both described off-frame-and the inability of these
plot data to affect the narrative.
Talk-BIDcks: NIeetings with Anna
Akerman's monologues can be considered signs of hindered communication,
sound masses that rhythmically break the silence but are sealed off
Forms of Address 155
from functioning as actual conversational exchange. In Meetings with
Anna, every character Anna (Aurore Clement) comes across delivers a
monologue, placing Anna as a relay for the spectator-her distracted absorption
in the other characters operates as a surrogate for our own. Each of
the blocks of discourse triggered by Anna's passage entails a location, a
character, a story. The film sets an Au hasard Balthasar effect. Ala Bresson,
emotions and long-unsaid truths are catalyzed not so much by what is
said as by an emoted presence. The result is a certain cinematic intensification,
where tone and rhythm constitute a "bla, bla, bla" that foregrounds
expressivity at the expense of "making sense."11
Accents and peculiar rhythms are added obstructions to transparency of
meaning: Sylvain reads Baudelaire with a Flemish accent; Jeanne gives a
flattened reading of her sister's letter; Akerman reads her mother's letters
in her own accented English in News from Home; and in Meetings with
Anna, Heinrich (Helmut Griem), the train passenger (Hanns Zieschler),
and Anna's mother (Lea Massari) all speak French with tonal variations
that jam the flow ofmeaning.
Meetings with Anna is instructive regarding Akerman's simultaneous
complicity with and perversion of naturalistic representation. Entirely
bypassing her characters' interiority, she shuns any elliptical utterances
that might suggest some hidden or repressed meaning. The clarity of her
character's exposition is so extreme, and yet so rhythmically distorted,
that one is slightly alienated from what is heard.
The mise-en-scene too undermines familiar conventions. It may be clear
that Anna is a stand-in for the audience, but the status of her attention is
ambivalent: as she listens to other characters talk, her stance wavers between
concern and distant politeness in such a way that it is hard to tell
the difference. Akerman consistently characterizes Anna as polite, but her
behavior may paste over a more nuanced feeling that is, to say the least,
equivocal. At times, the characters' skewed frontality in relation to the
camera suggests distance. At other times the characters face each other, but
their bodies are symmetrically posed in the frame, and they are totally or
slightly turnf)d to the front.'2 Whatever their focus of attention within the
film, then, they create a strong sense of a third, crucial axis-that of the
camera.
The characters in Meetings with Anna touch, but barely. These selfabsorbed
presences make fleeting contact at best. That Anna comes into
the lives of the other characters is perhaps less telling than the brevity of
her contact with them, and the vague attentiveness with which she listens
to them. The performer's opacity derives from neither a momentary involvement
with inner thoughts nor the distraction of external events. Her
156 Nothing Happens
Exchange of monologues, Aurore Clement and Hanns Zieschler in Meetings with
Anna (1978). Still, courtesy of the Collection of the Cinemaleque Quebecoise.
disengagement delineates a character intrinsically split. Anna's politeness
is not to be understood through a psychological grid; her semiabsorption
and inattention establish the film's sole channel of complicity with the
audience. Meeting no response within the film itself, the characters' utterances
broadcast their double-voiced nature.
Two related strategies enhance this sense: the lack ofvoice-overs and the
use of monologues. It is the absence of voice-overs in Meetings with Anna
that marks the film's unusual representation of subjectivity. No alternative
consciousness hovers verbally in an off-screen space, as, for instance, in
Godard. Akerman's fixed, symmetrical framing and long shot duration
clear the scene, and magnify the focus on single characters as they speak.
Along with the fixed perspective, there are no reverse or point-of-view
shots; the characters are always seen from the outside. This minimalist
approach enhances the literary quality ofAkerman's texts. Such detours as
these are fundamental to her creation of an impure modern cinema.
In this respect, the analogy between the monologuelike dialogue ofAkerman's
films and the literary or theatrical dramatic monologue is telling. For
the dramatic monologue constructs an unstable voice, suggesting two, superimposed
perspectives-that of the character and that of the author.
Akerman's work may contain no monologues in the strict sense, but the
Forms of Address 157
length that many ofher verbal addresses run without conversational retort
creates a similar instability. Distinguishing between the soliloquy and the
dramatic monologue, Robert Langbaum explains that while the soliloquist
offers self-analysis and internal debate, the speaker of the dramatic monologue
is absorbed in a "particular perspective that makes his self-revelation
incidental to his purpose."13 Akerman's dialogue-qua-monologue lacks
both the internalized perspective ofthe soliloquy (exemplified in Godard's
digressions) and the externalized counterperspective ofnormal dialogue.14
Deprived ofrecourse to an alternate perspective within the diegesis, Akerman's
dialogue-as-monologue structure displaces response onto the audience.
With no reversal of perspective, she establishes a noncomplicit
relation with her audience.
For Langbaum, loading the burden of the text onto a single character
often imposes a sense of fanaticism on that character's vision. He sees
the dramatic monologue as an excess in relation to the plot: "The motive
for speaking is inadequate to the utterance.... the utterance is in other
words largely gratuitous-it need never have occurred."15 Discussing Robert
Browning's St. Simeon, Langbaum remarks, "We need also a term out of
abnormal psychology."16 In both the dramatic monologue and Akerman's
dialogue-as-monologue, the meaning ofthe text is "in disequilibrium with
what the speaker reveals and understands." This disequilibrium and the
effects ofan excessive focus on a single perspective deserve further discussion
in Akerman's case, for they may explain the constant feeling one has
of some slight psychological disturbance in her characters. In literature,
the dramatic monologue exposes the shakiness of naturalistic dialogue. In
Akerman's films, the dialogue-as-monologue submits this instability, actually
present in any text, as a boundary of naturalist cinema.
Akerman provides her monologuelike dialogue with a certain ambivalence.
On the one hand it seems antipsychological. The litanylike quality
of the voices in News from Home and Je tu il elle, and even of the monologues
in Jeanne Dielman, has an entrancing effect; rhythm cumulatively
sabotages attention to meaning. On the other hand, the characters' insistence
on long speeches intimates a meaning to be decoded. Even when an
Akerman film advances more rhythmically than dramatically, there is a
marked pressure for signification. The characters' continuous flirtation
with pathology is part of this pressure for meaning; I address it in some
detail in my analyses ofJe tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman.
Akerman does not disarticulate meaning absolutely. The tension she
establishes between form and content varies markedly in its orchestration.
The monologues in Jeanne Dielman may impart quite prosaic information
158 Nothing Happens
(for example, Jeanne's long conversation with a woman as she tries to buy
a button for Sylvain's coat), but their extensiveness takes on abstract and
expressive values of its own, progressively detaching them from their
putative content. Conversely, the progressions ofthe monologues invoke a
growing uneasiness in the listener, whether character or spectator; they
tend to move from polite, conventional exchanges into personal revelations
that are clearly out of place. As Jeanne rambles about her son's coat,
for example-how it came from Canada-she moves on to describing how
her sister, on her last visit to Brussels, slept in the living room while
Sylvain shared the bedroom with Jeanne and her husband.
This inappropriate revelation matches Jeanne's reading of her sister's
letter. Connected thematically (both Sylvain's coat and the letter come
from the sister in Canada), the two scenes complement each other, exemplifying
two reverse strategies at work in Akerman's use of speech. As
she reads the letter, Seyrig reduces all its content to the same level, disarticulating
logic and grammar through a flat, monotone delivery. In the
scene at the button store, on the other hand, the babble of banality is
permeated with anxiety. The accumulating "insignificant" details force
meaning-the fact that Jeanne can't find the right button, the fact that last
time her sister visited, Sylvain slept in the same room with herself and her
husband, the fact that ... the fact that all of these facts matter.
The question remains of what to make ofthe content of Akerman's texts,
bracketed as it may be in long monologues. Though partially reduced to
form and rhythm, a residue of content eventually resurfaces, for Akerman
exploits language fully; the writing in her work always carries weight. It is
impossible to void meaning completely in these films. There is a parallel
here with Akerman's visual oscillation between literalness and referentiality:
sound and language are submitted to the same strategies of apparently
senseless accumulation present in the serial structure ofJeanne Dielman.
Jeanne Dielman's monologues have an asymbolic concreteness that
resembles the literalness of Jeanne's silent performance, the major difference
being that it is harder to dodge the symbolic reference present in
verbal language. The transgressive meaning of Akerman's accumulative
minimalism is made clear in Je tu il elle when, over shots of Julie (Akerman)
writing to her lover, we hear, "I wrote him three pages," and later,
"Then I wrote him six pages to say the same thing again." Quantity-of
shots, eaten sugar, written pages-is cleaved from significance.
Akerman's resistance to signification emerges in writing that lends
rhythm and concreteness to banality while corroding meaning through
repetition. The sense ofrepetition is not an effect solely of the recitational
Forms of Address 159
tone in which these stories are delivered, for their nature as repeats is
textually acknowledged. Like the images, the writing is pervaded with
cliches, platitudes, much-too-well-known stories. Besides, one's sense of
hearing commonplaces intensifies the feeling of the litany. Verbal discourse
is constantly drained of any original motivation, always spoken as
a retelling.
The idea of prescripted, unchanging stories is often acknowledged verbally:
"I ask you again ... for the last time, marry my son," says Ida to
Anna, clearly restating an oft-voiced demand. In News from Home, each
letter read either rephrases or literally repeats a certain set of remarks,
interspersing them with family gossip: "My dearest little girl ... ," "You
don't say if you're coming back ... ," "I only want your happiness ... ,"
"I was getting worried over not getting any news." In Jeanne Dielman,
Jeanne wearily retells her son the story of how she met his father. This is
obviously a bedtime favorite. And in Meetings with Anna, when Anna
meets a man on a train, he parades a series of platitudes about Belgium
("They say it is a country ofplenty"), France ("They say it is the country of
freedom"), and South America (the climate "is hot and humid"). From
time to time, Anna answers with a sort of verbal amen: "So they say" (On
Ie dit).
The sense of repetition varies with the text, the mise-en-sdme, and the
performance. Here one notes the brilliance of Akerman's writing, for it is
often the text itself that subtly dislocates expected patterns of exchange. In
Meetings with Anna, for example, Anna listens to the monologue of a
German teacher, Heinrich. At first it seems a series ofoversimplified tales,
but Heinrich's account of his life-his comfortable, passive relationship
with his wife, his wife's relationship with the dark Turk with whom she
has eloped, the pleasure he used to take in singing Don Giovanni with his
friend Hans-gradually slides into a summary list of events in German
history. The connecting phrase "and then" (et puis) makes up the bulk of
this list: "In the '20s there were the communists ... and then in '33 ...
the war ... the peace ... the reconstruction." "And then," he says, "one
day my friend lost his job and I lost my friend, such a nice man. What have
they done to my country?"
Rather than conveying any real information, these fragments of German
history work as common verities. They are well-known markers of crisis,
high points in a generic knowledge ofEuropean history shared not only by
Heinrich and Anna but by a whole post-Holocaust consciousness. Told
this way, national history releases not meaning but the affect or emotional
tone of a bedside story. Heinrich's monologue equates an unasked-for and
160 Nothing Happens
hence all-the-more-urgent revelation of his private life with a reduction of
national history to bookish milestones. The first part of his account is
needed (the viewer wants some background for this character), the second
is superfluous. The poignancy of the speech lies in its reduction of text to
tale. In equating real news with generic data, Akerman finds and releases
an intensity in redundant information.
Another activation of the cliche appears in Sylvain's queries about sex
in Jeanne Dielman. Describing to his mother a talk with a friend, he restates
the terms of the Oedipus complex. As with Heinrich's narrative, this
reprisal of a familiar story intimates a combined resistance to and regeneration
of content. Akerman's versions of history and of the story of
Oedipus profit from the intensity of the cliche-the fact that the story is
still told, despite being well known. Her refiguring of these cliches also
injects into them an estrangement that prevents them from passing as
platitudes. In Heinrich's case, a drastically reduced informational substratum
activates a moral out ofoa few well-chosen items; in Sylvain's, the
extremity of invoking sword and fire to describe lovemaking suggests a
pervasive anxiety about sex, and exposes the sexual repression operative
in Jeanne's household.
One effect of Akerman's use of redundancy is an infantilization of listener
and speaker. Lacking conventional narrative purpose, Akerman's
disconnected, prolix verbal addresses are easily read as signs of some
psychological disability. In Jeanne Dielman the part of Sylvain, an adolescent
who regressively needs to be told a bedtime story, is played by an
adult, Jan Decorte. In Meetings with Anna, the defamiliarization starts
with Anna's question at a hotel front desk: when the receptionist tells her
that her mother has called, she responds, "How does she know I'm here?"
It is only with his reply, ''I'm sorry ... I don't know," that one recognizes
the question's incongruity.
Anna's lack of understanding of the amount of information appropriate
in different social contexts is one example of how Akerman introduces
excess content. Anna will ask the receptionist to place a call to Cologne,
then add, "They've only just moved, but they have a phone already, anyway
I don't know if they are there at this time." The physical presence of
the listener makes little difference to what is said; telephone conversations
in the privacy of the hotel room are equated with the direct address
of the clerk at the front desk. The emphatic expletives usually present
in Anna's phone conversations may be followed by more substantive
remarks-"Ah! ... it is the director ofthe Roxy, he awaits me with another
gentleman"-but these remarks, by transgressing the conventions of naturalistic
representation, suggest a slightly weird, moronic character.
Forms of Address 161
In one ofthese phone conversations, Anna calls the receptionist, who is
supposed to connect her to Italy in two hours' time. Without pausing
between phrases she says,
Allo, I know it is not two hours yet. I found a tie, a pearl-gray silk tie. I
am certain it is silk. Besides, I've read the label. It is on the second
hanger on the left side ofthe closet; I left it there, I believe it belongs to
the man who was here before me, maybe the one sitting with a beer in
the hall. He had a small suitcase. I didn't notice if he wears a tie....
Ah it is not his, ah I thought so. I will leave it there. You will call me in
two hours, a little less now.
Almost parodically, Akerman illustrates the sort of narrative imagination
that supposedly characterizes the filmmaker or storyteller, linking two
disconnected episodes-the tie she finds in the closet and the man we see
in the background as she registers in the hotel. This speech exposes the
underlying thrust ofAkerman's writing: she gives Anna, the filmmaker, an
imagination that in narrative terms is perfectly banal. Yet by externalizing
this imaginary link in a completely unnecessary phone call, Akerman
short-circuits conventional narrative. Anna's motives for speech are inadequate
and the speech itself clearly gratuitous. In spouting narrative
cliches, expanding or compressing them and, mostly, saying them unwarrantedly,
Akerman, as Anna, sings out of tune. And it is such slight but
definite dislocation, the misplaced tone and accent of her writing, that
wrings music from her text.
Postscript: The Man with the Suitcase
and A Rlmmaker's Letter
Meetings with Anna ends with the only form of verbal address otherwise
absent from the film: the voice-off. Lying on her bed, Anna plays her answering
machine. After each disembodied message we hear three short
beeps; then, in the second-to-last message, a voice says, in an Italian accent,
"Anna, dove sta, Anna, where are you?" The message stresses the
question of Anna's whereabouts; and her absence from anyone place, her
wandering, is a direct function of her identity as a filmmaker. The Italian
voice also gives provisional closure to Anna's distracted stance throughout
the film: she has been bothered by continually missing a connection
with her lover in Italy.
Another emphasis however, on "you" as opposed to "where," suggests a
different set of questions, which cohere around the issue of presence.
Akerman herself has advanced this interpretation in an interview; instead
162 Nothing Happens
of defining Anna in the negative-as a presence lacking place, as absenceshe
has defended Anna's presence as is. Anna's mobility has been compared
to that of other road-movie wanderers, but Akerman is adamant on
her difference from say, Wim Wenders's characters in Kings ofthe Road or
Alice in the Cities: "Anna's trip through Northern Europe is not a romantic,
initiation voyage."17 She is not looking for identity. Rather, her mobility
designates her as a "mutant being," a woman who truly rules out the
values of domesticity. Thus her wandering is misleading ifread as the sign
of an identity problem that would be solved if she stayed home. "It is her
work that makes her travel, but one could almost say of Anna that she has
the vocation for exile."18
In a quiet way, Meetings with Anna plays out the liminal position Akerman
herself holds in Je tu il e11e, where she shifts among the roles of
character, author, and director. Akerman's attempt to update the radical
liminality of the earlier film can be seen in the suggestiQn of Anna as
"mutant." The themes oftravel and nomadism present in both films are in
certain ways circumstantial; what matters is that the characters' borderline
behavior is grafted over Akerman's presence or persona. It is Akerman's
figuration ofher own selfthat interests us here.
Authorial traces of Akerman in her films include the low camera position
in Jeanne Dielman, which corresponds to Akerman's own sight line,
and the reading of letters in News from Home, which collapses addresser
and addressee; both Meeting with Anna and The Man with the Suitcase
(1983) set up parallels between character and director, and Akerman herself
is physically present in Saute ma ville, Je tu il e11e, The Eighties, and
in her work for TV-The Man with the Suitcase, Family Business: Chantal
Akerman Speaks about Film (1984), A Filmmaker's Letter, and Sloth
(1986).
The variations in meaning of these films are self-evident. I restrict my
analysis to works in which Akerman's physical or referential presence
questions the fiction of an univocal, fixed identity. In Je tu il elle and
Meetings with Anna, for example, the major issue underlying the representation
of a "je," or of "a filmmaker" loosely based on Akerman herself, is
how to author a selfthat is not necessarily oneself.
Akerman claims that she appeared in Je tu il elle simply because she
couldn't stand the way someone else acted the "je." She wanted a rougher
delivery in that role. This assertion and her brilliant performance highlight
her peculiar relation to autobiography: Akerman uses her own body
to undermine the authority of origin and referent. When, however, Akerman
asks Clement to playa role modeled on her, one can infer she has
Forms of Address 163
found a means of transferring the internal disjunction constitutive of the
pronominal shifter je onto another body. The sense of the phrase "je est un
autre" varies in Akerman's different uses ofanother performer to represent
herself. The use ofClement to thematize "Chantal Akerman" is instructive
in relation to Akerman's presence in other works; at stake in how the
filmmaker represents herself is the broader matter ofthe attempt to create a
distinct, separate object to replace one in one's discourse. Representing
oneself demands complex operations of objectification to create a fictional
entity that is clearly separate from, yet refers to, the enunciating self.
Watching Meetings with Anna. one is struck by the resemblances between
Anna and "Chantal Akerman" (going on what one knows of Akerman
from outside the film). Yet the film's reflexivity is only partly based
on its borrowings from Akerman's history. In my discussion of Meetings
with Anna, I suggested that the film's formal effects of alienation and distanciation
become a sort of secondary theme within the film's diegesisthat
Anna, modeled, significantly, on a filmmaker like Akerman, bears the
weight of a representation split between scene and audience. Meetings
with Anna saturates its characters with conflicting demands-of silence
and speech, of absorption with oneself and with an elsewhere. Akerman
voids her representation of her self by superimposing divergent energies
on it. The character of Anna adds to one's understanding of the filmmaker
Akerman, but one's understanding of Akerman doesn't illuminate Anna.
A complex deferral in identity construction cancels the analogy between
Anna and Akerman as an explanatory principle of the work.
Meetings with Anna was followed by two works that examine the filmmaker's
chores in different ways: The Man with the Suitcase and A Filmmaker's
Letter. Akerman begins The Man with the Suitcase at the point
where Meetings with Anna ends: the moment when "the filmmaker" reenters
her apartment after an absence. In the later film an active, plump, fastpaced
Akerman replaces the ethereal, opaque Clement of Meetings with
Anna. In A Filmmaker's Letter, a ten-minute video made for Antenne 2, the
French television network, to present Akerman to a larger public, Akerman
appears with Clement, her scenic alter ego.
Making a filmmaker's life their subject, both film and video return to the
idea of what it means to thematize the self, this time emphasizing the way
Akerman's presence either prevents or assists the transformation ofthe self
into a fixed entity. Akerman's body stands in the way in these works: introducing
herself, she puts herself at odds with the demand for a separate,
fictional self. To make Akerman the theme clearly becomes problematic.
The aural contrast between Meetings with Anna and The Man with the
164 Nothing Happens
Suitcase is striking. In place of Akerman's long monologues, the later film
is almost without speech, instead using intertitles, an initial voice-over,
and the conventions of silent comedy-exaggerated representations of silence
(tiptoeing) or of loud noises (chance collisions), contrasts between
the actors' scales (tall and short, etc.), and so on. Off-screen sound is inordinately
important in this depiction of a paranoid sensibility: we start
trying to decode the sound of footsteps, typing, or a key turning. Taking to
an extreme the animosity underlying Anna's relation to men in Meetings
with Anna, The Man with the Suitcase evokes the contours and formal
strategies ofboth Laurel and Hardy shticks and Bresson's A Man Escaped.
At the beginning ofthe film, Akerman gets home after a trip. We see her
pleasure in surveying her territory as she gets ready to work. But when she
comes back from buying paper and turns the key in the lock, someone
inside opens the door; a very tall man and a very short Akerman clumsily
cross paths. The man is a visitor, supposed to have left already. He
announces that he's staying a while longer. Without a word, Akerman
dismantles her worktable. Refusing any help, she furiously moves her
things-the table, a typewriter-to her own room. From then on, everything
she does relates to that other space, the living room, from which she
has exiled herself. More: her work is transformed into controlling the time
and space occupied by the presence she abhors. Her strategies to avoid her
male visitor's presence go to hilarious extremes, especially since she never
explains why she's angry, indeed barely answers his questions. At the
same time, she's entirely obsessed with him. Her own routine as a writer
and filmmaker is replaced by elaborate schedules for showering, breakfasting,
and coming and going. She starts to sneak into her own apartment.
The issues here, as in Meetings with Anna, are those of nomadism and
celibacy. Discussing Franz Kafka, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explore
nomadism in terms of a complex articulation ofrelations to food and
to writing. By this scheme, food is linked to a fixed place, that of planting
and harvest, and territorialization connotes an attachment to family and to
conservative values. Conversely, writing-the use of language, and the
creative act-results in exile, a deterritorialization from social conventions
(though not all writing is necessarily deterritorialized). Exile and nomadism,
then, have a progressive thrust-they reject the values of domesticity.
In asserting her Jewishness and transnationalism, Akerman valorizes nomadism
as posited by Deleuze and Guattari.
Traveling can occur in a single place-in "one's bedroom," say-and be
all the more intense for that. As Kafka writes in his diaries, "Now you lie
against this, now against that wall, so that the window keeps moving
Forms of Address 165
around you.... I must take my walks and that must be sufficient but in
compensation there is no place in all the world where I could not take my
walks.""9 I will not develop the analogy between Kafka's descriptions and
Akerman's minimalism in detail; the notion of exile (from social norm,
from fixed gender roles), however, is cogent for her films. Ie tu il elie, for
example, starts off in a "room" like Kafka's, and in Meetings with Anna,
the political dimension ofthe central "mutant being," who is also an artist,
is characterized by constant nomadism.
In The Man with the Suitcase, a radical aversion to a man's presence, as
well as to the image of coupled domesticity, becomes a form of exile. Wandering
is spatially limited here, yet the apartment setting seems to accelerate
Akerman's obsessional tics so that they replicate, in a comic register,
the ideas that inform her films in general. After refusing her guest's offer of
ratatouille, Akerman sneaks into the kitchen to eat voraciously. She speaks
her mind-she wants him out-only when he's shaving in the bathroom,
where he can't hear her. In an epigrammatic, gendered representation of
nomadism, Akerman carries a tray (a suitcase of sorts)' holding food and a
clock around the apartment. Thus she thematizes her own exile as well as
her own oeuvre (duration and cooking being a summary image of Jeanne
Dielman). As the woman with the tray maps a course through the remainder
of a man's space, her nomadic withdrawal defines something
particular to Akerman's filmmaking rhythm: the fissuring of an ideal and
unified notion of the selfthrough her own, awkward, body.
The Man with the Suitcase describes a paradoxical domestic entrapment.
At the same time, Akerman explicitly and ironically acknowledges
the discursive instance. At the high point of her exile in her room, Akerman
develops a system of visual control: through a video monitor, she
follows the path of the man who has invaded her space-or, rather, doesn't
so much follow him as point him out to us. This figuration of authorial
control is, of course, a condensed image of the entire film. The splitting of
a character between being cornered and taking control suggests how Akerman
uses ber body to extend the parameters of creativity implicit in the
fact that she is, after all, making the film.
More pointedly, the theme of the retreat into one's apartment and then
into one's own room, and into a situation where all that matters is the
control of another person's presence, comments interestingly on the notion
of self-reflexiveness in cinema. What remains of the character"Akerman"
when her space is stolen? The control that comes when Akerman
plays herself as a filmmaker-one recognizes bits of The Eighties (1983)
playing in the video monitor, and later she demonstrates her proficiency
166 Nothing Happens
with a video camera-is offset by a fiction of insecurity. As the self aspires
to a greater, if more fragile, definition, it is circumscribed by a fear of
invasion. The fiction of self at stake here is in exile from its defining trait:
the role of writer and filmmaker. (In Meetings with Anna, too, one sees
only slight traces of Anna's profession.) However, I would claim that this
retreat and self-exile take the theme of nomadism to its limit: in stripping
the character of her professional makeup, Akerman leaves her with no
option but to create, using her own body to partition time and space.
The corporeality of the bodies, their contrast with each other, and the
delay in self-expression suggest the affinity between The Man with the
Suitcase and Ie tu il e11e. Again, Akerman's presence in a reduced setting
formally replicates a liminal condition. As in Ie tu il e11e, a character is
temporarily stripped of social identity and renews the terms of that identity.
The resulting condition of liminal subjectivity is experienced through
a performer's rhythm. Akerman has said that she breaks down her own
structural mastery as a filmmaker by the use of different acting styles and
personas. These different rhythms (including her own as a performer)
counterpoint her dry, minimalist sobriety. One could say, then, that the
creation of an obsessional system of control (following the man in the
apartment, say) is both diegetically and formally related to the definition
of a character's or actor's timing and rhythm.
The Man with the Suitcase shows Akerman involved in something like a
process of production, a situation that might precede the "actual" writing
and shooting that we see the character getting ready to do. Between two
scripts-one featuring conventional images of the filmmaker-author, the
other a paranoid mapping of a foreign body that interrupts authorshipAkerman
writes the film we watch. This convoluted representation of authorship
borrows from silent comedy's emphasis on physical expressivity,
trading the explanatory power of language for the preverbal tantrum: a
preauthorship fear that demands only Akerman's physical presence. Both
the theme of entrapment in The Man with the Suitcase and the film's use of
sound are intrinsically connected to this notion of a self in retreat, a representation
of liminality that relies on silence and choreography.
What is Wrong with Signing? A Filmmaker's Letter
The Man with the Suitcase and A Filmmaker's Letter are postscripts to the
extended letter that Akerman's films constitute. In a lighter vein, they
thematize the proposals of Meetings with Anna and News from Home.
They do not replace or summarize Akerman's other work; like any supple-
Forms of Address 167
ment, in fact, they beg for more. Written after the letter has been signed,
they are afterthoughts, efforts to correct what seems amiss in the rest of
the text. The correction is, I should warn, qualified; neither work really
amends the image of the self presented in the earlier films. If The Man with
the Suitcase purports to be a humorous segue from Meetings with Anna, its
version of nomadism is actually more stringent than Anna's wanderings;
Akerman's presence in it, with its pseudodirect presentation of "Akerman
the filmmaker," only amplifies the split quality of Akerman's mise-enscene
and of Clement's performance in Meetings with Anna. Both the serious
and the comic films mock the possibility of grafting a fixed identity
into a film, whether through Clement's presence or through Akerman's
own. Rather, the thematics of exile provide a clue to a basic direction of
Akerman's work-away from a fixed image of the self.
A Filmmaker's Letter, on the other hand, tries to do what Akerman's
work otherwise cunsistently avoids: to construct an image for Akerman
the filmmaker, as signature and as body. In News from Home, Akerman
cancels the authority of origins by reproducing-"betraying"-her mother's
words. At the end of A Filmmaker's Letter, on the other hand, she
heralds betrayal as homage: "A letter must be signed; what should I write,
'Chantal,' 'Chantal Akerman,' or simply 'Akerman"? My father wanted a
son. So let's sign 'Akerman' to give him pleasure." The major question of
the video, though, is that of to whom this pleasure is directed.
Produced by Antenne 2 and aimed at a limited but still anonymous TV
audience, A Filmmaker's Letter lacks a specific addressee. And the image
that the filmmaker constructs of herself is interestingly inflected by the
indistinctness and genericness of the receiver. How is one to present oneself,
sign one's work through an ear that might be less than keen? The
answer comes in bold strokes. Major themes intersect in the playfulness of
A Filmmaker's Letter. To construct a self-presentation that might fill the
authenticating vacuum of the vague and unknown audience, Akerman
parades her themes and strategies while leaving the problematics of authorship
unquestioned.
The film condenses the themes in other Akerman works. Not only Akerman
herself but her scenic alter ego, Clement, appears in it. Slipping in a
now familiar way between different levels and tones of address-from
statements of belief to a mocking self-critique in indirect speech-it ultimately
collapses all sorts of writings: "A letter is a script is a script is a
script is a letter." The word "letter" is a recurring pun, and its various
connotations are explored. Akerman's ii 1a 1ettre embraces literal meaning
as it does the law, in this case the Jewish law.
168 Nothing Happens
A Filmmaker's Letter starts with a black screen and Akerman's voice
announcing God's presence and His proscription of the image: "And you
shall not make any image that resembles anything over the earth, sea, or
sky." In defiance of God's commandment, we see the video's first imageAkerman's
face, half-covered by a blanket, peeking at the camera. As she
leaps out of bed, she states off-frame, "To make films one must get up." A
blank wall replaces the empty bed. Again, Akerman will draw an image
over this empty space: this time saying "To make films one must stand
up," she jumps up into center frame. Next she magically exhorts Clement's
presence by tenderly repeating her name-"Aurore, Aurore, Aurore."
Clement now replays Akerman's formula, jumping out of bed and off
frame, then standing up to fill the frame. Here and from now on, she is
Akerman's explicit double. In a sense repeating the role of the filmmaker
in Meetings with Anna, she displays for the camera what the arduous
profession of filmmaking involves. How to dress for a meeting with one's
producer? How to write and rewrite a script? How to carry film cans?
These questions are presented as overacted comic vignettes, all leading to
the main issue: how to make films that give pleasure to one's friends?
Underlying this question is Akerman's difficulty in responding to an
indeterminate audience. This TV production poses its own demands: it
must communicate and, perhaps more significant, must reshape Akerman's
image. Antenne 2 affords Akerman an assurance of signature (of
public recognition) that is both challenging and overwhelming; a voiceover
introduces her as a prominent artist. This video letter, then, becomes
an arena in which she must build her case, a case in a way won and lost in
advance.
Anticipating a diffuse audience's hostility to Akerman's style, this generic
letter rehearses a metacritique. Akerman reports to an amazed Clement
that a friend would rather have her make Raiders ofthe Lost Ark than
Toute une nuit. Dressed as a man, sitting with Clement, she deflects an
expected criticism by stamping it with her personal style: "A friend once
told me," she says, "Chantal, you always make films that are too long, you
always make films that are too long, you always make films that are too
long." As Akerman talks, she speeds up, invoking her talent for concision
and her delight in slurring words into sound.
Minor moments such as a filmed production break are filled with references
to God and the letter. "At times when Iwrite a letter," Akerman says,
"I describe what I see from a window. It has a sensitive and quotidian
tone ... but this is not a letter, it's a script." If looking through a window
produces easy matter for a letter, Clement shuts the window. Akerman
Forms ofAddress 169
remarks, "We the Jews have no images, just the Book." Defying her father's
tradition, she declares herself an image maker: "A letter in image is to kill
the letter. We'll do it then. Bang bang!"
Akerman's killing of the letter-her announcement that she rejects the
Jewish ban on image-making-is compromised from the start by television's
need for legibility. The tension between breaking the law and talking
about breaking the law is a moot point here: A Filmmaker's Letter can
only talk about Akerman's style rather than constitute it, didactically displaying
the dichotomies-between author and performer, performer and
character, speech and writing-that her other work perverts. In News from
Home, for example, these tensions are actually performed. A Filmmaker's
Lettersimply thematizes them, diffusing their cogency.
Thus the only proof Akerman can cite as evidence of her proclaimed
crime is a reproduction of Rene Magritte's spoof of referentiality, his suggestion
of an eternal competition between the logics of image and word.
"This is not an orange," Akerman says, presenting an apple; then, replacing
the apple with an orange, "This isn't either." She then replaces oranges
and apples with a red rose, overlit on a blue velvet top; Gertrude Stein's
phrase "A rose is a rose is a rose" is whispered fast and relentlessly, as a
chant of "Love me, love me not" takes over the soundtrack. The literalness
suggested and defied in Magritte's pun (most cogently in his painting Ceci
n'est pas une pipe), and the slippage from a literary to a musical and
concrete register in Stein, inform all ofAkerman's cinema. Here, however,
such issues are alluded to without actually informing the work. The contamination
ofcontent by rhythm, ofillusion by literalness, that gives Akerman's
cinema its edge is merely a theme here.
Nothing is actually endangered in this vacuous either/or of word and
image, not even, as the success of A Filmmaker's Letter shows, Akerman's
zest for writing and image making. What is at stake is not the actual killing
of the letter but the need to thematize it. A Filmmaker's Letter displays
Akerman's cinematic strategies through an aesthetics of juxtaposition and
allusion. Disjunction, collage, and a light touch provide an image for Akerman
that conforms to a dialogic dynamic. The easy legibility of this letter
is not a necessary function of a juxtapositional or heterogeneous mode of
presenting the self. "Letter" in this video spans a wide range of meanings.
Along with Akerman's work, her chamomile tea and diet, her style, the
pope, and her Jewishness, the letter is capitalized, as if God couldn't be
alone on that count. Arrested by a pressing demand, "letter" translates in
A Filmmaker's Letter as the law of the father-the respect for an external
demand, supposedly that ofthe audience.
170 Nothing Happens
Usually characterized by an anxious incompleteness, the epistolary format
serves a clear function in A Filmmaker's Letter: the fragmentary texture
ofthis letter/video disguises the will for a full, self-contained picture.
It allows Akerman to sign her patronym resolutely, beyond the shadow of
betrayal. In News from Home, the filmmaker's signature wavers between
retracing and differing from her mother's voice. A Filmmaker's Letter
makes blunt the tremulous certainty of Akerman's own voice.
7 THE RHYTHM OF CLICHE
Akerman into the '90s
In any event repetition is transgression. It questions law. it denounces its normal or
general character promoting a deeper and more artistic reality.-Gilles Deleuze,
Difference et Repetition, 1968
Chantal Akerman's work has a dry, cumulative intensity. Extended takes,
fixed frames, and a resolutely frontal camera position efface the conventions
of analytic editing; precise and repeated framings are coupled with a
consistent focus on single characters and an insistence on time. In the
1970s films, single protagonists propel the narrative through visible displacements
(Je tu iJ e11e, 1974, Meetings with Anna, 1978) or increasingly
charged stillness (Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxe11es,
1975). This premise is reversed in the '80s work-in Toute une nuit (All
night long, 1982), for example, where Akerman's narrative, though still
predicated on accumulation, is spread over multiple episodic threads, as
characters couple and decouple according to a logic of the romanticthrough
longing, sexual desire, boredom. And in The Eighties (1983), different
performers speak similar lines of dialogue, submitting the same
text to variations of rhythm and performance. These "rehearsals" defile
the very possibility of an essential, "authentic" fit between speech and
performer.
In Toute une nuit, Akerman passes from the minimalist narratives ofher
earlier films to her later, idiosyncratic use of the movie-musical form-a
natural outgrowth of her attention to the rhythms of gesture and dialogue,
172 Nothing Happens
and to her transformations of them into an antinaturalistic choreography
of concreteness. "No links except a musical one, with recurrences and
ruptures," says Akerman of Toute une nuit's fragmentary structure.' From
her first short film, Saute rna ville (1968), on, Akerman's work grows steadily
more stylized. raifaim, j'aifroid (1984) and The Man with the Suitcase
(1983) follow the codes of slapstick comedy, The Eighties and Window
Shopping (1986) those of the musical. The difference between these works
and films like Ie tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman is less than it might seem:
the comedy and the musical forms only exacerbate the manic compulsion
of the protagonists' behavior in the earlier films, and they remain vehicles
for Akerman's consistent concern with rhythm. The borderlines of these
genres are in any case transgressed by the duration of both shots and
gestures, here protracted, there compressed.
AbJrman's '80s work takes over from her '70s experiments with duration
and series. The earlier, structural films comprise systematic examinations
of a given space or theme: a welfare hotel (Hotel Monterey, 1972),
New York City (News from Home, 1976), Akerman lying in bed (La Chambre
2, 1972). These films' structured exploration of cinematic language
is grafted onto a spatial or geographic scan-of a hotel, a city, a room.
Their documentation of particular aspects of a site or behavior suggests
an experimental ethnography, an element present throughout Akerman's
oeuvre, from these first films through the fictional yet hyperattentive depiction
of a housewife's routine in Jeanne Dielman to the acute observation
of Eastern European urban and rural landscapes in the 1993 documentary
D'Est.
Akerman's turn from linear, albeit elliptical and experimental, narrative
films in the mid-'70s to serial structures in the '80s deserves discussion. I
have argued that the focus on a single character and the homogeneous
texture in Ie tu il elle and Meetings with Anna provide a hint of continuity,
a counterbalance to Akerman's narrative and discursive disjunctions. But
this sense of continuity is traversed by a serial structure: these films move
in blocks of different kinds, dramatic blocks (Anna's series of encounters,
each constituting one main sequence in Meetings with Anna); discursive
blocks (the dialogue-qua-monologues of Jeanne, Anna, etc.); and analytic
blocks Ue tu il elle's rehearsal of every possible camera position in a room
in relation to the performer's body). This block configuration, particularly
in its analytic form, follows the catalogue principle of structural film, and
Akerman's serial work is on the face of it involved with cataloguing. Any
systematic, exhaustive approach to a given reality, an attempt to encompass
that reality'S limits, has something of the quality of the catalogue,
which aims to provide a structure or heading through which an event can
The Rhythm of Cliche 173
be read as an element of a given series. The catalogue or list both displays
difference and subsumes it under the relevant heading.
To reconstruct a reality through a serial structure is in some way or
another to reflect on that reality as a totality. A series of shots-events-can
work against teleology if it appears as pure series; or, depending on the
paradigmatic quality of each element, it can reconvene into a circular. total
picture. These two directions in cataloguing, these two organizational
principles (the serial accumulation and the cluster), are principles that
Akerman's work cleverly recasts. The romantic situations in Toute une
nuit, for example, and the series of small performance parts in The Eighties
are presented in quantity, but the repetition of similar situations (with
changing backgrounds, characters, and performance modulations) intimates
the very opposite of a catalogue heading: a search for the specificity
and individuality of each scene or moment, a search that is successful in
Toute une nuit and purposefully frustrated in The Eighties.
How does a serial structure, a marked pattern in cinematic design, set off
a filmic event as singular? Conversely, how does such a repeated pattern
(in shot duration, image content, etc.) imply a generic bracket that subsumes
all difference as exemplary of a particular genus-life in the city,
domestic work, life in Eastern Europe? Toute une nuit's multiple characters
and locations, for instance, might appear to have been subsumed
within an encompassing paradigm: love in the city at night. But that's too
easy a reading: actually, Toute une nuit poses the rather delicate question
of how to circumvent a totalizing tone when dealing with so many different
characters within a single paradigm. The film could easily slide into
a representational tokenism, yet, as we shall see, its display of multiplicity
in fact directly confronts the notion of representativeness. As with Akerman's
conception oftype in Jeanne Dielman and in Je tu i1 e11e, no category,
of character or of event, holds against Toute une nuit's pull for singularity.
That cinema's indexicality-the singularity of every gesture, site, and
sound as film reproduces it-can puncture any blanket denomination or
concept is my guiding hypothesis concerning not only Toute une nuit but
also D'Est, Akerman's latest film at the time of writing.
Eight Times "Cui"; Singularity in Toute une nuit
Qui . . " Qui . .. ,Oui ... ,Qui .. " ()ui .. " Qui . . " Oui .... Qui.
-Aurore Clcment, on the telephone, in the last shot of Toute une nuit
Akerman's boldness as a filmmaker lies in her charging the mundane with
significance. In Jeanne Dielman, both long takes of everyday tasks (the
174 Nothing Happens
kitchen scenes) and nontakes (the elided sex scenes) stand for a radical
new visibility. Toute une nuit again takes the banal to task as Akerman
braves the formally and thematically depleted territory of the love story.
The film concentrates on the brief moments that often constitute the turning
points of traditional feature films-the parting, the embrace, the moment
of sexual longing. It rescues singularity and energy precisely where
the pressure of convention has turned the representation of love into
cliche.
Theme and narrative here are governed by a principle of match and
mismatch that also provides the film's formal trope. In fact two principles
of organization struggle for priority in the film: a visual and thematic
continuity, arising from the recurrence of characters and sets, evokes a
model of linear narrative that is countered by a principle of multiplicity
and interruption. Given the sheer diversity of the film's situations and
locations, recurrence becomes insufficient to guarantee a linear story. Instead,
it begins to shape Toute une nuit as a structured accumulation.
Opposing the conventional plot format of conflict, climax, and then
resolution, Akerman's narrative is structured as a single major movement
composed of minor variations-a fugal structure. Eighty characters and
several locations shatter the idea of the "film with two characters in a
room," shaping Akerman's desire for effervescence.2 In a succinct hour
and a half, the film moves from evening to morning. Its spatial coordinates
traverse three main areas of Brussels: a middle-class suburban condominium,
an older building facing a square (La Vielle Halle aux Bles) in the
center of town, and a poorer and ethnic area (mostly populated by Arabs),
also in the city's center, where the bars stay open late. This relatively
straightforward temporal and spatial frame-a single night, and a group of
recognizable sites-is broken into fragments, fractured into the scenes of
the many micronarratives. It stands as a set of external coordinates that
create a counterpoint, an obliviousness, to the rhythm of both cinematic
and profilmic events. Toute une nuit shares this working principle with
structural film.
In Toute une nuit each fragment takes two minutes or less of screen time
to activate an entire imaginary narrative. Akerman's editing allows no
completion-as if through some fault of the cut, the promise of convergence
she holds out is never fulfilled. This disarticulated narrative has the
transient quality of a frustrated encounter between two people. The familiar
film conventions of transparent editing and sound are used inconsistently,
within a cinematic structure that is broken and nontotalizing. Each
microscene could potentially expand into an entire film. Toute une nuit
The Rhythm of Cliche 175
grafts a minimalist structure onto a splintered melodramatic matrix. The
ratio between the scenes' internal density and their length is crucial.
Rarely named, the characters are at first identified through their surroundings
or homes. They leave their domestic spaces for the street, the
hotel, or, as a member of an older suburban couple, who are going out
dancing, says, "la ville." Especially in the suburban condominium, doors
mark the borders between suffocating interiors and the energy ofthe city at
night. The film privileges passageways, stairs, and shared spaces of different
kinds, spaces of transit that make explicit the deliberate sense of
randomness and transience in Akerman's mise-en-scene. Stairs, for instance,
link floors and lead characters to their destinations. But Akerman's
cuts between one character climbing and another waiting are visual
matches only; the expected meeting is denied. Several couples and micronarratives
share spaces, and the cuts within and among these situations
are often (though not always) perfect, showing Akerman weaving a homogeneous
texture-which she then contradicts by resolutely denying
convergence. No character or couple interacts with any other in the film
except through Akerman's formidable editing. Narrative is subverted by
cinema's most banal narrative trick-editing for continuity.
Elsewhere, establishing shots hold out the hope that Akerman will fit
several stories together into a larger one, a macronarrative, or even into
a governing theme-shared space. for example, a noticeable structuring
principle in the film. The common areas in Taute une nuit are the cinematic
equivalent of paradigmatic frames, evoking the surveyor the ethnographic
study, in which differences between individual characters are
subsumed under some encompassing category such as "suburban life" or
"urban nightlife." In creating only a simulacrum ofconvergence, however,
these shared areas perversely preempt totality.
The thematic similarities among several scenes. and their grouping as
similar, also become more than a structuring principle of the film: Akerman's
systematic exploration of a theme, like her exploration of a given
space, works to cancel the possibility of a purely structural accumulation.
The hint of the catalogue in Taute une nuit ends up not affirming but
calling into question the idea of gathering scenes or images into a thematic
cluster or coherent whole. Akerman's structure of fragments is placed in a
liminal position, touching on several filmic models-narrative, structural,
minimalist, and the city-symphony film, a poetic and avant-garde mode of
social documentary-but not quite conforming to them.
Taute une nuit's seriality, for example, evokes yet departs from the '70s
minimalist road narrative exemplified by James Benning's 11 X 14 (1976).3
176 Nothing Happens
Toute Une Nuit's thematic, fragmentary structure also invites comparison
with the city-symphony film genre. In this genre of film, each shot or scene
metonymically reconfirms a totality by implying the possibility of accounting
for urban multiplicity through an analogously fractured structure.
The city symphony consistently follows two organizational principles
described by William Uricchio in a discussion of Walter Ruttmann's
Berlin, Symphony of a Great City: "Throughout the diversity of locations,
activities and class, meaning is created through cluster editing and coherence
provided by the clock.'" Akerman uses the notion ofthe clock (or
of the natural cycle) to create a sense of limit and therefore of drama. In
Toute une nuit, the road principle-the cumulative yet transient, ateleological
progression-is intercepted and dramatized by the curve of another,
timed progression: the cycle of one night.
Akerman's dialogue with the city-symphony film necessitates a brief
discussion of the relations between part and whole in a variety of analogously
structured films. To describe the formal film, the avant-garde mode
preceding structural film, P. Adams Sitney uses the notion of the mosaic,
"a tight nexus of content, a shape designed to explore the facets of the
material." He derives this term from the title of Peter Kubelka's film Mosail,
a term that expresses "this conscious aspiration. Recurrences, prolepses,
antitheses, and overall rhythms are the rhetoric of the formal."5
Discussing a different genre, the direct-cinema documentary work of Frederick
Wiseman, Bill Nichols also uses the notion of the mosaic to describe
how Wiseman's assumption that "social events have multiple causes and
must be analyzed as webs of interconnecting influences and patterns"
leads him toward a poetic rather than a narrative organization. Nichols
refines his analysis by suggesting that Wiseman's work, which displays
recognizable narrative sequences, differs from other mosaic structures in
that "the tesserae [facets] merge to yield a coherent whole when seen from
a distance, whereas an individual facet conveys little sense of the overall
design."o
The tension in the mosaic is that between part and whole: the mosaic
structure can be problematic as a way to reveal singularity. This limitation
reflects the epistemological quandary of sociological and ethnographic
film in general. (The alternatives of the case study and the statistic are one
example of this methodological predicament.) The disadvantages of the
mosaic appear when one considers how it organizes the procedures of
sampling in several ethnographic films. At stake in the rhetoric of observational
and ethnographic cinema is the notion that reality is only
truly represented if it is not subjected to fragmentation, selection, and
The Rhythm of Cliche 177
intervention-all processes implicit in mm editing. The alternative is the
holistic approach-the attempt to represent whole bodies, or an event's
entire duration. This approach finds parallels in the equally totalist anxiety
exemplified by the collage or sampling method, the idea that categories
(of activity, age group, space, etc.) can be defined through representative
samples that when combined, allow something like complete
coverage of a given social reality,7 Here the mosaic's individual facet-the
event, gesture, or line of dialogue, even if presented unfragmented and
entire-becomes a "tessera" within an encompassing preexisting thesis.
The diversity ofAkerman's "sampling" in Taute une nuit, though, voids
the idea ofa coherent whole. Indeed, given the number of characters, some
of them markedly individual in ethnicity or sexual preference, the risk
the film runs is that of tokenism, the inclusion of characters for the sake
of representativeness. Still, the film's rhythm and direction are those of
accumulation-of energy, sweat, and desire, never of an ideal categorical
unity.
The film depicts, for instance, a succession ofwomen of all ages, fleeing
from oppressive interiors into the night and the city: a girl with a cat; an
adolescent at a window, who then tiptoes down the stairs; a wife who
loudly packs, leaves, and then returns-her snoring husband's obliviousness
serving as the backdrop for her theatrical exit and entrance. Compounding
Akerman's rhythmic design, these moves give the "leaving"
situation a farcical touch, but what grafts them on our memory is their
repetition, their resonance as imagistic deja vus, their demand that we
acknowledge them as rerepresentations. These microscenes straddle the
anecdote and its deflection into the catalogue entry: they are subject to a
general category or figure, such as "escape,"" yet at the same time, through
hyperbole and ellipsis, Akerman's editing and mise-en-scene shape them
as singular.
Marsha Kinder, in "The Subversive Potential of the Pseudo-iterative,"
helpfully points out that the microscenes in Taute une nuit are "presented
to suggest that these or similar events occur every night."g Making this
point about the scenes' iterative nature, however, she also suggests that
"characters are no longer singular ... land] no longer hold a privileged
place in the narrative. "10 Although I agree with Kinder's observations on
the abstractive pull ofAkerman's fragmented seriality, one need only compare
Akerman's images with those ofanother experimental narrative using
paradigmatic substitution-Yvonne Rainer's Lives of Performers-to note
the contest in Tauie une nuit between the series and the singularity of the
images presented. This insistence on the uniqueness of each incident in a
178 Nothing Happens
paradigmatic series, an insistence that runs against the images' cliche thematics,
is Akerman's specific contribution to cinematic typification. If
Hollywood's traditional narratives make the singulative (the "unique"
love affair) a deja vu, Akerman recovers the uniqueness of passion by
setting it up against the notions ofrepetition and cliche.
In taking up love and passion, dominant themes in countless commercial
narrative movies, Akerman forces a consideration of the notion of
singularity. Piling up scenes that refer in one way or other to romantic
desire, she insists that a scene's claim to uniqueness lies in its brush with
redundancy. Defying the banality of cliche, these microscenes profess the
freshness of an original motivation: it is as if they "said" love for the first
time. Their contrast between the platitudinous and the intense gives Toute
une nuit an unclassifiable force, neither a chant d'amour-there are too
many birds singing the same song-nor a parodic demeaning of the petit
rituals of love.
Toute une nuit is the opposite of Jeanne Dielman in that it is a film of
mostly "significant moments," exuberantly multiplied climactic instants
relating to desire, and rebounding from the fictive space of classical cinema's
narrative and melodrama. Like Roland Barthes's Fragments of a
Lover's Discourse, it is concerned with the resonance of certain figures of
passion as they are snatched from sources in personal experience, literature,
and film. The difference between the film and Barthes's book, however,
is not only the difference between the descriptive and rhetorical
possibilities of literature and cinema; it is a matter oftrajectory.
Barthes's gesture is critical: he defines the lover's discourse as a personal
claim to singularity in passion, but, with a descriptive finesse thatbalances
detail and intertextuality, he construes the love event as at most a representational
reality. Akerman's film claims the romantic gesture through the
particularity of cinema's indexical image, unraveling the many examples
that lead to Barthes's synthetic descriptions, demanding the spectator's
confrontation with gestures (that is, with their images) that at some point
generate a rhetoric oflove without meaning. By presenting particular ways
of embracing, hesitating, dancing, particular looks, tempos, and intensities,
Akerman uses cinema's indexicality to foreground what is irreducible
in a gesture (and by implication in passion). Further, she intensifies
each of the situations she shows through the minimal amount of time she
allots each grand gesture (embrace, recognition, first kiss, etc.), as well as
through the repetition ofsimilar coupling moves.
Not all of the film's tiny scenes are climactic turning points. It is rather
the economy and clarity of Akerman's focus that give inordinate signifi-
The Rhythm ofClicM 179
cance to mundane gestures. Her mix of drained drama with excessive and
resolute moves defies a corrective or ultimate (transparent) presentation of
reality. In playing on the overvisibility of the cliche, Akerman gives yet
another meaning to ellipsis. Her cutting of her scenes constantly renews
the frustration (and suggestiveness) of lack. It accumulates the imaginary
resonances of scene and unseen up to the point of cancellation. Perhaps
in this sense more than any other, Toute une nuit defies the romantic
while avoiding the sentimental. If the romantic thrives at the margins of
the possible, and at the limits of representation itself, sentimentality is
bloated feeling, an overdose of evidence. Toute une nuit's stylized concreteness
mocks both the idealism of thinking love to be unrepresentable
and the need for explanation.
Moving away from a poetic analysis of passion, Akerman infuses her
representations of desire with an original energy not amenable to exemplarity,
much less to cataloguing. The film's gestures are as unexpected as
they are banal. As much as her cuts, her mise-en-scene creates a rhythm
that is always "improper," inappropriate. Movement within shots, within
sequences, and among scenes is now excessive (in the series of men pulling
women into cabs and doorways), now subdued (in a dramatic and
performative style that is minimal and boldly surprising.
A series of scenes of couples formed after a casual collision insists that
desire veers toward the abolition of distance. Akerman stages this basic
axiom as a matter of gravitational energy. Her physics of desire dictates
that after standing by each other's side for a while, bodies simply and
momentously spark in a single collision which disrupts private orbits.
Desire, hinted at through brief sidelong glances, becomes more graphic
and pressing as the two neighbors in a bar coincidently bump against each
other. Accident made necessity, Akerman's mise-en-scene asserts the couple's
right to contact by letting them dance while she cuts to two other
microscenes before returning to "their scene." The song on the juke box
plays through twice as they dance; their clumsiness, a choreography ofits
own, precariously conflates movement and the need for embrace.
Two intersecting rhythms animate the film. One is personal. throbbing
through Akerman's cinematic physis; it speaks in the first person, it says
desire. The second cadence, that of natural running time, qualifies this
private utterance. The passage from night to day draws an inexorable line.
Although each rhythm is made of multiple points, each is precise enough
to precipitate romance into disinterest without further notice.
Akerman dodges allusion. She charges her images with affect by hyperbolizing
certain gestures, by sabotaging motivational structure, by cutting
180 Nothing Happens
Strangers between glances in Toute une nuit (1982). Frame enlargement. print courtesy
of World Artists Release.
and compressing the preludes and aftereffects of a motion or emotion. She
represents desire solely through its movement-its actual displacement of
energy. its unequivocal imparting of a signal to the film's characters. One
would then imagine a film made solely of charged dramatic moments, yet
Akerman's mise-en-scene revokes even that certainty. Her staging of passion
hovers between deflated drama and spiraling choreography.
Akerman refuses explanation, and her use of real time is, among other
things, a strategy for countering the intensity of meaning that her little
scenarios invoke. At the same time, her long takes, displaying actions
ranging from impatience to inertia, allow the space surrounding the performers
to register. This space is never vapid; it is full of descriptive clues
that place the characters socially. What is avoided on a narrative level is
subtly smuggled in through a realistic visual texture. Each of the film's
fragments is charged with an entire narrative of placement: where a character
comes from, his or her cultural and economic background. All this is
grafted into a one-minute or thirty-second scene, an episode that may
never reappear. The rhythm of the action, the timing of the editing, may
rupture the familiar styles of mise-en-scene, but Akerman doesn't tamper
with the reality of the setting.
Most of the many characters who parade through the film are seen once;
others reappear, drafting a provisional ending to their story in the morning.
These recurrences are supposed to negotiate the contrasting rhythms
The Rhythm of Cliche 181
Strangers meet and dance with each other in Toute une nuit (1982). Frame enlargement,
print courtesy of World Artists Release.
of impulsive nighttime romance and daybreak. The ever-suspended resolution
asserting its demand, the characters' reappearances carry the burden
ofa need for closure. But the tempo of a given character's second scene
isn't significantly different from that of the first. Defining these second
scenes as closures are their new spurts ofromantic energy, which have the
circular quality of a movement of return. A couple embrace desperately
after rain, the wife returns to her snoring husband, another wife leaves her
lover in a motel lobby.
Akerman's documentary on Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Tanztheater, One
Day Pina Asked Me-made in 1983, one year after Toute une nuit-displays
Akerman's take on the peculiar rhythm of passion and drama. Akerman's
affinity with Bausch is limited. Both use compression, elision, and
repetition to comment on the cliched rhetoric of desire, but they part ways
in Akerman's resolute antiromanticism. Akerman dries out the spectacular
from Bausch's choreography with a single perverse stroke: she has the
dancers repeat some of the moves in the Tanztheater's deconstruction of
melodrama, but without music and against the neutral background of a restricted
backstage area. Punctuating the film's recording of rehearsals, interviews,
and shows, these brief scenarios of passion as power starkly disclose
the nature of the seductiveness in Bausch's choreography. Without
their tangos and other romantic scores, these mechanically repeated gestures
of violence, fear, and desire are drained of their transcendental lure.
182 Nothing Happens
In this sense, Toute une nuit's last scene offers the perfect closure to
Akerman's proposal of a "dry" musical. Aurore Clement (the first recognizable
character in the film) returns; she waits for someone, meets someone
else, and as they dance she repeats a few sentences nonstop in a
monotone: "How hot it is." "I love him passionately." "I tried to resist but
couldn't." The litanylike quality of this discourse and Clement's stylized
dance toward the camera with a male substitute in a narrow corridor allude
to Marguerite Duras's India Song, and to its romantic reliance on
absence. In Duras's film, Delphine Seyrig (central in Akerman's Jeanne
Dieiman, made the same year as India Song) dances with several lovers as
a voice-over dialogue both signals and fills in the blanks in passion. It is
the same disjunction as in Toute une nuit: the dance with someone else
and the impossible dialogue that verges on pure text. An excess of discourse
is made a signifier of passion in absentia.
Suddenly, however, this romantic suspension, this temporal and spatial
bracketing, is interrupted. The telephone rings, the music (where does it
come from?) stops, and Clement moves toward the next room. She picks up
the phone; as the man waits, lying on her bed, she focuses on an unheard
voice and rhythmically utters the word "yes" eight times. This is all she
says. The rupture from the early part ofthe scene is radical. In its collapsing
of text and speech, Clement's initial monologue had signaled a kind of
short circuitry of address. As the telephone rings, though, this suggestion
of an impossible or oblique dialogue is bluntly laid aside along with the
corny romantic song. The remnants of romantic modernist transcendality-absence
and ambiguity as signifiers/signifieds par excellence-are
swiftly traded for an alternative positing ofpassion: instead ofa suggestive
(and romantic) suspension, Akerman has Clement say "ouL" The sound
from the street is very loud; laying over it a single syncopated word, Akerman
composes a concretist score that finally moves the night's intensity
into the morning.
Night and Day and Night: The Cycle Revisited
Ten years after Toute une nuit, Akerman returns, very differently, to the
notion of the cycle. Toute une nuit stretches out a single night by bringing
ever more characters to this hot, orgiastic summer dark-to-dawn. But finally,
albeit reluctantly, it concedes to the reappearance of day. In Night
and Day (1991), the characters try to trick time. By refusing to sleep, Julie,
the film's protagonist, rejects the notion ofthe natural cycle. In an attempt
to balance night and day, her desire for her lover Jack and her desire for her
The Rhythm of Cliche 183
Julie and Jack during the day, Guilane Londez and Thomas Langmann in Night and
Day (1991). Still, courtesy ofInternational Film Circuit.
lover Joseph, she lives the bliss of love as a kind of vagueness, a happier
version ofthe liminal state ofanother Julie-the character Akerman herself
plays in Je tu i] e11e. That earlier film's formal liminality and shifterlike
character are somehow given a plot in Night and Day, through Julie's more
obviously existentialist fiction of freedom. This simpler narrative of deterritorialized
desire ends with Julie leaving the apartment she has shared
with Jack, with a purposeful walk-she knows where she is going.
Night and Day tells the story of Julie, Jack, and their perfect love. Coming
from the country to the big city, the two youngsters know no one and
need no one. Spending their days making love, they need no telephone.
They also say they need no child: if they had a child they would need a
telephone, and that, they say, "we do not want." Friends, telephone, kid"only
next year," they decide. "Next year," the start of normality, clearly
marks the end of romance.ll
Mirroring the film's circular narrative, Julie and Jack live in a serpentine
apartment, its rooms connected by a flanking corridor and by a plank
joining the kitchen and the bathroom windows. They can talk across these
doubled framing windows, but they can also easily miss each other as they
look for and follow each other through this meandering space. Julie is
overflowing with passion; at nights, when Jack drives a cab, she starts
184 Nothing Happens
sleeping with Joseph. A voice-over narration explains that it is only because
she has a surplus of love for Jack that she can sleep with another
man. For the sake of narrative symmetry. and also in a reference to a
characterological device that is virtually a cliche of the French New Wave
(in Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Godard's Taus les gar90ns s'appellent Patrick,
etc.), Joseph is a permutation of Jack-he drives Jack's cab during the day,
when Jack is off work.
Similarly, though logic and statistics tell us that Jack could drive his cab
through Paris for a year without ever meeting Julie in the streets, cinematic
coincidence allows Julie to watch Joseph's lonely wanderings from the
cab's window as she betrays him by driving with Jack at night. By the same
token, Jack can see Julie "in a world of her own" but can miss Joseph in a
sight gag-he has bent down to tie his shoelaces. In Taute une nuit, Akerman
shattered the usual unit of the French romantic film-the room; in
Night and Day, Paris, the big city, is reduced to the size of the room, a space
in which the members of a menage atrois keep narrowly missing. Julie and
Jack's sinuous apartment represents the city as an interspaced net, which
separates at the same time as it allows communication. Here, Jack may say
something Joseph has said the night before, giving Julie a sense of a deja
entendu. And dreams and repeated phrases may create a rhythm ofverbal
slips, of almost missed encounters.
In Julie's, Jack's, and Joseph's reasoning, cause and effect obey the same
precarious order as night and day, or Jack and Joseph, do in the film's
structure. The series night-and-day-and-night-and-day-and ... follows
the same perverse lack of hierarchy that informs the protagonists' behavior.
Night and Day reiterates an old concern of Akerman's: how can
balance be maintained within a serial accumulation? How can Julie, in her
sexual elation, strike a poise without tipping the symmetry one way or
another? How can she move from night to day to night without sleepingwithout
reestablishing some form of natural closure?
"Don't fall asleep, Julie, you know what happens to people who fall
asleep," warns Joseph. The warning comes too late. Julie starts to attach
importance to such phrases as "It doesn't matter" or "That's not important."
Her thinking becomes more and more wordy, its rhythm more and
more accelerated, as she tries to explain the rupture in her perfect equilibrium,
making the rupture ofher earlier bliss clear by sheer excess. Night
and Daythematizes the lack ofhierarchy that informs Akerman's seriality,
an excess that in the mid-'80s figures the strongest in her adoption of the
musical and of singing.
The Rhythm of Cliche 185
So Let's Sing: The Eighties and Window Shopping
Akerman's interest in multiplicity-of performers, scenes, and textures
(video and film)-can be seen as a flirtation with the aesthetics of juxtaposition.
The courting of serial variation present in Toute une nl/it appears
more clearly in her experimental musical The EightiesY In an early script
for the film, then entitled "La Calerie," Akerman states her intent: "While
leaning on 'sociologically precise' facts we have not hesitated to push
situations toward the melodrama-to use old vaudeville procedures such
as recognitions, pursuits, confusing quarrels, quid pro quos ... but we are
also intent in tearing away the cliche.""3 Akerman has stated that The
Eighties is "like a work in progress. It begins with an audition for a musical
I want to make. Then the last fifteen minutes are a sort of dummy run with
songs, routines, etc., to give the producer some idea of what the real film
would be like.... as I have never worked in that area [musical] before, I
made The Eighties as a sort of pilot, to prove I was capable of it."14 The
Eighties, about people who work in neighboring shops in a fashion mall,
parades a dizzying number of disjunctive strategies under the guise of
transferring a casting rehearsal from video to film. At the film's end. an
intertitle introduces "The Project." A scene recorded in film is a version of
the movie musical's grand finale, when all mingle in dance and song. The
Eighties starts with a black screen and two distinct voices: First, a woman
repeats the phrase, "At your age, grief soon wears off." Then Akerman's
voice corrects the actress's intonations, a sequence that works as an expose
of the subtleties of performance. Other dialogues follow, with Akerman
serving as coach, both feeding the performers their lines and playing the
interlocutor. Four or five sequences of banal dialogue are heard: "Robert,
Robert darling, I've lost him." "She's the one he loved." "I knew but I
hoped, I love him, I love him so.... Now it's all over, all is over, no one
will love me." Each of these lines will be repeated by one or more performers
at different points in the film. Next, Akerman's voice is superimposed
on and seems to control a series of vignettes in which either a
woman or a man leans on a wall and waits: "You wait, with an ad-like
smile, you see him (her), you smile, he (she) doesn't see you, you look
disappointed. "
The fragmentary structure, spatial distribution, and dialogue quality of
The Eighties recalls the "world of interiors" ofthe soap opera.IS For Robert
Allen, the soap's "paradigmatic complexity" activates "a reservoir of relational
possibilities" in a "world represented as an aggregate of atomistic
186 Nothing Happens
interiors."'6 Soaps focus the viewer's attention "almost exclusively on
facial expression and figure relationship."17 No one character "can be singled
out as the motor of the narrative."18 The format has a high degree of
redundancy, in that the same piece of news is often voiced by several
different characters in several different episodes. What matters is not the
knowledge that, say, Lucy is pregnant but the way different characters
react to this information.'9 All these qualities appear in The Eightiesredundancy,
for example, when cliched remarks are repeatedly voiced by
different performers.
The film seems to mock the desire for plot that its charged exchanges
elicit. The soap opera's constant interruption by and multiplication of
subplots are here shaped as a performative instability, a narrative overflow
created through a minimum of text. Hearing these repeated spoken fragments,
we wait to see a perfect match between them and a body or voice.
The film engages us, then, in what we assume is Akerman's work in the
film-the casting and directing of performances. The notion of a natural,
organic relation between performers and text is on constant trial in The
Eighties; we often experience it as "almost" successful, yet the excess of
these performance permutations places them beyond a reflexive function.
The performances modulate the cliched exchanges in a sort of test oftheir
banality range.
The Eighties presents the soap opera's melodramatic energy in its skeletal
form: dialogues and microscenes are suffused with melodramatic
promise, but the promise is unfulfilled. One has no clue who the "he" or
"she" is in a scrap of dialogue, not to mention the "he" or "she" who
speaks it. The transient linkage between person and utterance blocks the
hint of plot that a dialogue may suggest; along with their dialogue bits,
performers and characters float above narrative causality and dramatic
effect. The dissemination of this procedure across the entire film intensifies
the unsettling function of the pronominal shifters-the ''I's'' and
"you's" that continuously address each other.
The question remains: Why would anyone care who the characters are
who would speak such dialogue? Three years later, Akerman answered
that question with Window Shopping, a film in which the banality of a
love story's twists and turns is delivered alongside the singing and dancing
of the musical format, in a mix of music and the mundane like that
found in Jacques Demy's films. Window Shopping tells the story ofJeanne
(Delphine Seyrig) and her encounter, after 30 years, with her first love, an
American she had met during the war. It also tells ofMado, who is in love
with Robert, jeanne's son, who is in love with Lili, Mado's boss in the hair
The Rhythm of Cliche 187
Delphine Seyrig sings in Window Shopping (1986). Still, courtesy of World Artists
Release.
salon that stands in front of the clothes shop owned by Robert's family in
the fashion mall, Lili goes out with Robert but is supported by M. Jean.
And it tells ofAurore (Clement), who serves juice and coffee at a counter in
the middle of the mall and who gets letters from her lover, who works in
Canada to make money for them both.
All that is said in the film is at one point or another also sung. Window
Shopping presents what Demy hid when he overdubbed Seyrig as the
Lilac Fairy in Donkey Skin: Seyrig's faltering singing. Window Shopping
finally "makes sense" of the exchanges made ambiguous in The Eighties:
they reappear here as talks between Lili and her lover M. Jean, who pays
the bills; or between Lili and her former boyfriend, Robert, across a fittingroom
curtain. "At your age grief soon wears off," the unplaced phrase that
opens The Eighties, is here spoken by Jeanne when Mado, wearing a wedding
dress, discovers that Robert, soon to be her husband, still loves Lili. In
Window Shopping's sole venture outside the claustrophobic enclosure of
cliches that is the mall, the film's sole breath ofair, Robert's father, Jeanne,
and Mado stroll together out in the street, the older couple consoling the
younger woman. This man of commerce equates love and fashion: availability,
fit, and the desire for a certain style explains the lover's fickleness,
188 Nothing Happens
as well as the right time for mating. This is what guarantees that Mado will
find someone else to love: "After all," says the father, "did you ever see
anyone naked on the streets?"
Ifthis cardboard philosophy perfectly caps the vacuity of Window Shopping's
tale, we still have to account for Akerman's desire to tell this story
twice, to base two films on the same set ofcharacters and texts. Clearly, her
desire to make a musical has stretched across two films with very different
aesthetics. (The very existence of The Eighties attests to her determination
to work with this soap-opera material; she had difficulty raising the money
for the project.) To "repeat" the same story in two separate works-the
rough, fragmented The Eighties (the "draft") and the polished Window
Shopping (the "final product")-isn't really evidence of a desire to comment
on the myths of authenticity in the musical.20 The ambition of these
films, with their melange of surface textures, is something other than antiillusionist:
what matters is that the full weight of banality be reexperienced
through the cliche-that banality recover its repetitive intensity, or
that it display its claustrophobic design.
The texture of Window Shopping is relatively unfractured by comparison
to the juxtaposition of video and film, rehearsal and finished scenes,
and dialogues and songs in The Eighties. Modeled on the musical, with its
eruption of song and dance amid narrative, Window Shopping is initially
baffling as an Akerman product.21 Perhaps it can be seen as the culmination
ofher desire to incorporate the gaiety and intensity of music in film. If
the work is unsuccessful, it may be because the choice of the musical
format is deemed sufficient in itself to create intensity. And yet, in looking
at how Window Shopping fails to attain the spontaneity and freedom of
the musical, one misses how this fashion-mall gossip chamber formally
matches its stale suffocation with the thematics of stasis that is so central
to Akerman. The strict conformity to the idea of a musical reveals, in the
film's overall texture, the very opposite of the vivacity of the genre. The
film's claustrophobic setting and narrative platitudes are coated with a
smothering polish that deadens both narrative and song and dance. And
this polish can be understood within Akerman's particular form of distanciation-that
of hyperrealist layering.
The Eighties's fragments, on the other hand, at first apparently part of a
reflexive thrust in cinema, also work to intensify the melodramatic affect
of the love song or soap-opera dialogue. The Eighties defeats the idea of an
original source through its dizzying parade of exchanges (not for a single
moment does a performer coalesce as a character). Moreover, this mise-enabIme
set in motion by the film's performatic instability is pervaded by
The Rhythm of Cliche 189
dialogue cliches. The Eighties thus poses a question at the core of postmodernist
aesthetics: Is the film stating the impossibility of difference or,
cumulatively, through a putative emerging differance, stating the force of
the cliche? By embracing postmodernist aesthetics, The Eighties breaks
Akerman's delicate balance between the voiding principle of the series
(where any single exchange or shot equals any other) and the cumulative
movement ofserial accumulation in both the form and the content ofevery
scene and shot in. for instance, Toute une nuit and News from Home. In
contrast to these earlier films, The Eighties's fragments are truly centerless.
Their scattered quality appears both in the film's structure-its rapid
editing-and within its shifterlike scenes and characters.
The Eighties's rejection oflinearity and its absorption ofmass-media elements
attest to a postmodern digestive system that radically abstracts the
musical and the soap opera, releasing their intensity in a sort ofspewed-up
narrative mass. The film's fragmentary structure keeps its pop elementsthe
musical's song, the soap opera's dialogue-intact. It feeds off their
energy. The very suspension of a given bit of dialogue'S narrative consequence
turns it into a reverberant unit akin to the interrupted scenes in
Toute une nuit. These narrative bits parallel the songs that punctuate both
films.
That Akerman is drawn to popular, even schmaltzy elements is evident
in her use of her performers as chansonniers. In One Day Pina Asked Me,
Akerman enjoys a song by Cole Porter twice: first, she asks a performer in
his dressing room to tell the story of his number, a silent-language version
of "The Man I Love." Then we see the number in Bausch's presentation
onstage, as he lip-syncs and gestures to a recorded female voice. In The
Eighties we hear a blond actress sing "La Complainte de la serveuse automatique,"
a dark woman sing Edith Piaf's "Les Mots d'amour," an Arabiclooking
man sing a love song in Arabic, and another actress sing Marlene
Dietrich's main song from The Blue Angel. Most songs are sung in their
entirety, and the quality of the performance matters less than the feeling
put into the singing.
Akerman's grafting of spectacle onto dailiness through song follows the
French tradition rather than the American. The expansion of realism into
fantasy is certainly part of the entertainment-as-utopia motor of the American
musical,22 but it has a forcefully different function in the French
context. French modern films check the dryness of their antinaturalism
with a nostalgia for the emotional affect of singing. From Rene Clair to Jean
Renoir (Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir), from Jean-Luc Godard to Demy
and Akerman, French filmmakers let singing revise the verbal track, chan-
190 Nothing Happens
The Rhythm of Cliche 191
neling the wordiness of the French language into an emotive rhythmic
force. 23 As early as Meetings with Anna. for instance, Akerman's dialoguequa-monologues
stretch toward a singsong expressivity.
In The Eighties, Akerman herself sings in the studio, the song echoing
mechanically from the sound-mixer's space, reproducing her detailed but
hammy performance. When she apologizes to the mixer for an off-key
moment-"Je me suis debordee 1ft" (I went off the track there)-the lyrics
here are Akerman's, and the words are from a letter supposedly sent from
Canada by Aurore's lover. It is also at this moment that one notes the
particular emphasis, acted out or natural, on schmaltz as an expression
of that which transcends any formal concern. The words of this letter
unequivocally state the incommensurable dimensions of love. But Akerman's
lit-up face and broad gestures are also excessive. Disproportion
often takes a musical shape in her films, and music and singing are often
meant to disrupt an all-too-elegant cinematic design, Akerman's brush
with the musical runs deeper than a momentary reach for a different,
lighter mode: paradigmatically abstracted in The Eighties or frozen in a
caricature of spontaneity in Window Shopping, the musical is for Akerman
the cheerful form of a basic perversion, an overflowing of affect present
in all of the filmmaker's work.
As Aurore sings her second love letter to her customers, she distractedly
repeats a work gesture: as her right hand holds the letter, she dips an ice
cream scoop energetically from one container to the next with her left. She
manages to serve a few people, and even to sing the entire letter, as she
moves carefully between two lines of customers swinging to the melody.
Yet I associate Aurore's peculiar, displaced gesture-of work sliding into
mess-with Akerman, It's true that this kind of distraction at the moment
of singing appears often in musicals; I think of Ann-Margret efficiently
preparing sandwiches as she sings and dances in Viva Las Vegas. But in
Akerman's work the combination of divergent movements is not a display
of physical coordination or part of a spectacle, Rather, as in traditional
American musicals, it signals an intensity of feeling that makes prioritization
impossible,
Chantal Akerman sings her lyrics out of tune in The Eighties (1983). Still, courtesy
of World Artists Release.
Aurore sings and serves ice cream, Aurore Clement in The Eighties (1983). Still,
courtesy of Collection ofthe Cinemateque Quebecoise.
The duet, Maria de Medeiros and Pascale Salkin in rai faim, j'ai froid (1984). Still,
courtesy of the British Film Institute Stills, Posters and Designs.
192 Nothing Happens
"So let's sing," says the "J'ai froid" character to the "J'ai faim" one in rai
faim, j'ai froid (I'm hungry, I'm cold, 1984). Singing, they have decided, is
the only thing they can do besides "sewing, counting, reading, and writing."
"I love singing but I sing out oftune," says one, and "I sing in key but
I raise my voice when I sing," says the other. rai faim, j'ai froid is Akerman's
episode in Paris vue par: Vingt ans apres (Paris Seen: Twenty
Years Later) an omnibus film that repeats the formula of focusing on Paris
present in the New Wave film Paris vue par. .. (Six in Paris) from
1965. Twelve minutes long, Akerman's section portrays two young Belgian
women visiting Paris for the first time. They move and pause, one always
slightly behind, as if in an opera duet. They look to the front as they talk,
and a refrain punctuates their stroll through the streets ofParis: "rai faim,"
says one, "rai froid," says the other. Sometimes the second one answers,
"Moi aussi" (Me too). Moving fast, they contradict themselves just as fast:
"I feel like falling in love," says one, "Me too," says the other, but when,
soon after, two young men approach them, they slap the men's faces. They
show each other how their boyfriends used to kiss, and why it didn't work:
"Ouch," says one after a demonstration kiss, "it hurts." One of them goes
to bed with a man they have just met at a restaurant, as the other, always
hungry, voraciously gobbles some barely cooked eggs. A scream is heard,
and as the famished character rushes to see what has happened, her friend
leaves the bed, saying "Now it's done." After this rite ofinitiation the film
ends, with both characters walking down the street, their backs to us.
But this droll comedy of decision really climaxes in the scene right
before the sex: hungry, and having just discussed their limited ability to
work, they look for a way out. Deciding to sing for money they join their
voices in a shrill chant to the startled customers in a restaurant. Their
singing interrupts the film's call-and-response format, its repetitions, and
its symmetry, creating, amidst the witty dialogue and formal precision, an
oasis of chaos.
Echoes from the East: Histoires D'Amerique and D'Est
Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? piping is our people's daily speech. only
many a one pipes his whole life and does not know it. where here piping is set free
from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly
should not want to do without these performances.-Franz Kafka. "Josephine the
Singer, or the Mouse Folk," 1924
We have seen Akerman's special sensitivity to the expressive possibilities
of popular songs and singsong dialogue. Exploring language at the border
The Rhythm ofCliche 193
of its referential power, she wants her verbal tracks to end up "as a bla, bla,
bla, as psalmody."24 Akerman's comparison of her antinaturalistic use of
text-her flat, monotone dialogues, her songs-to the liturgical practice of
psalmody betrays her recognition of the shared ground between her modernist
sensibility and her Jewish identity.
On a tour of California in January 1933, the German modernist choreographer
Mary Wigman,25 provided a clear image for the religious-cultural
nexus ofJudaism and modernism that informs Akerman's work when she
described the quality of her Jewish performers:
Do you remember the Dybbuk? How the Chassidim first discuss the
matters of everyday life-the petty business of the village? Then subtly
how their voices change? In a crescendo they rise to argue about
the Talmud. Now the voices carry quite another musical sound. The
crescendo expands once again-oh so delicately, suavely, imperceptibly-into
an ecstasy of prayer which becomes the song and finally the
dance.26
Ascribing the dancers' creative rhythm to an "ecstasy of prayer," to their
tapping of "snatches of Jewish folk melodies" that they "build dances
upon" and "use the chant for accompaniment,"27 Wigman anticipates not
only the basis but the direction of Akerman's style and thematics. The
switch from daily life into chant, from content into rhythm, corresponds to
the "deterritorialization" of meaning that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
discuss in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, a book Akerman has
said explains the nature ofher own cinema. In Kafka, according to Deleuze
and Guattari, "The sound or the word ... no longer belongs to a language
of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or
song, even though it might appear to be."2B This "line of escape from
sense" relates to Akerman's own alogical use of language: like Kafka and
Samuel Beckett, she pursues a "willed poverty," transmuting content
into rhythm the way children repeat "a word, the sense of which is only
vaguely felt in order to make it vibrate around itself. "29
Deleuze and Guattari trace the dry, concrete quality of Kafka's writing to
the novelist's perception that Prague German, a language with a "withered
vocabulary and an incorrect syntax," could be pushed to "a new expressivity"
and "new intensity" precisely because of its poverty and inflexibility.3D
They also discuss Prague German in relation to other nomadic
language conditions such as those of Yiddish. Kafka and Akerman are
modernist artists with an acute sense of their Jewish heritage. One could
find similarities between Akerman's minimalism and Kafka's asymbolic
style, but Deleuze and Guattari's brilliant analysis of Kafka fulfills itself
194 Nothing Happens
mainly as a warning: is it possible to make a film that is charged with social
and cultural echoes of its cultural and ethnic (modernist and Jewish) history,
and yet that avoids projecting a stable, recognizable identity? Akerman's
effort to avoid reterritorializing film, to avoid grounding its images
in accepted systems of legibility and in a particular ethnic typicality, is
the issue I want to discuss in relation to Histoires d'Amerique (American
StoriesI[English version entitled Food, Family and Philosophy], 1988), an
ethnic serial portrait, and D'Est (1993), an ethnographic experimental
documentary.
. In 1987, Akerman spoke ofthe idea of a film in which each character
would tell a joke about his or her ethnic group while eating a typical ethnic
dish.31 With significant changes, this project became Histoires d'Amerique.
The film condenses a particular moment in the Jewish journey from
East to West into Akerman's characteristic modular format. In long-take
tableaux, she stages cliched images of Ashkenazi Jews frozen in an initial
moment of secularization: their costumes and stories eclectically refer to
the early period of immigration to America (1890s) and to the pogroms
they escaped.
Meetings with Anna traces a filmmaker's journey in 1978, as Anna
shows her work in Germany and returns to Paris. Similarly, from film to
film within Akerman's own oeuvre, a route is sketched that runs from
Eastern Europe to America. The stops between would include, in Meetings
with Anna, the night of intimate confidences with her mother that Anna
spends in a Brussels hotel; Brussels and Akerman's own Polish mother are
likewise the "origin" of the letters to Akerman in News from Home, a film
about her stay in New York in 1972. The itinerary in Akerman's oeuvre,
populated by people with different accents, exposes a continuous process
ofadaptation, ofnew languages constantly and barely acquired-a process
that is part of Jewish history. Akerman returns to this history as if on a
linear track, an axis having at one of its ends Eastern Europe and Russia
(her ancestral origin, historic and at the same time mythic) and at the other
Ellis Island, the promised land ofimmigrants, New York.
Akerman's structured repetitions in narrative films such as Meetings
with Anna, and in personal documentaries like News from Home and
D'Est, echo the rhythm and affect ofJewish Eastern European tales, songs,
and jokes but radically abstract them. For their whole duration the shots in
these films may provide a concentrated scrutiny of a space, a landscape, a
face, but they abstract these views by passing them through Akerman's
particular form ofminimalist accretion, her cumulative seriality. Histoires
d'Amerique, though, directly presents the ethnic and historical background
for Akerman's litanylike dialogues and minimalist series.
The Rhythm of Cliche 195
Jewish life in the Pale, in the shtetl, and in big urban centers such as
Warsaw and New York during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
fonns the core ofthe stories portrayed in Histoires d'Amerique. Akerman
had actively pursued adapting Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Manor
and the Estate. That she was interested in this epic book, a form quite alien
to her aesthetic, indicates that the novel's content-the story of a Jewish
family in Poland at the turn of the century, and an exploration of the
dilemmas of secularization in Poland and in America-is an important
focus for her. Indeed Akerman has talked of how, in reading the book, she
felt it talked about her and her family.32
The tales, jokes, and songs voiced in Histoires expose their own nature
as quotations; one feels their sources beyond the performers' mouths. Presented
as vignettes, a dark night surrounding the storyteller, the stories
introduce a fourth dimension in Akerman's work: a different kind of time,
a nonlinear temporal beyond, which each presence and storyteller evokes.
In a deliberate distancing process, actors and actresses speak in a recitative
tone. Their archetypal roles-the wandering Jew, the bride, the groom, the
assimilated young man, etc.-weigh heavily in the film's attempt to make
Eastern European Jewish culture breathe. Placed against the hazy background
of the Williamsburg Bridge area, the anecdotes call to mind New
York ghetto short stories such as Abraham Cahan's "The Imported Bridegroom,"
and "The Providential Match." And the fact that the performers
are ofJewish or Eastern European origin, some ofthem having acted in the
old Yiddish theaters of the Lower East Side (George Bartenieff, Judith
Malina, Ezther Balynt, Roy Nathanson), literalizes the displacement ofthe
temporal frame in which this immigration account is set.
Histoires starts with the paradigmatic image of immigrant arrival-an
unsteady view of the Statue of Liberty on the horizon, seen from an approaching
boat. This view reverses the last shot of News from Home,
where a long tracking shot from a departing Staten Island Ferry lets us see
a gradually oscillating Manhattan, in the film's first clearly subjective
use of the camera. News from Home is an essay on the distance between
the Old World and the New. It links and contrasts America and Europe
through a soundtrack that interweaves and overlaps the urban sounds of
Manhattan and the reading of letters from Akerman's mother in Brussels
to Akerman in New York. That the last shot of News from Home reverses
the first image in Histoires acknowledges that Akerman's personal trajectory-from
Belgium to New York-is part of a migrant history. This
characterless subjective long take from the ferry is moving: whereas the
other scenes in News from Home have a fixed, mechanical quality, even
those in which the camera has been propped on a moving car (an effect
196 Nothing Happens
The ferry shot in News from Home (1976). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of
World Artists Release.
that ends up precluding the sense of a subjective gaze), the ferry scene
evokes an adieu.
Histoires seems to invert this adieu, but one should keep in mind the
mirage quality of the reversal. Here as in News from Home, distance is
Akerman's modifier: the Manhattan skyline is presented almost as a mirage,
light blue within blue. That New York doesn't seem to be a concrete
place here-in fact a concrete place is never quite reached-characterizes
this crossing as storytelling; time, not space, is its ground. As we watch
these buildings floating in the frame, we hear, though barely, a whispered
dialogue in Polish and a Jewish song played on a cello. The film is about
memory; tradition is the moral core ofthis remembrance.
In voice-over, Akerman begins a cautionary tale about remembrance:
A rabbi always passed through a village to get to a forest, and there,
at the foot of a tree, and it was always the same tree, he began to pray
and God heard him. His son also passed through the village but he did
not know the tree or the forest, so he prayed under any old tree, and
God heard him. His grandson did not know the tree or the forest, so
he went and prayed in the village, and God heard him. His greatgrandson
did not know where the tree, nor the forest, nor the village
The Rhythm of Cliche 197
were, but he still knew the words ofthe prayer, he prayed ... and God
heard him. His great-great-grandson did not know where the tree, nor
the forest, nor the village were, not even the words of the prayer, but
he still knew the story and he told it to his children and God heard
him.
The tale implies that the Hasid can do without traditional rituals in the
sincerity of his reach for God. It also suggests that it is by repeating and
naming forgotten places and things (the tree, the forest, the village, the
prayer) that one renews one's contact with a religious past. Storytelling,
then, is thematically and formally privileged, and Akerman's own act of
storytelling in the film partakes in this form of surrogate prayer. Once one
cannot literally repeat the ritual, cannot pray under that one tree, to list
what was left behind becomes the next best alternative. In this context,
Akerman's formal strategies of literalness and seriality are submitted as
approaches with clear moral consequences.
Although the film's heavy-handed presentation suggests an overconcern
with identity, Akerman's choice of Jewish jokes reveals interesting parallels
with her own aesthetic methods. One typical Talmudic play on the
interpretive process makes clear her interest in unbalancing signification
by slight nuances in repetition:
What is consistency? Today this way, tomorrow this way.
What is inconsistency? Today this way, tomorrow this way.33
A characteristic joke structure in the film involves overinterpretation
when a simpler reading would do. At other times, the motif of someone
outsmarting someone takes the shape of a radical ellipsis:
Hello Teitelbaum! Mendelbaum, drop dead. Why do you answer like
that? I'll tell you. Suppose I answer to you politely. Then you'll ask me
where I'm going. I'll tell you to the baths on Houston street. Then
you'll tell me that the Avenue A steam baths are better and that a man
who prefers Houston steam baths to the Avenue A steam baths must
have a hole in his head. I'll holler that a man who prefers the ... in
Avenue A to the ... in Houston Street must be completely crazy.
Then you'll call me a schmuck. I'll say, "A schmuck?! Drop dead." So
instead of going through all that hoohah I say "Drop dead" and that
ends it. Goodbye.
Ihave discussed how Akerman's works hover between detailed record (absolute
literalness) and abrupt ellipsis. The joke here depends on an over-
198 Nothing Happens
zealously reported speech. At the same time, the crucial bone of contention-the
steam baths-is made obtrusively redundant, formally voiding
the issue of difference: when Teitelbaum comes to the repetitions of the
words "steam bath," he reduces the very difference in question to a sonorous
beat.
Perhaps the key to what makes this the material of an Akerman film lies
in the concluding story. Sitting on a stool, an old man tells the following
anecdote:
One day, in Moscow or Warsaw as you like, there's a man waiting on
line in front of a butcher. He waits there, for hours. When his turn
comes up he asks the butcher: I'd like to have a filet of beef. The
butcher looks at him stupefied and says, no, we don't have that. Well
then, I'd like the lamb cutlets. The butcher looks at him more and
more shocked: we don't have lamb cutlets. Well then, veal cutlets. No,
certainly not, we don't have veal cutlets. Maybe veal roast? But mister,
why don't you ask me for something we do have? OK: give me simply
the breast of duck. There isn't any. And the man leaves. The butcher
says, "What a fool. But how he remembers!"
Like so many ofAkerman's monologues, this mundane encounter involves
a long list. The joke operates within Akerman's characteristic absurd nominalism:
her resistance to abbreviation, and to the logical subsumption of
alternatives within an encompassing category, appears here in the customer's
inability simply to ask what kind of meat is available. The butcher's
final remark explicitly recognizes the contest between two overlapping
yet mutually exclusive systems of thought. To memorize and recite a list
shows a lack of adaptability, but the very feat ofremembering is somehow
impressive. In a scholarly culture like that of the Jews, the process of
remembering is of capital importance. As in a religious chant, each element
or event needs to be remembered and named. Yet this very remembrance
makes one blind to changes under one's very nose.
The question Akerman asks in this joke seems to be the same one that
moved her to make a film on Jewish identity: presenting listing as a form of
ritual in the face of change, she is staging the passage from traditional to
secular existence. The question to be. asked of Histoires is how burdened
the representation becomes once Akerman's filial, ethnic, and religious
obligations come to the fore. "My story," says Akerman at the end of the
rabbi's tale ofpraying under the tree, "is full ofholes, and I don't even have
a kid." Several of the stories in Histoires recount the guilt of leaving reli[!ion
and tradition hHhind. RHDHatinQ" familiar iokHs bHcomHs AkHrman's
The Rhythm ofCliche 199
own ritualistic gesture-a form of surrogate childbearing, of maintaining
tradition.34
Staging Akerman's familiarity with Jewish culture, Histoires reproduces
identity too faithfully to leave any space for the sense ofestrangement that,
in oblique ways, commands her filmic vision of the two main poles of her
journey: the Poland, East Germany, and Moscow recorded in D'Est, and the
personal, singular New York shown in News from Home. Within the EastWest
axis ofAkerman's voyage, these films are related beyond their similar
hypnotic rhythm and ethnographic quality. They explore new territory
and, displaying the best qualities ofthe ethnographic sensibility, create an
unfamiliar image.
D'Est is one of the results of a project for a multimedia installation
focusing on the coming together of the European community.35 While
"Akerman was immediately attracted to the project ... she proposed to
look at what was left out ofthis union as well, and at the concomitant rise
of nationalism and anti-Semitism."36 Kathy Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins
point out Akerman's prescience in suggesting these themes before the fall
ofthe Berlin Wall and the dissolution ofthe Soviet Union.37 More than any
ofAkerman's essayistic documentaries, D'Est raises issues concerning the
role of ethnographic film, questioning the subjective imprint of a gaze on
images ofa distant or threatened reality.38 A formally stringent work, D'Est
uses fixed shots or long tracking shots "to make a big trip across East
Europe while there is still time." Her declared interest was to "film ...
all these countries that lived a common history after the war, that are
marked by this history in the very folds ofthe earth, and whose roads now
diverge."39
As other statements of Akerman's reveal, she was also quite aware of a
parallel image track she was tapping into. Her journey through today's
Eastern Europe doesn't document the region as such, though documentation
is one of the film's effects. Her referent is clear: "Our imaginary is
charged with East Europe. At each face I felt a history ... the camps,
Stalin, denunciation." As in a "primitive scene," she notes that "it is
always the same thing that reveals itself": "old images" "barely covered by
lighter and even radiant images," images of"evacuation, ofmarches in the
snow with packages toward an unknown place, faces and bodies placed
one besides the other." "The film," says Akerman, "will let one perceive
something ofthis disoriented world, with that impression ofa postwar era
in which each lived day seems like a victory."40
A ritual in the form ofa catalogue, the film, which took off only in 1992,
can be said to have been" 'written' in the aftermath ofimpressions, memo-
200 Nothing Happens
ries and emotions Akerman brought back from a journey she had taken [in
1990] to prepare for a film about the poet Anna Akhmatova."41 And it is the
poet's "Requiem: 1935-1940," that colors the film's implicit historicity:
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months
waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in
the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips
blue from the cold, who had, ofcourse, never heard me called by name
before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked
me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): "Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can." Then something like a smile passed fleetingly
what had once been her face.42
Akhmatova's "this" is somehow included within Akerman's description,
the filmmaker's "this" of a '90s East also undergoing historical and political
change. About this change there are no explicit questions asked. But
Akerman does ask, through her pointed process of layering, what kind of
movement, or better what kind of paralysis, informs this landscape's wintery
rhythms.
Starting with the end of summer in East Germany, D'Est moves across
fields, roads, and interiors to end, abruptly, in deep Moscow winter. A
sound film without speakers or voice-over, D'Est puts the burden of providing
information on images, music, and diegetic sound. Where one is,
who these people are, remain to varying degrees opaque. When Akerman
shows people in lines or crowds, she limits their identities to the cinematic
index they produce-their unique humanlike traits, shaped by light
and shadow. When she enters someone's apartment, she records the inhabitant's
absorptionin an everyday task or pleasure-cutting salami, playing
records or the piano-as in genre painting. This circumstantial, not necessarily
typical moment is all that will link that woman or man to a certain
social function. Elsewhere Akerman provides more conventional portraits:
the person poses as if for a photograph, sitting by a table, a TV, or a
kitchen sink.
Akerman also uses exterior shots to suggest the particulars of social
place. A group walks down an icy road; one wonders where they are going.
People wait outdoors for a bus, all ofthem wrapped in similar fur hats and
overcoats; through slow tracking shots, with the camera mounted on a zil,
a bureaucrat's heavy car, Akerman momentarily dispels their uniformity,
probing their faces as the very index of a resistance to anonymity. D'Est
critiques the Western perception of Eastern Europe's supposedly homogenous
mass societies. To discover signs ofdifference among the members of
The Rhythm ofCliche 201
Women pick potatoes and face the camera in D'Est (1993). Still, courtesy of Walker
Art Center, from the exhibit, Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est,
June IS-August 27, 1995.
a sociopolitical system with a more restricted consumer grid becomes an
exercise as arduous as finding a difference among the fields and roads that
most of the film shows covered by snow. Akerman wrote during shooting,
"] will show faces that ... express something still untouched and often
the opposite ofthat uniformity that at times strikes you in the movement of
crowds.... Without romanticizing, I would say these are countenances
that are not ruined; that offer and give themselves as they are, and erase,
for an instant, the feeling of loss, ofa world at the edge ofan abyss, a feeling
that grabs you when you cross the East, as I just did."43
The pace of D'Est's images is entrancing, and disallows an easy or superficial
recognition. Though the spectator is curious about the inhabitants of
these rural and urban landscapes, no sequence of shots receives an establishing
frame. As in News from Home, the rhythm ofthe shots and tracking
movements is answered, from within the image, as people gaze at the
camera. In a field, Akerman boldly places the camera facing some women
picking potatoes and gradually moving toward the camera. The camera's
presence is felt; the women's furtive glances as they continue with their
work designates its gaze, and ours, as the foreigner'S. Our foreigner's curi-
202 Nothing Happens
osity recalls other invasive gazes-that of the ethnographer, say, or the
photographer, or the journalist. It is not a touristic curiosity, though, for
the result of its scrutiny is a very specific encounter. A moment of mutual
curiosity is registered. In the train station the camera seems to follow a
paraplegic; after he disappears in the throng, the camera turns in successive
360-degree pans to record a human movement that is itself entrancing
in its rapidly changing design and focus of interest.
Moving east, progressively recording a snowclad landscape, D'Est more
than any of Akerman's films is a series with no telos. The final shot, of an
empty train station, is abrupt but creates no closure. As in News from
Home, its tension is the tension between the camera's mechanical gaze and
the human passersby it catches. But in D'Est the landscape itself has a
significance that is absent from the New York images in News from Home.
The facts of Eastern Europe's shifting geography were too fresh at the
moment of the film's making for this history not to register as History, and
for the film not to refer one back to other histories. Its underlying motif, in
fact, might be a gaze at the traces ofa history shared by Akerman's parents,
to test the familiarity the filmmaker felt with Eastern Europe's and Russia's
clothes and food when she first traveled there. Her sense of the forced
movement of crowds-her attention to the ways people gather in stations,
or in lines-is testimony to a post-World War II sensitivity.
The real eloquence of this almost silent document, however, lies in its
ways of provoking the spectator to try to distinguish in its varied physiognomies
a landscape and a history that might brush against the grain of an
image of Eastern Europe that has been simplified for Western consumption.
Akerman's ability to let personal histories briefly flash from within
an imagistic mass so pregnant with historical valence attests to the ways
her attention is tuned to difference.
Akerman's long takes have been likened to blocks-distinct, separate
scenes that follow a linear progression, like the compartments of a train.
This structure is even more evident in films that depict some kind of
journey. Typically, Akerman breaks the film into units: train or subway
cars (Meetings with Anna, News from Home), the enactment of jokes or
anecdotes (Histoires d'Amerique), placement in Eastern Germany or Poland
and Russia (D'Est). She constructs a cinematic correlate ofgeography,
a geography that moves in time just as it has moved with history. This
geography is traversed by a personal and political history, alternate energies
that resist the track of a linear progression. In D'Est, for example,
this resistance reverberates against the limits of the contemporary myth
of Eastern Europe. Akerman's personal ethnography is split between the
The Rhythm of Cliche 203
present that it records-the surprising interest of each person and faceand
this other image, a cliche of our post-Holocaust sensibility. To these
echoes from the East Akerman responds with small-scale moments of individuation,
ripples of sound. After a woman's moving performance of a
cello solo, one is moved further by the audience's appreciation: first a
woman, then a man, and then yet another man approach the stage to hand
the musician a bouquet of roses.
Akerman's personal history-that of a filmmaker and European Jew
looking out to New York as well as back to Eastern Europe-is dramatized
in some of her films as a gliding gaze that encounters and checks the
cliches of history. Heinrich's monologue in Meetings with Anna, on what
happened to him after the war, exemplifies Akerman's way of telegraphing
history and a post-Holocaust consciousness: Anna's semiattention to
Heinrich's speech displaces onto the audience the demand that the spectator
share his knowledge. In D'Est, which has no recourse to fiction, it is the
filmmaker's own glance that mediates the cliche (an image known before it
is seen) and creates the possibility of seeing something else. Akerman
avoids constructing her images as time stopped. Unlike most ethnographic
film, her images are not part of the kind of rescue project that justifies the
filmmaker's presence as the righteous recorder of a threatened reality. Although
Akerman has said that in making D'Est she was moved by the sense
of rapid social change, the film that resulted does not freeze any reality as
myth. Rather, D'Est both acknowledges the mythical pull of history and
persists, in a minor key, to construct alternate images.
TO CONCLUDE
It Is Time
Sloth: Portrait of a Lazy Woman (1986), is Akerman's episode for Seven
Women Seven Sins, an omnibus film of 1988 by a group of women directors.
It addresses the sin of sloth, of playing with time, Akerman's chosen
vice. In its unusual sloppiness, she has said, the film exposes her own
laziness: it feels as if she'd made it easily in a single afternoon. Even more
starkly than her feature work, this bare-bones quality reveals Akerman's
concern with duration.
In "Sloth" the experience of time passing and being wasted, measuring
things left undone, is interpolated by acute compressions. As the episode
starts, Akerman is lying in bed. She looks at the clock and says she'll get up
in a minute; we watch with her as the minute passes by. "To make a
film ... you have to get dressed ... but if you don't get undressed-you
don't have to get dressed. At least that's a gain!" she says, throwing off the
bed covers to show she's clothed and ready. Laziness, allowing time to slip
by-Akerman compensates for these very quotidian procrastinations by
clever shortcuts: gathering her pills for the day, for example, she saves
time by dropping them all in a glass of water and drinking them at once.
In discussing the distinctive traits and effects of Akerman's minimal!
hyperrealist style, I have often found myself describing a process of inconclusiveness
and ambivalence. In Akerman's work, meaning emerges in
fits and starts, and is often presented under dual, conflicting banners.
Images flicker between the literal and the figurative register; sentences
To Conclude: It Is Time 205
As in Night and Day (1991), she cannot choose either boyfriend in Taute une Nuit
(1981). Frame enlargement, print courtesy of World Artists Release.
waver indeterminately between the loud cliche and the earnest comment.
This aesthetic strategy seems to suggest a purposeful allegory of reading.
The at once of taking the pills is the urgent, assertive image for the lack
of priority that informs both Akerman's formal strategies and the duality of
several of her characters' behavior. In all her films and videos, the cumulative
principle animating the figures at once, both, and and, and, and . ..
works as an active instability undermining the stakes involved in choice.
Irresolvable sequencing and dualistic structuring spill from the films'
form into their content. Night and Day (1991), for example, a film in a light
mode that is so revealing of Akerman's major concerns, suggests hawaII of
her work leans on the notions of an ordered time and a natural cycle only
to pervert them. The film makes a theme of the lack of hierarchy that
informs Akerman's seriality (an excess that in the films of the mid '80s
figures most obviously in her adoption of the musical and of singing).
When Julie, in Night and Day, is offered a choice between tea and coffee,
she asks for both-a logical answer, since she wants both night and day,
both Jack and Joseph.
This idea of all or nothing is quite understandable in the realm of romance.
In other films, however, the logic it provides is rather peculiar.
Akerman's dialogue, for example, often contains two disparate, contradictory
ideas that should contradict and void each other, yet don't. What
206 Nothing Happens
introduces these incongruities is not the kind of suggestion of a subjective
point of view that comes, for example, with a character's voice-over; the
force of Akerman's work lies in quite concrete disparities-when, say,
lines of dialogue are voiced in a row, yet don't quite follow from one
another. When Julie talks to Joseph, she discusses her high heels in the
same breath as her feelings. Each is an equal term in her explanations of
the dangers of falling asleep and of losing her balance.
In Akerman's work, estrangement is often provoked by the formal collapse
of two different registers or orders that are juxtaposed (in her hyperrealism)
or that segue one from the other despite their categorical incompatibility
(in her minimalist seriality). One source of her affinity for
comedy is precisely her performance of a filmic bluff-a smooth surface
over a warped reality, a detailed description where none is needed, an
equation of discordant realities, an indiscrimination among registers and
categories. Language's layered referentiality, the possibility of metalanguage,
is crucial to establishing this at times subtle indistinction. In Meetings
with Anna, Anna and Heinrich are in a city but not in a clearly defined
urban center. Anna asks if they are in the suburbs; when Heinrich says no,
she replies, "Good, I don't like suburbs." Here as in other Akerman films,
language, the reality of naming and of words, is a safeguard against a
concrete aversion.
Examples abound in which language and mise-en-scene displace the
content of an action, sliding a gesture into its opposite. Jeanne Dielman
smoothes her skirt as she stands up to pick up the scissors and kill her
john. In The Eighties, Aurore starts by serving ice cream efficiently but
ends by sticking the ice cream scoop randomly in the containers, in a
distracted simulation of her working gesture. In The Man with the Suitcase,
we hear the sound oftyping, slightly out of sync, as Akerman is about
to start typing herself. Her unwanted guest has started to type ahead ofher.
Akerman's work consistently places deceptively similar realities in apposition
to suggest that they are not quite the same. Or an accretion of
indexical references somehow suggests something not quite then and
there.
These categorical ambiguities often have larger consequences than the
fact that a suburb, for instance, is not really pinned down by the word
"suburb." One of Akerman's '90s films, Le Demenagement (Moving in,
1992), explores this structuring linguistic duality with the alogic of Beckett
(an echo in many ofher scripts): Akerman is writing about the difficulty
of choice. After walking the length and width of his new apartment from
wall to wall-measuring twice, each time with different results-an un-
To Conclude: It Is Time 207
named character (Sammy Frey) tells us about last summer, when his
equally passionate interest in three of his young neighbors resulted in an
impasse: it was impossible for him to choose between each of the particular
delights available to him.
Juliette, Beatrice, Elisabeth-I loved all three with an immense
love.... Elisabeth was from Toulouse, Beatrice was from Toulouse,
Juliette was from Toulouse, and none had a dog. Each had a room.
Elisabeth had a room, Juliette had a room, Beatrice had a room. None
had a dog. There was a strong concentration of Toulousians in an
apartment in Paris.
Then, after describing a photograph he has taken ofJuliette and her father,
he sighs,
After the photo I stlOuld have asked for Juliette's hand. But no, that of
Beatrice was sweeter, and then that day when Elisabeth said to me,
"Apres vous monsieur [After you sir]," it was so mature, she didn't
bow, but ... imagine living every morning in this fantastic politeness-"Apres
vous monsieur." Beatrice I met in the supermarket and
she asked if I didn't notice how the temperature inside and outside
was different. And I agreed. To live all your life with someone with
whom you agree over small things. I compared the"Apres vous monsieur"
with "Don't you think that the temperature inside/outside,
etc.," and I was perplexed. One equaled the other.... the question
became more complex when I met Juliette at the post office. She didn't
say anything but her face was lit.
He punctuates his thoughts about each of the women with other considerations:
"A man passed by in the street ... and he said: "I went to the sea
last week." "What luck you had," replied the other. I did not agree. I
sincerely pitied that man. I thought 'last week' is not 'tomorrow,' and
'tomorrow' is necessarily better than 'last week.''' The story gets more
piquant when the girls sleep over in his room while he politely spends the
night on the living room floor. They decide he needs a new bed, and a
discussion ensues of the mattress, the springs, the frame: but the expected
closure-a sexual or romantic denouement-dissolves. Each woman gets
married, but to someone else, and our hero sadly reminisces, his verbal
and logical conundrums replaying an entire Rohmerian comedy of morals
in monologue form.
The character's fascination with these women is revealed in all its lack
of specificity. By making the women permutations of an ideal, Akerman
208 Nothing Happens
discloses the contours of a male discourse in which interchangeability
spells romance. But more is at stake here than a good-humored twist
on masculine romanticism: the monologues reveal a man torn not only
among three young students of the human sciences but among the dizzying
possibilities of referentiality. At one point he compares the weight of a
description to the value of a saying; he equates two different sorts of platitude,
and because he seems not to question the triteness of either, the
spectator can only agree.
The detached quality of the linguistic references in Le Demenagement,
their seeming at once significant and banal, recalls the cliche and its evocation
of meanings that seem somehow out of place.1 Once a striking and
original figure ofspeech, the cliche has lost its power. The quotation marks
or brackets in which Frey sets Juliette's, Beatrice's, and Elisabeth's gestures
and phrases have the same kind of effect. Emphasizing the impossibility of
choice, he qualifies the women's "baffling" uniqueness; describing the
particularity of their gestures and speech, he voids it. Structurally, each
equals the other. This equivalence not only confuses the identities of the
three women, it leads to a sort of paralysis of signification. The certainty of
the platitude is linked to stasis. Frey explicitly promises stability through
coded behavior and banal phrases: "Imagine being in agreement every day
about the small things in life." Mobilized by Akerman's permutations, the
cliche is fixed in its apparent logical irrefutability.
The juggling of phrases as props suggests a clever argument about the
arbitrariness of reference, but this reflexive game seems somehow alien to
Akerman. In fact Frey's ultimate solitude after so much indecision adds a
tinge of pathos to the notion of playing with signifiers; his confusions
among different referential procedures somehow doom his permutational
logic. Akerman's referential circularity spells loneliness for him. The antihierarchical
structure and thematics of Le Demenagement, so promising
on a deconstructive narrative level, seem to imply a moral: the impossibility
of choosing becomes a burden with very real consequences.
This relative moralism is uncharacteristic of Akerman and needs to be
accounted for. Something similar is found in Night and Day, where Julie,
unable to sustain the equivalence between two lovers, resolutely steps out
into the street, throws her high heels into a garbage can, and walks toward
the camera in a long traveling shot, her smile suggesting a liberation from
the impossible balancing act of her double affair. Julie's decisiveness, her
reoccupation of her split desire, seems to reflect an ultimately healthy
ambition to pursue her route alone; the Frey character's loneliness, on
the other hand, seems deserved, because "caused" by his male logic. In
To Conclude: It Is Time 209
The impossible choice, Sammy
Frey in Le Demenagement
(1992). Still. courtesy of the
Film Society of Lincoln Center.
both cases, however, psychology threatens to take over the narrative's
irresolution-a development alien to the more usual oscillatory movement
of Akerman's aesthetic. That aesthetic has a characteristic pathology: in
Jeanne DieJman and in Je tu iJ e11e, for example, it is through an extended
sympathy with, or a mimicry of, a character's eccentricity that Akerman
redirects the issues from the psychological to the social and collective
realms. How are we to take then, Le Demenagement's distance, the fact that
it finally frames its character's alogic?
Frey's monologues can be seen as a special form of na'ivete, a pose or
mimicry of innocence or simplicity that constitutes a form of irony between
the verbal and the dramatic. Verbal irony is a form of speech in
which one meaning is stated while a different, often antithetical meaning
is intended; dramatic irony is a plot device in which the protagonist behaves
inappropriately or unwisely and the spectators know more than the
protagonist, observing a contrast between what the protagonist understands
about his acts and what the text demonstrates about them.2 Falling
between verbal and dramatic irony, Le Demenagement presents Akerman's
text in a dessicated cinematic shape: could the man's monologue be
as well served onstage? Or as part of a book? Not quite-the weight of
Akerman's writings and dialogue-qua-monologues is, we have seen, intrinsically
related to its performance, to her oblique displacements of the
210 Nothing Happens
agencies of narration. Yet the fact that in Le Demenagement it is the text
that almost single-handedly carries the burden of her categorical oscillations
is crucial.
As Frey sits in a chair, facing the spectator, the camera tracks in on him.
This is the sum of the cinematic devices of Le Demenagement. Made for a
TV series entitled Monologues, the film has a theatrical setting that reduces
the dialogue-qua-monologue strategies of films like Meetings with
Anna and Jeanne Dielman to bare antinaturalistic effects. Le Demenagement
plays mostly with words, and because the arbitrariness of the verbal
sign makes it less malleable than the photographic image, the film seems
to be clearly making a case against the illusions of referentiality. The theatricality
of Frey's frontal confessions is another sign of anti-illusionismyet
this theatricality ultimately becomes the stage for a moral condemnation
of the character. Instead of arguing for the arbitrariness of signs,
the mise-en-scene of Frey's solitude creates a strangely naturalizing twist.
Given the ambivalence ofthe film's scene, we wonder whether this gesture
toward reflexivity is another bluff, anothe~ tactical maneuver from a filmmaker
who often plays by simulation. But the character's naive confusion
of the three women fits in with Akerman's habitual desire for referential
instability and is finally unco-optable by her knowing authorial nod here.
One can suggest, in fact that even in Akerman's most coherent simulations
Ueanne Dielman, Je tu il ellel, the consistency between the films' cinematic
structures and their characters' pathologies at some point breaks
down and shows as fissure. Conversely, one can add that it is Akerman's
formal liminality-her delay in framing eccentricity, in distinguishing
subject from object, texture from theme-that allows for the greatest gains
in active spectatorship. The issue for Akerman, as for other filmmakers
after Godard, remains that of the reflexive strength of mimicry. Is her
double-layered mimesis a particular form of reflexivity, or are we moving
into a different representational dimension? The most conspicuous trait of
Akerman's aesthetic is the categorical blur it promotes. Her antihierarchical
effects depend on a perverse notion ofthe copy, one that even ventures
into making actual references. These effects are also, and significantly,
contingent on a slowing down of tempo, a different perceptual temporality,
and an acute detour from the open-endedness common in European art
films ofthe '60s.
Akerman's repeated references to the figure of humming are illuminating
in regard to her characteristic lack of hierarchy in structure and texture.
In Saute ma ville, the character played by Akerman energetically, and
almost vengefully, hums a lively Bach-like tune while combining oppos-
To Conclude: It Is Time 211
ing activities in single gestures: she cleans and dirties the kitchen floor,
shines her shoes and brushes her legs black with shoe polish, before finally
blowing herself up. Akerman has talked about seeing a women's
demonstration in which the demonstrators, instead of screaming and raising
their fists, joined in a hum. For Akerman, this alternative language
opened a possibility ofsaying something different. and ofasserting gender
as difference. Describing the making of D'Est, she has said that the only
way to film that reality was to proceed by a form of stuttering, a slow,
hesitant approach. Her repeated references to detours from content-based
communication define her form of expressivity as straddling the logic of
order and the intensity of chaos or formlessness.
Discussing what he calls Akerman's "impossible melodrama," Eric de
Kuyper asks, "Should one consider boredom a passion?" His answer
makes clear the nature of Akerman's neither nor aesthetic: the irresolvable
sequence of her images suggests "not a chaotic, undecisive, gasping discourse,
but quite on the contrary a rnelopee fa long recitative chant], a slow
and diffuse boredom, a white neutrality.":1 This choice of diffuse sameness
perfectly describes the droning and humming in Akerman's films, the oscillating
machinery of her aesthetic. That from this background of continuous,
purposeful indeterminacy she can create sudden pockets of drama,
or a perceptual difference, attests to the relative patience. as well as the
perversity, of her particular branch of duration.
In Saute rna Ville, Akerman's humming is in ironic concert with a frenzy
of action that cannot distinguish order from chaos. Yet the songs she uses
aren't amorphous; they are well-known, and they bring with them the
layered dimension oftheir popularity. When a song's lyrics are heard in an
Akerman film, it is always a corny love song, or else a classical musical
cliche, like the "Fur Elise" heard over the radio in Jeanne Dielrnan.4 Even
the films' cheerful original songs, with lyrics by Akerman, appeal to what
Theodor Adorno disparagingly called the "emotional listener."S Akerman's
songs are the lighter side of a darker, more powerful drive. Conjured
up against the dread of stasis that haunts the films, these musical cliches
(like the platitudes in Meetings with Anna) draw their energy from the
many times they have been and will be hummed. Their rhythmic quality
and their history reflect Akerman's interest in repetition. One might say, in
fact, that she vanquishes sameness and repetition (boredom in Akerman's
work being a clear correlate of the death drive) by speeding up and rhythmically
modulating repetitive elements.
While the underlying sense pervading Akerman's films is one ofcyclical
homeostasis, her defiance of telos and oflogical certainty is radical and at
212 Nothing Happens
times clearly upbeat. We need, then, to find whatever does not quite repeat
in her repetitions. Akerman is drawn to those strategies and elements that
halt and defer. Extended duration and cliches are blockers of meaning;
they promote a different form of sensibility, one tuned to the very corporeality
of filmic language. This corporeal dimension lies in the spectator's
share in the image's duration, or in his or her exfoliation of the
cliche's semantic history. If logical meaning is corroded, other meanings
subsist in layered or hybrid forms-in hyperrealist images, in singing and
humming, in pregnant images or cliches. These forms suggest a dense
stratification, but its strata resist hierarchical determination. In Akerman's
films meaning is nomadic.
In a strategy akin to that of experimental filmmakers, Leslie Thornton
(in her cycle Peggy and Fred in Hell, 1984-94) and Peggy Ahwesh (in Ode
to a New Pre History, 1984-87; Martina's Playhouse, 1989; and Scary
Movie, 1993), who use children's immediate mimicry of cultural and social
norms to register a societal indigestion," Akerman operates through a
second-degree cinematic naIvete, a densely layered mimicry.7 In both her
fictional and her documentary films, her minimal hyperrealism forces
images and characters to add their immediate denotative function to cultural
and aesthetic scenarios, enforcing their reciprocal instability. Instead
of the filmic wink directed at the spectator, and above the character's
heads and bodies (as in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction), Akerman suggests
a corporeal cinema whose complicity with its detail-saturated settings,
and with the gestures of its eccentric characters, is so fierce as to
inscribe, along with the halted flow of storytelling, the possibility of alternate
logics. Expressive despite its minor key, Akerman makes signification
oscillate and alternate in phases. Despite their constant motion, however,
the phasing is clear.
FILMOGRAPHY
Saute ma ville (Blow up my town). 1968, 35mm, black and white, 13 minutes
I.:Enfant aime au Je joue aetre une femme mariee (The beloved child or I play at
being a married woman), 1971, 16mm, black and white, 35 minutes
Hotel Monterey. 1972, 16mm, color, 65 minutes (silent)
La Chambre 1 (Thn room 1). 1972, 16mm, color, 11 minutes (sound)
La Chambre 2 (The room 2), 1972, 16mm, color, 7 minutes (silent)
Le 15/8, 197:i, 16mm, black and white, 42 minutes, codirected with Samy Szlinger-
baum
Hanging Out Yonkers 1973, 1973, 16mm, color, 90 minutes (unfinished)
Je til if eJle (I you he she) 1974, 35mm, black and white, 90 minutes
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 BruxcJles, 1975, 35mm, color, 200
minutes
News from Home, 1976, 16mm, color, 85 minutes
Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Meetings with Anna), 1978, 35mm, color, 127 minutes
Dis-moi (Tell me), 1980, 16mm, color, 45 minutes
Toute une nuit (All night long) 1982, 35mm, color, 89 minutes
Les Annees 80 (The nighties). 1983, video/35mm, color, 82 minutes
Un Jour Pina m'a demande (One day Pina asked me), 1983, 16mm, color, 57 min-
utes
L'Homme ii la valise (The man with the suitcase). 1983, 16mm, color, 60 minutes
rai faim, Fai froid (I'm hungry, I'm cold), 1984, 35mm, black and white, 12 minutes
Family Busincss: C/lIln/a] Akerman Speaks about Film, 1984, 16mm, color, 18 min-
utes
New York, New York bis. 1984, 35mm, black and white, 8 minutes (lost)
Lettre de cineaste (A Filmmaker's Letter), 1984, 16mm, color, 8 minutes
Golden Eighties (aka Window Shopping), 1985, 35mm, color, 96 minutes
214 Filmography
La Paresse (Sloth), 1986, 35mm, color, 14 minutes
Le Marteau (The hammer), 1986. video. color. 4 minutes
Letters Home. 1986, video. color. 100 minutes
Mallet-Stevens, 1986, video, color, 7 minutes
Histoires d'Amerique (American stories/Food, Family and Philosophy)' 1988.
35mm, color, 92 minutes
Les Trois dernieres sonates de Franz Schubert (Franz Schubert's last three sonatas),
1989, video. color. 49 minutes
Trois strophes sur 1e nom de Sacher ("Three stanzas on the name Sacher. by Henri
Dutilleux). 1989, video. color. 12 minutes
Nuit et Jour (Night and day). 1991. 35mm, color. 90 minutes
Le Demenagement (Moving in), 1992, 35mm, black and white. 42 minutes
Portrait d'une jeune fille de 1a fin des annees 60, aBruxelles (Portrait of a young girl
from the late sixties in Brussels). 1993, 35mm, color, 60 minutes
D'Est (From the East), 1993. 35mm, color, 107 minutes
NOTES
Chantal Akerman's Films: The Politics of the Singular
1 See Chantal Akerman quoted in "Entretien avec Franr;:oise Maupin," Image et
Son 334 (December 1978), 103. Richard Kwietniowski discusses Akerman's
USA of symmetry in "Separations; Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1976)
and Toute une nuit (1982)," Movie 34/35 (Winter 1990).
2 See Marie Claude Treillou, "La Vie, II Faut la Mettre en Scene," Cinema 76. 206
(February 1976), 32.
3 Gary Indiana, "Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties: A Conversation with
Chantal Akerman," Artforum 21.10 (Summer 1983), 61.
4 Akerman originally wanted to make a feature film. See "Getting Ready for The
Golden Eighties," 57. She mentions that Saute ma Ville was kept in a laboratory
for two years. When trying to pay her debt to the lab she asked if there was any
chance of selling it somewhere, and the lab director suggested among others
Flemish TV. It took the film for the TV series L'autre Cinema. After an excellent
review Akerman called one of the critics to ask about other chances for production.
He suggested the Ministery of French Culture, where she sent a project
about a girl who poisons her parents. The project was refused, and meanwhile
Akerman watched many films and borrowed money to make a second film,
L'Enfant Aim6. which she claims is weak, the result of badly absorbed knowledge.
Akerman then went to New York, where she felt liberated after watching
American experimental films and made Hotel Monterey. See Akerman, "Entretien
avec Chantal Akerman," in Daniele Dubroux, Therese Giraud, and
Louis Skorecki, Cahiers du Cinema 278 (July 1977), 40.
5 Akerman, quoted in Corinne Squire, "Toute une Heure: Corinne Squire Talks
to Chantal Akerman," Screen 25.6 (November-December 1984), 68.
216 Notes to Introduction
6 See Marsha Kinder, "Reflections on Jeanne Dielman," Film Quarterly 30.4
(Summer 1977), 2,
7 Akerman, "Le Manoir-Le Domaine," in Chantal Akerman, Cahier 1, ed, Jacqueline
Aubenas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982), 144, My translation.
8 Akerman, quoted in Treillou, 90.
9 See Laura Mulvey, "Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde," in Visual and
Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 117.
10 In the feininist section of Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, vol. 2 (Berkeley,
Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1985), a number ofarticles deal
extensively with Jeanne Dielman: Claire Johnston's "Toward a Feminist Film
Practice: Some Theses"; Jayne Loader's "Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments";
and B. Ruby Rich's "In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism." See also
Rich, "Chantal Akerman's Meta Cinema," and J. Hoberman, "Jeanne Dielman:
Woman's Work," Village Voice (29 March 1983); Janet Bergstrom, "Jeanne Dielman,
23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, by Chantal Akerman," Camera
Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 2 (Fall 1977); Mary Ann
Doane, "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body," October 17 (Summer
1981); Brenda Longfellow, "Love Letters to the Mother: The Work of Chantal
Akerman," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13.1-2 (1989);
Kinder, "Reflections on Jeanne Dielman"; Ruth Perlmutter, "Feminine. Absence:
A Political Aesthetic in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du
Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4.2 (Spring
1979), "Visible Narrative, Visible Woman," Millenium Film Journal 6 (Spring
1980), and "Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics," in New
German Critique 13 (1978) which was an instrumental article in discussing
Akerman's work. Books on feminism and cinema invariably discuss Akerman's
work: Annette Kuhn's Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London:
Routledge, 1982), Teresa de Lauretis' Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,
Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and Judith Mayne's
The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990) are examples.
11 See Mary Jo Lakeland, "The Color of Jeanne Dielman," Camera Obscura 3/4
(1979): 216-17, Lakeland doesn't emphasize the Flemish tradition in Akerman's
use of certain colors, and the relation of this tradition to her depiction of
the mundane, but discusses how the film's color scheme demarcates the enclosure
ofJeanne's world.
12 In his essay "Jeanne Dielman: Cinematic Interrogation and 'Amplification,'''
Millenium Film Journal 22 (Winter/Spring 1989-90), Ben Singer exhaustively
analyzes Jeanne Dielman's formal system and its "amplification" of quattrocento
perspective. Akerman's use of classical linear perspective is one reason
Jeanne Dielman has been absorbed in the canon ofthe European art film.
13 A relevant predecessor to Akerman's depiction of a housewife's mundane activities
is Helmuth Costard's The Oppression ofWoman is Primarily Evident in
the Behavior of Women Themselves (1969). This film's strategy of defamiliarization
ofa woman's routine is to have a man perform the household tasks. The
descriptions provided by Jan Dawson and by Ann Harris (in her in-depth study
of Costard's work) relate the ways in which the film departs from Jeanne Diel-
Notes to Introduction 217
man in its use of a handheld verite-style camera. Most important is the similar
anti-essentialist impulse present in both films. See Jan Dawson, ed., The Films
ofHelmuth CostaI'd (London: Riverside Studios, 1979), and Ann Harris, "Taking
Time Seriously: Technology, Politics and Filmmaking Practice in the films
of Helmuth Costard" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1993).
14 In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman's camera follows the routine of Jeanne (Delphine
Seyrig), a widow who looks after her adolescent son and supports herself by
working as a prostitute once each afternoon, for three days. The compass ofher
world is shown as circumscribed by the immediate demands ofher household.
Something happens on the second day, however, that we only learn about
through its residual effects: a general breakdown of order. Then, in the first sex
scene Akerman actually shows, in a medium distance shot, Jeanne has an
orgasm. As she is dressing she leaves the bed, picks up a pair of scissors, and
kills her client. After the murder we watch her sitting at the dinner table,
motionless.
15 See my discussion in chapter 3.
16 In an interview for program notes for the Public Theater, New York, Dan Yakir
asks Akerman if Jeanne finally reaches this kind of awareness. Akerman replies,
"I don't know about her psyche. The problem in the film is not her: it is
her relating to me and you. So the awareness is in you, not her. She doesn't
exist." Akerman, quoted in Yakir, "An Interview with Akerman," 2.
17 Perlmutter, "Visible Narrative, Visible Woman," 22. Although this article is
full of reductive psychoanalytic and feminist jargon, Perlmutter advances an
interesting interpretation of Akerman's aesthetics in a comparison with Peter
Handke's film The Left Handed Woman.
18 Bergstrom,116.
19 Fine descriptions of Akerman's aesthetics can be found in Rich's and Hoberman's
Village Voice articles, Bergstrom's essay, Kinder's article, and Annette
Kuhn's references in her book. Other useful readings include Judith Mayne's
The Woman at the Keyhole; the care Mayne takes to avoid establishing a homology
between detailed textual analysis and psychoanalytic constructs is
outstanding. Doane's "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body" and Perlmutter's
description of Akerman's "undernarrative" in "Visible Narrative, Visible
Woman" are especially valuable.
20 Kuhn, 174.
21 Daniel Dayan's "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema," Film Quarterly (Fall
1974), 22-31. Jean Pierre Oudart's "Cinema and Suture," and Stephen Heath's
"Notes on Suture" are part of a debate on the potential application of JacquesAlain
Miller, "Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)." These three
articles, published in Screen 18:4 (Winter 1977/78), define not only the relevance
of the subject but the pervasiveness of the preoccupation with classical
cinema as a model. Although Oudart discusses Robert Bresson and Heath
brings in Akerman's News from Home to suggest alternatives to that model,
these works end up as counterexamples in a predetermined system. Joan Copjec's,
"Apparatus and Umbra: For a Feminist Critique of the Apparatus" (Ph.D.
diss., New York University, 1986), develops an important critique of all applications
ofthe concept of suture.
218 Notes to Introduction
22 Johnston, "Feminist Film Practice," 326.
23 Bergstrom, "Jeanne Dielman," 117.
24 See Rich, "Feminist Film Criticism," 346-47.
25 Rich, 346.
26 Rich, 346. Employing the precarious all-encompassing term "correspondence
films," Rich fails to account for the specificity of the films she discusses.
Grouping filmmakers as different as Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Peter Wollen,
and Laura Mulvey, her term refers to films "investigating correspondences, i.e.,
between emotion and objectivity, narrative and deconstruction, art and ideology.
Thus Jeanne Dielman is a film of correspondence in its exploration of the
bonds between housework and madness, prostitution and heterosexuality,
epic and dramatic temporality" (Rich, 354).
27 Rich,348.
28 In relation to the second part of Je tu il elle, for instance, Akerman refers explicitly
to an ethnological regard turned to the "other": "The truckdriver ...
represents the mythical character, the sailor, the adventurer, he is from a different
world.... This strangeness is reinforced by the style adopted for this
sequence that I call "The Time of Reportage," in which we gaze at others ...
that are different. An almost ethnological gaze" ("Je tu il elle." press-book for
Unite Trois, Paris, my translation).
29 Andre Bazin, "De Sica: Metteur en Scene," in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 76.
30 Rich, for example, reads Akerman's cinematic specificity correctly-the fairy
tale quality of her plots, the sexual explicitness of Je tu il elle, the tactics of
reduction and hyperbole-only to consider it basically a negation of conventional
expectations. Rich, "Chantal Akerman's Meta Cinema."
31 This phrase is a combination of several reductive phrases spread out in writings
on Jeanne Dielman.
32 See Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of"Women"
in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
33 She adds that "it was a good idea to think about what a feminist film is, but I
don't believe in the end it means very much." Susan Barrowclough, "Chantal
Akerman: Adventures in Perception." Monthly Film Bulletin (Great Britain) 51
(April 1984), 105.
34 Akerman, quoted in Angela Martin, "Chantal Akerman's Films: Notes on Issues
Raised for Feminism," in Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon (London:
British Film Institute, 1986), 62. Akerman has asserted her feminist stakes
by defending a feminist form: "I do think [Jeanne Dielmanl is a feminist film
because I give space to things which were never ... shown in that way, like the
daily gestures of a woman.... it's a feminist film-not just what it says but
what is shown and how it's shown. "Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman:
Excerpts from an Interview with Camera Obscura, November 1976." Camera
Obscura 2 (Fall 1977), 118-19.
35 Martin, 63.
36 In the introduction to her book, Mayne indicates her awareness of the gap
between Akerman's work and the parameters ofthe theories usually mobilized
for its analysis. See Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole, 7.
Notes to Introduction 219
37 Arlette Farge, "Women's History: An Overview," in French Feminist Thought:
A Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 136. Setting the project
of women's history in a historical context, this article acknowledges the relative
positivism of the early accounts of women's history, which were more
concerned with description than with theoretical reflection.
38 Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, "La Micro-histoire," in Le Debat (Paris: Gallimard,
1981), 133.
39 Farge, "Women's History," 140-41.
40 For informed anti-essentialist analyses ofthe relations between historiography
and feminism. see Riley, Am I That Name?; Catherine Gallagher, "Marxism and
the New Historicism," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 37-48; and Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, eds., The
Woman in Question (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
41 For an analysis of differences among temporalities, see Fernand Braudel, "History
and the Social Sciences: The Longue Duree," in On History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25-54.
42 Jacques Le Goff, A Historia Nova (Sao Paulo: Livraria Martins Fontes Editora,
1990), 32.
43 Riley, Am I That Name?, 5.
44 Copjec; "m/f, or Not Reconciled," in The Woman in Question, 12.
45 Riley, Am I That Name?, 5.
46 See Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980), 126.
47 Foucault, "Truth and Power," 126.
48 Michel Foucault, "Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," in Language, Memory, Counterpractice: Selected
Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 207-8.
49 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis:
University ofMinnesota Press, 1986).
50 Michele Levieux, "Propos de Chantal Akerman: Du cote chez Kafka," Ecran
(France) 75 (December 1978), 47-52.
51 Levieux, 49.
52 Akerman, in "Entretien avec Fralll"oise Maupin," 17.
53 See Alice jardine's discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux in
"Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and his Br(others}," Substance 13.3/4 (1984), 46-
60.
54 See Akerman, quoted in Michel Grodent, "Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna de Chantal
Akerman; un film sur l'histoire," Le Soir, 23 February 1978, 20. See also
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16-27.
55 Akerman, "Nouveau Cinema comme Nouveau Roman," in Le Monde. 22 January
1976, p. 15.
56 Parveen Adams and Jeff Minson. "The 'Subject' of Feminism," in The Woman
in Question, 81-101.
57 Adams and Minson, 82.
58 Adams and Minson, 82.
220 Notes to Introduction
59 See Akerman, "Entretien avec Chantal Akerman," interview by Daniele Dubroux,
Therese Giraud, and Louis Skorecki, 35.
60 Akerman, "Les Rendez Vous D'Anna," in Chantal Akerman, Cahier 1, ed. Jacqueline
Aubernas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982), 17. My translation.
61 Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard, "Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard," C;a Cinema
19 (1st trimester, 1980), 11.
1 Nothing Happens: Time for the Everyday in
Postwar Realist Cinema
1 Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1971), 29.
2 Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," Yale French Studies 73 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), 13.
3 Of Umberto D, Bazin writes: "The narrative unit is not the episode, ... the
sudden turn ofevents, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of
concrete instants of life, ... for their ontological equality destroys drama at its
very basis" (81).
4 Cesare Zavattini, "Some Ideas on the Cinema," in Film: A Montage ofTheories,
ed. Richard Dyer MacCann (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 219.
5 Think, for instance, of the scene in Hans-Jiirgen Syberberg's Our Hitler where
Hitler's valet de chambre describes for the camera the Fuhrer's daily underwear
routine. Likewise, think of Godard's strategies of protraction in Every
Man for Himself allowing what is "in between images" to be perceived as
worthy of attention.
6 Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," 15.
7 Blanchot,12.
8 For a detailed account of this project and its confusing titling see Henri Lefebvre's
Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
26-64.
9 Lefebvre, 32.
10 Guy Debord, "Perspectives For Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life," in
Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau
of Public Secrets, 1981), 70.
11 Debord, "Perspectives," 70.
12 Debord, "Perspectives," 69.
13 Raoul Vaneigem, "The Role of Godard," in Situationist International Anthology,
176.
14 Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 33 and 40. For the translation, I took the liberty of
substituting "consciousness" for "Conscience," which carries a moralistic
connotation absent from Lefebvre's use ofthe French Conscience.
15 Lefebvre, 34.
16 Lefebvre, 37.
17 The rereading of Hegel by several philosophers in the early thirties took off in
several directions. Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From
Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), chap. 1. For
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the concept of alienation is the founding possibility
of subjectivity itself. About Lacan's relation to existential marxism, see Poster,
318-23.
Notes to Chapter 1 221
18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Film and the New Psychology," in Sense and
Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 58.
19 Merleau-Ponty, "The Film," 58.
20 Merleau-Ponty, "The Film," 59.
21 Bazin, "The French Renoir," in Jean Renoir (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1973),90.
22 Cesare Zavattini, "Some Ideas on the Cinema," 220.
23 Bazin, "The French Renoir," 90.
24 Annette Michelson, introduction to Theory of Film Practice, by Noel Burch
(New York: Praeger, 1973), ix.
25 Amedee Ayfre, "Neorealism and Phenomenology," in Cahiers du Cinema; the
1950s, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
26 Ayfre, 185.
27 Similarly, Merleau-Ponty's theoretical juggling of film, Gestalt theory, phenomenology,
and existentialism demarcates the affinities between film and
description.
28 Merleau-Ponty, "The Film," 156.
29 Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing
and Difference (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 156 and 157.
30 Philip Rosen, "History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in
Bazin," Wide Angle 9.4 (1987), 12.
31 Rosen, 15.
32 Philippe Hamon, "The Rhetorical Status ofthe Descriptive," Yale French Studies
61 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981),22.
33 Bazin, "De Sica: Metteur en Scene," in What is Cinema? vol. 2, 65-66.
34 See Bazin, 66.
35 See Paul Hockings, ed. Principles of Visual Anthropology (The Hague and
Paris: Mouton Publishers, 1975), 9.
36 John Marshall and Emile de Brigard, "Idea and Event in Urban Film," in Hockings,
134.
37 Colin Young, "Observational Cinema," in Hockings, 66.
38 See James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Allegory," in Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus
(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1986).
39 The fact that French cinema verite's earnest essentialism can propose itself as
reflexive reveals the similarity between practices purporting to reveal "reality"
transparently and those exposing the reality ofcinema's materiality.
40 For an excellent discussion of direct cinema's noninterventionist agenda see
Paul Arthur, "Jargons ofAuthenticity (Three American Moments)," in Theorizing
Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 118-26.
41 Cinema verite's need to turn lenses and tape recorders on the filmmaker coincides,
in Europe, with an ethnography in crisis (a process present in Jean
Rouch's reverse ethnography since the early fifties), with the political malaise
of French intellectuals during the war in Algeria, and, before that, with the
disclosure ofStalin's totalitarianism.
42 Bazin, "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson," in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, 130, 131.
43 Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Nature, Humanism and Tragedy," in For a New Novel:
Essays on Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 57.
222 Notes to Chapter 1
44 Robbe-Grillet, 68.
45 Poster, "Existential Marxism," 324.
46 Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 56.
47 Michel de Certeau, The Practice ofEveryday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1984), xvii.
48 While Lefebvre's defense of speech as the site of a unity of sign and meaning
hardly survives Derrida's analysis of the complicity of speech with a metaphysics
of presence and origin, Baudrillard's later writings seem to confirm the
impossibility of a stable referent in the widespread process of simulation that
informs all society. See Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); and Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton,
and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
49 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard (New York: a da Capo Press, 1972),49.
50 Godard, 2 au 3 chases que Je sais d'Elle (Paris: SeuillL'Avant Scene, 1971), 69.
51 Cesare Zavattini. "Some Ideas on the Cinema," 218.
52 Zavattini,224.
53 Zavattini, 220.
54 Margaret Mead, "Visual Anthropology in a Discourse of Words," in Hockings,
Visual Anthropology, 9.
55 Writings on Andy Warhol's cinema have for the most part emphasized the
same points raised in my argument. For a broader view on Warhol's politics of
indifferentiation see Stephen Koch, The Stargazer: Andy Warhol and His Films
(London: Calder and Boyars, 1973). See also P. Adams Silney's chapter on
structural film in Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (1943-1978), 2d
ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) and the essays
collected in Andy Warhol Film Factory, ed. Michael O'Pray (London: British
Film Institute, 1989).
56 Marsha Kinder, "The Subversive Potential ofthe Pseudo-iterative," Film Quarterly
43.2 (Winter 1989-90)' 8. This essay has been highly provocative for my
own thoughts on the issue of typicality. lowe to Kinder the perception of how
Bazin oversees the implications of analytic editing in Umberto D.
2 Toward a Corporeal Cinema: Theatricality in the '70s
Michael Snow. "Two Letters and Notes on Films," in The Avant-Garde Film: A
Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York
University Press, 1978), 186.
2 Chantal Akerman, "Statements collected by Jose Vieria Marques," in pressbook
ofJeanne Dielman in Festival de Figueira da Foz, Berlin, July 1975.
3 Perhaps one of the main texts to underly this opposition as central to a modernist
gesture in art is Merleau-Ponty's essay on Cezanne "Eye and Mind," in The
PrimacyofPerception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the
Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), 159-92.
4 In an interview with Marsha Kinder, Akerman states that when she saw the
films of Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas, they opened her mind to "the relationship
between film and your body" in Kinder, "Reflections on Jeanne Dielman,"
Film Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1977), 2.
Notes to Chapter 2 223
5 Snow's reference to C~zanne's negotiation of modernism and realism in painting
in the epigraph to this chapter perceptively defines the break from a prescriptive
to a descriptive cinema present in filmographies quite different from
the avant-garde.
6 See Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," in Image Music, Text. trans. and
ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32~51.
7 Snow, "Two Letters and Notes on Films," 186.
8 Akerman, "Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal
Akerman by Gary Indiana," Artforum 21.10 (Summer 1983), 58.
9 The camera maintains some of the characteristics of autonomy in relation to
the profilmic event that other structural filmmakers have used. It is a particular
version of the primitive ghost rides (a type of record issuing from a camera
mounted in moving trams or cars, filming randomly whatever crosses its path)
that is retransformed in Ernie Gehr's Eureka (1974) within the vocabulary of
mechanical reproduction dear to structural minimal filmmaking.
10 Richard Kwietniowski, "Separations: Chantal Akerman's News From Home
(1976) and Toute une Nuit (1982)" in Movie 34-35 (Winter 1990),111. This
inspired article details Akerman's procedures making clear its use of symmetry,
as well as the perceptual demands posed by Akerman's minimalism.
11 Akerman, "Statements," July 1975.
12 Benning, "James Benning," in A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent
Filmmakers, ed. Scott MacDonald (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1992), 232.
13 Michael Fried's criticism of the effect of presence (the theatricality) of minimal
art is a major inspiration for my own understanding of cinema's corporeal
dimensions. See, Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968).
14 See Clement Greenberg, "The New Sculpture," in Art and Culture: Critical
Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 139.
15 Linda Nochlin, "Some Women Realists," in Super Realism: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), 77 and 78. Nochlin
also points out that Yvonne Jacquette's painting of spaces between objects
displays a distinctly phenomenological concern with the description of the
insignificant.
16 Richard Estes as cited by Nochlin in "Realism Now," in Super Realism, 118.
17 Audrey Flack cited in Udo Kulterman, New Realism (Greenwich Conn.: New
York Graphic Society, 1972), 15.
18 Rosalind Krauss, "Theories ofArt after Minimalism and Pop," in Discussionsin
Contemporary Culture. vol. 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 63-64.
19 In Robert Morris and Donald Judd among others, repetition, seriality, and the
use of mass produced units and materials were meant to thwart intentionality
through a decided equivalence and lack ofinternal hierarchy among the components
of a work. See Judd, "Interview with Judd and Stella," in Minimal Art.
150.
20 See Annette Michelson, "Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression," in
Robert Morris (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969), 69; Maurice
Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960's (New York:
Harper and Row, 1989), 53.
224 Notes to Chapter 2
21 Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture" in Minimal Art, 234.
22 See John Cage, "Cinema Now; A Symposium in Cincinnati," Perspectives in
American Underground Film: Stan Brakhage, John Cage, Jonas Mekas, Stan
Vanderbeek (University of Cincinnati Press, n.d.), 9.
23 The particulars of these two filmic projects (among other examples of "pure
film") are addressed at length by David James in his book Allegories ofCinema:
American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
24 For a comprehensive panorama of the period under consideration see Paul
Arthur, "Structural Film; Revisions, New Versions and the Artifact-Part I,"
Millenium Film Journal 2 (Spring/Summer 78), 5-13, and part 2 in MFJ 4
(Winter 79/80), 22-34, as well as James, 237-75.
25 Patricia Patterson and Manny Farber, "Kitchen without Kitch: Beyond the
New Wave: 1," in Film Comment 13.6 (November-December 1977), 47. "Dispersion"
and "shallowboxed space" are main characteristics of the two aesthetics-ofheterogeneity
and of homogeneity-I describe in this chapter.
26 Patterson and Farber, 47.
27 Stationed in passages and public vehicles, the camera in Hotel Monterey and
News from Home represents a variant from structural minimalism. There, views
from windows characterize the curiosity for the real (as in Ernie Gehr's Still, 1971),
and filming inside enclosed spaces allows a control over human interference, secured
either through absence (Gehr's Serene Velocity 1970) or through mise-enseEme
(Snow's Wavelength and Back and Forth). Akerman's camera moves into
spaces oftransit. The hotel provides a relatively stationary place within the city's
turbulence, granting Akerman a controlled contact with passersby, while allowing
them, at least theoretically, the freedom simply to avoid her camera.
28 I have not watched La Chambre 1 which is 11 minutes long and has sound. The
film I analyze throughout this chapter is La Chambre 2 which is silent and is 7
minutes long.
29 The exploration of most video art in the early seventies revolves around confirming
endlessly the delusions of self-presence. The play with the discrepancies
between image and language offers a scenario of dislocation of the self
which underlies most ofthe art done in this period. Bruce Nauman's Lip Synch
(1969), Peter Campus's mem and dorinstallations (1974), Richard Serra's Boomerang
(1974), Linda Benglis's Now (1973), Joan Jonas' Vertical Roll (1972),
involve the experience of a presence never fully and instantaneously present.
"Now" and "I" were submitted in these works to a constant vexing; they were
"screened" through video technology which delivered at most a mirrored,
split, identity.
30 Marguerite Duras's India Song (1974), Woman of the Ganges (1973), and Son
Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Desert (1976) are all propped on two interrelated
Duras' novels. Likewise, Straub and Huillet's Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's
Accompaniment for a Cinematographic Scene" (1972). Othon (1969),
Cezanne (1989) constitute radical reconfigurations of their base texts as documents
of history.
31. Bertold Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willet (New York: Hill and
Fang, Methuen, 1964).
32 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painter and Beholder in the Age
ofDiderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Notes to Chapter 2 225
33 Eric Rohmer, "Film and the Three Levels of Discourse: Indirect, Direct, and
Hyperdirect," in The Taste ofBeauty, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989).
34 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 193. Likewise he passes judgment on theatrical and
Hollywood musicals: "Nothing is more revolting than the actor pretending not
to notice that he has left the level of plain speech and started to sing. The three
levels-plain speech, heightened speech and singing-must always remain
distinct and in no case should heightened speech represent an intensification
of plain speech or singing of heightened speech" (44).
35 See Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1978).
36 P. Adams Sitney has described Robert Bresson's subversive linearity in opposition
to a geometrical editing. "For the most part, radical formalism in cinema
has been geometrical: Eisenstein, L'Herbier, Kuleshov, Vertov, Kubelka ... use
the alternative positions of the camera, ... to articulate a solid geometry of
cinema in which the various angles ... combine to give the illusion of a cubic
spatial field.... The linear style on the other hand suggests tapestry or bas
relief as the pictorial metaphor for cinema, not sculptural space.... Bresson
has deliberately developed an antigeographical approach; he has linearized
the metonymic principle by discrete movements of the camera which change
carefully set up long shots to significant closeups and vice versa." Sitney, "The
Rhetoric of Robert Bresson," in The Essential Cinema; Essays on the Films in
the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, ed. P. A. Sitney (New York: New
York University Press and Anthology Film Archives, 1975), 185-56 and 188.
Sitney's distinction between geometrical and linear editing is basic in defining
an aesthetics ofhomogeneity.
37 Sitney, 188.
38 For the antimetaphysical implications of the notion of quotation see Jacques
Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
39 Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York:
Urizen Books, 1977), 51.
40 See Thomas Elsaesser, "Editorial: The Cinema ofIrony," Monogram 5 (n.d.).
41 Walter Benjamin makes clear the social implications of the epic theater: "[It]
appeals to an interest group 'who do not think without reason.''' Benjamin,
"What is Epic Theater?" in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York:
Schoken Books, 1969), 148.
42 Jean Luc Godard, Introduction a une Veritable Histoire du Cinema, vol. 1
(Paris: Editions Albatros, 19S0), 66.
43 Annette Michelson, "Film and the Radical Aspiration," in Film Culture, ed.
P. Adams Sitney (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1971), 414. Peter Wollen expanded
on Michelson's insights in his two subsequent articles "The Two Avant
Gardes," Edinburgh Magazine 1 (1976), and" 'Ontology' and 'Materialism' in
Film," Screen 17.1 (Spring 1976).
44 Michelson, "Film and the Radical Aspiration," 412.
45 Bresson and Dreyer, though conSistently invoked as masters of cinematic modernism,
are part of a formalist critical canon little concerned with the politics
of anti-illusionism. David Bordwell, discussing Dreyer, and P. Adams Sitney,
226 Notes to Chapter 2
in brilliant analyses of Dreyer and Bresson, define the modernist and classical
lineages of these filmmakers. See Bordwell, The Films ofCarl-Theodor Dreyer
(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981); and Ozu and the
Poetics ofCinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and P. Adams
Sitney, Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Another writer 'vho also canonizes
a non-Godardian aesthetics but with less critical finesse is Paul Schrader,
in his Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer (New York, ada
Capo Press, 1972). My take on the corporeality of Bresson and Dreyer's cinema
runs counter to Schrader's linkage of their work's concreteness to Zen Buddhism
and a transcendental religiosity.
46 For some examples of an equation of Brechtian distanciation techniques and
filmic strategies see Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature from D.
Quixote to J. L. Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Julia
Lesage, "Visual Distancing in Godard," Wide Angle 1.3 (1976); Marilyn Campbell,
"Life Itself: Vivresa Vie and the Language of Film," Wide Angle 1.3 (1976);
Colin McCabe, "The Politics of Separation," Screen 16.4 (Winter 1975/76), as
well as Stephen Heath, "From Brecht to Film: Theses, Problems," Screen 16.4
(Winter 1975/76). For a critique of an immediate assumption of politics as
issuing from a formal self-reflexivity, see Dana Polan, "A Brechtian Cinema?
Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film, in Movies and Methods, vol. 2. ed.
Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
47 Silvia Harvey, May 68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978),
69-71.
48 Harvey, 73.
49 Pascal Bonitzer, "La Notion de Plan et de Sujet du Cinema: Les Deux Regards,"
Cahiers du Cinema 275 (April 1977): 40-45.
50 Peter Gidal, "Theory and Definition of Structural Materialist Film," in Structural
Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 1.
51 Gidal, 1.
52 Akerman, "Statements," 1975.
53 In the' attempt to circumvent an explicit enunciation on cinematic language,
Wenders opts for narrative through a complex concept of transparency. See
Wenders, The Logic ofImages: Essays and Conversations (London: Faber and
Faber, 1991), 1.
54 For an understanding of the link between minimalism and the uncanny effect
of presence see Fried's"Art and Objecthood."
55 Carl T. Dreyer, "Interview with Borge Trolle," Film Culture 41 (Summer 1966),
59.
56 In an interview with Michel Delahaye in 1965 Dreyer states: "In theatre ...
words fill the space, hang in the air. One can hear them, feel them, sense their
weight. But in cinema words are too soon relegated to a background that absorbs
them." C. T. Dreyer, Reflexions sur mon Metier (Paris: Editions Etoile,
1983),121. He claims to have corrected that with Gertrud.
57 Carl T. Dreyer, statements collected by Yvonne Baby, Le Monde, 17 December
1964.
58 Eric Rohmer, "Film and the Three Levels of Discourse: Indirect, Direct and
Hyperdirect," in The Taste ofBeauty, 84.
Notes to Chapter 3 227
59 Dreyer. In "The Real Talking film" (1933), Dreyer claims that one can "keep on
stripping a dialogue of entire speeches, sentences, words-without any other
effect than that the writer's thoughts stand out even more clearly." "The talking
film presents itselflike a theatre piece in concentrated form." Dreyer, Dreyer in
Double Reflection: Translations of Carl Th. Dreyer's Writings about Film, ed.
Donald Skoller (New York: A Da Capo Press, 1973), 54.
60 David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1981), 148.
61 See mainly Germaine Dulac's writings "From 'Visual and anti-Visual Films'"
and "The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea," in The Avant-Garde Film: A
Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York
University Press, 1978). The tendency offormalist critics to privilege the visual
track has to do most immediately with the need to avoid the theatrical model.
The proscription of verbal content is only a manifestation of a modernist proscription
ofreferentiality.
62 Bordwell, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 149.
63 Andre Bazin, "Theater and Cinema-Part One," in What is Cinema? vol. 1, I,
trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 87-90.
64 Andre Bazin, "The Stylistics of Robf!rt Bmsson," in What is Cinema?, vol. 1,
136.
65 James Schamus, "Dreyer's Textual Realism," in Carl-Th. Dreyer, ed. Jitte Jensen
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 60.
66 The internalization of another's voice, apparent in adaptations, is especially
keen in certain historical films. The documentarism of Roberto Rossellini's
The Rise to Power of Louis the XIV or Straub and Huillet's Chronicle ofAnna
Magdalena Bach suggest a textualized profilmic reality. They actualize music
and dialogue, as well as scenic df!tails, accessible solely through documents.
67 In his Notes on Cinematography. Bresson says: "Words do not always coincide
with thought. Earlier, later. The aping of this non-coincidence is dreadful in
films" (51).
68 Bresson's version ofcinema as flattened surface is aimed as an antidote to what
he perceives as the main nemesis of cinema: theatre.
69 Bresson has claimed an essential core to the model, one however he believes
can be reached by automatism: "Models, mechanized outwardly. Intact, virgin
within" (42). The attempt to formulate a performatic instance that completely
excludes consciousness is of course extremely romantic and in several respects
close to the essentialism of some of body and performance art.
3 The Equivalence of Events: Jeanne Die/man,
23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
1 Kenneth Burke, "On Tragedy," in Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. Robert W.
Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1965), 285.
2 Chantal Akerman, "Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman: Excerpts from an
Interview with Camera Obscura, November 1976." Camera Obscura 2 (Fall
1977),120.
3 Ben Singer, "Jeanne Dielman: Cinematic Interrogation and 'Amplification,'''
Millenium Film Journal 22 (Winter/Spring 1989-90), 58-59. This "repetitive
228 Notes to Chapter 3
and self-conscious system of prefacing cuts" Singer perceives as Akerman's
strategy for calling attention to the cut through what he terms a trope of stan-
dardization.
4 Singer, 64.
5 Singer, 64.
6 Ruth Perlmutter, "Visible Woman, Visible Narrative," Millenillm Film Journal
6 (Spring 1980).
7 Aesthetics of homogeneity approximates what Ruth Perlmutter calls "undernarratives":
"Undernarratives separate and recompose the elements of traditional
narrative. They differ, therefore, from avant-garde films' attempts to
transcend narrative structures or cinematic autonomy by incorporating other
art forms." Perlmutter, 19.
8 In his article "Primitivism and the Avant Gardes: A Dialectical Approach,"
Noel Burch writes that Jeanne Dielman "studiously avoids any direct matching,
indispensable to the principle of camera ubiquity in the Institution"
(in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 504). In emphasizing the antiinstitutional
thrust common to the "primitive stare" Burch ahistorically disregards
how Akerman differs from her avant-garde contemporaries (Andy Warhol,
Ernie Gehr, and Michael Snow, for instance). Moreover, what gets consistently
repressed in formal analyses is the representational content of the films
themselves.
9 Akerman, "Jeanne Dielman," 119. Although these statements approximate direct
cinema's claim of noninterference, Akerman's hyperbolic use of such devices
within a fiction film compounding duration, fixed frame, and stylized
performance warrants her distance from an essentialist cinema.
10 Akerman, "Jeanne DiHlman," 119.
11 Heath, "Repetition Time," in Questions ofCinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1981). The antinarrative thrust of avant-garde film is of course
not restricted to structural film. One of the main proponents of a deflection of
memory is Stan Brakhage, in his romantic abstractionism.
12 Heath,171.
13 Akerman, "Jeanne Dielman," 120.
14 Singer claims the film is "densely overinscribed with a traditionally male type
of looking." He invokes, however, one factor that seems to qualify voyeurism
rather than promote it: he points out that we have not been granted a justified
access to the diegesis through a point-of-view structure-that our sole means of
identification is with the camera. (Singer, "Jeanne Dielman," 65-66).
15 In "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman,"
Janet Bergstrom suggests that the absence ofreverse shots guarantees the
split between the character and the director's logiCS. "The camera look can't be
construed as the view of any character. Its interest extends beyond the fiction...."
Bergstrom (Camera Obscura 2 (Fall 1977). 117).
16 Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (New York: Grove
Press, 1965), 72.
17 Roland Barthes, "Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet," in Jealousy, by
Alain Robbe-Grillet (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 17.
Notes to Chapter 3 229
18 Barthes, 13-27. In this essay Barthes states how for Robbe-Grillet "the object is
no longer a common-room of correspondences, a welter of sensations and
symbols, but merely the occasion ofa certain optical resistance" (15).
19 Barthes, 15.
20 The fundamental uncertainty about the identity of the hyperrealist image can
be tentatively theori~ed through the internal dissimilitude ofthe simulacrum.
Its relation to the copy is discussed by Gilles Oeleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum,"
trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 27 (Winter 1983), 48, 49.
21 Rosalind Krauss, "LeWitt in Progress," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 253.
22 Krauss, 253.
23 Krauss, 253.
24 Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism, eds.
Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1965),
12.
25 Shklovsky, 12.
26 Against the conceptual abstraction that allows access to the object through its
habitual "name" Shklovsky proposes an impediment of perception so that
"the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of perception"
(12).
27 For a more comprehensive analysis see Paul Arthur's two-part essay "Structural
Film: Versions, Revisions and the Artifact," Millenium Film Journal 1 and
2. (Spring/Summer 1978 and Winter 1979/80).
28 Thierry de Ouve, "Les Trois Horloges," in Chantal Akerman, Cahier 1, ed.
Jaqueline Aubenas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982). 89. For de Ouve the film's
complex temporality is the crucible of three conceptions of time. The first is a
Newtonian conception in which time derives from dynamics, and it is linked
to classical tragedy in that each ofthe tragic actors "has its own destiny, his/her
own personal internal force (mass by acceleration)." The second version of
time is related to thermodynamics: in the film, this concept is related to real
time. And the third version, indicated by the glaring absence of clocks in the
film, "corresponds to neguentropy or information" (94, 95, 96).
29 Michael Snow, "1\vo Letters and Notes on Films," in The Avant-Garde Film
Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 186.
30 Andre Bazin, "Le Grand Diptyque: Geologie et Relief," in Orson Welles (Paris:
Editions du Cerf, 1972), 60 (my translation).
31 Jean Luc Godard states, "I perceived, ... cinema is that which is between
things, not things, but between one and another, between me and you." Jean
Luc Godard, Introduction a une Veritable Histoire du Cinema, vol. 1 (Paris:
Editions Albatros, 1980), 145.
32 See Annette Michelson's analysis ofSnow's Wavelength in "Toward Snow," in
Avant-Garde Film, 172-83.
33 Snow, "1\vo Letters and Notes on Films," 186.
34 Manny Farber, "Canadian Underground," in Negative Space: Manny Farber on
the Movies (New York: Praeger, 1971), 250.
35 Michelson, "Toward Snow," 174.
36 See P. Adams Sitney, VisionaryFilm: The American Avant-Garde(1943-1978),
230 Notes to Chapter 3
2d ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),438. This recurrent
dichotomy between interior and exterior, controlled and uncontrolled
events, informs structural film and becomes, in fact, in the best of these works,
its main trope. In Akerman's Hotel Monterey, the aubade is the explicit event
external to the film's mounting toward the last floor ofthe hotel (following in a
way Empire's natural progression, starting as it does at night).
37 See Koch's qualified note of this "climatic event" slightly bracketing his own
assertion to fit a "customary" critical neglect to structural and minimal work's
"content" or "plot." Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His
Films (London: Calder and Boyars, 1974). 60.
38 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
201. This show was part of a series ofseven-minute performances organized by
the composer LaMonte Young at the Living Theater in 1961.
39 Snow, "Two Letters," 186. "The various kinds of events imply or demonstrate
links which are more or less 'stories.' "
40 Snow, 187.
41 The use of violent actions-a fight or a murder-constitutes liminal situations
for representation, in that such actions supposedly preclude literalization.
Such actions are, therefore, appropriate illustrations for dramatic content in
structural minimalist film. Content in Snow's work is always parasitic and is
always used as an effect of wit, of ironic paradox.
42 This notion of a double "narrative" is described in Sitney's analysis of Wavelength:
"Things happen in the room of Wavelength, and things happen to the
film of the room. The convergence of the two kinds of happening and their
subsequent metamorphosis create for the viewer a continually changing experience
of cinematic illusion and anti-illusion" (Visionary Film, 378).
43 Jean-Paul Belmondo's spastic run after being shot, his fall and the gestures he
performs of closing his own eyes, retrace an entire history ofthe representation
ofdeath in Western cinema: from neorealism (Anna Magnani's death in Roberto
Rossellini's Rome Open City) to Hollywood Westerns (Anthony Mann). It significantly
comments as well on method acting-Marlon Brando's performance
in On the Waterfront being the precise reverse of Belmondo's in direction (from
defeat to confrontation) and in thrust (one serious and the other ironic).
44 See Catherine Russell's original argument about the representation of death in
narrative cinema in Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas
(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1995).
45 Although the scarcity of characters and purposive deflation of relationships
precludes a direct association of Jeanne Dielman with melodrama, a few attributes
of the film recall the melodramatic mode. Characters embody attributes
without "naturally" changing channels of behavior. The intensity produced
by the cumulative actions of an initially affectless protagonist, is, in
Jeanne Dielman, displaced onto the objects and domestic scene. See Thomas
Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,"
in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film,
ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1978),62. This homology,
between set and character, is in Jeanne Dielman nonsymbolic but still
pervaded with affect and intensity.
Notes to Chapter 3 231
46 Elsaesser, 64.
47 Linda Williams, "Something Else besides a Mother," in Home Is Where the
Heart Is, 320.
48 See Andre Bazin, "La Mort tous les apres midi," in Qu'est ce que Ie Cinema?,
vol. 1 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958), 70,
49 Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 205.
50 Mayne, 206,
51 Mary Ann Doane, "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body," October 17
(Summer 1981), 35.
52 Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole, 251.
53 Several essays in Obsessional States, ed. Howard R. Beech (London: Methuen,
1974), describe variations in behavior for the obsessional compulsive. For an
even more simplified version see David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York
and London: Basic Books, 1965).
54 Perhaps one of the uncanniest moments in the film comes as Jeanne waits for
the shops to open early in the morning and passes by a street, not her own, and
sees a bright red number 23 painted on the door. At a certain moment the metal
door of the butcher shop starts rolling up, seemingly on its own.
55 Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in Studies in Parapsychology (New York:
Macmillan, 1963).
56 Through etymological research into the meaning of the German word "unheimlich"-"uncanny,"
or, more literally, "unhomely"-Freud arrives at two
contradictory definitions, which he resolves through a psychoanalytic reading.
For Freud, the uncanny is both that which causes estrangement-something
concealed or secret-and that which is homelike, familiar.
57 See Daniele Dubroux, "Le Familier inquietant (Jeanne Dielman)," Cahiers du
Cinema 269, (March-April 1976): 17-20.
58 Freud, "The Uncanny," 31.
59 Freud, 31.
60 See Freud, 57.
61 Naomi Schor, "Duane Hanson: Truth in Sculpture," in Reading in Detail: Aesthetics
and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 139. On the lack of
deception of the naked sculpture, Schor quotes Harold Rosemberg's review of
the "Sharp Focus Realism" exhibition held at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New
York, in 1972.
62 Michael Fried has pointed out the inherent uncanninness of minimalist sculpture,
its effect of presence as the beholder confronts the work in time: "In fact,
being distanced by such objects is not ... entirely unlike being distanced, or
crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming
upon literalist objects unexpectedly ... can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting
in just this way." Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Minimal Art: A
Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 128.
63 Schor, "Duane Hanson." in Reading in Detail, 139. She equates this disturbance
with the sort of detail that, in its hyperrealist quality, goes beyond its
denotative functions, granting to the figures it "excessively dresses" a quality
of exemplarity.
232 Notes to Chapter 3
64 The uncanny results, therefore, from a surplus of reality effect-an effect that
reminds one precisely of the double distance operative in the hyperrealist
image. The double works in the hyperrealist image as an extra token ofthe lack
of reality, the insistence on repeating the repeatable. Through this supplementarity
the hyperrealist image inscribes differance as the condition for reproduction
and repetition-the previously mentioned quality of the simulacrum.
65 The uncanny feeling associated with Akerman's emphasis on mimesis can be
understood through Roger Callais's concept ofmimicry as the temptation of an
organism to assimilate to its surroundings ("Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,"
October 31 [Winter 1984]). This procedure is seen not only as defensive
but as a wish for a submersion into in-difference, an abdication of what
Denis Hollier calls "that fundamentally vital difference between life and matter,
between the organic and the inorganic" ("Mimesis and Castration," October31
[Winter 1984), 11).
66 The links between the compulsion to repeat, the death drive, and the automaton
are developed further in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York:
Norton, 1961).
67 Krauss, "LeWitt in Progress," 255. Krauss uses this expression to counter the
idealist contours of the epithet of conceptual art applied to LeWitt's work. It is
especially appropriate in terms of other minimalist expressions equally ridden
with an arational impulse-such as Akerman's cinema.
68 Another stone image, besides Shklovsky's "stoniness of the stone," is therefore
required in characterizing Akerman's work. The image that punctuates
Krauss's analysis of the obsession subtending minimalist procedures of repetition
in "LeWitt in Progress" is appropriate: Beckett's Molloy shuffles the
stones across from his pockets in a methodic confirmation of nothing except
the very lack of logic in seriality or closed circuitry. See Samuel Beckett, Molloy,
Malone Dies, The Unnameable (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 69.
69 de Duve, "Les Trois Horioges," 90, 91.
70 de Duve, 91.
71 Claire Johnston, "Toward a Feminist Film Practice: Some Theses" in Movies
and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), 326.
72 I do not mean to imply an antecedence to johnston's analysis but rather the
commonality of her discourse and that of Janet Bergstrom, Marsha Kinder,
Judith Mayne, Brenda Longfellow, B. Ruby Rich, etc.
73 Loader, "Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments," in Movies and Methods, vol.
2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 339.
74 Brenda Longfellow, "Love Letters to the Mother: Chantal Akerman's Films,"
Canadian Journal ofPolitical and Social Theory 13.1-2, (1989),84.
75 Akerman, "Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman."
76 Reinforcing the lack of psychology for the character Akerman states: "You will
never know what is happening in her mind and in her heart. I don't know
either. It is not Jeanne Dielman's secret, it's Delphine [Seyrig'sJ secret. Akerman,
"Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal
Akerman," Artforum 21.10 (Summer 1983), 59.
77 Akerman, "Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman," 120.
Notes to Chapter 4 233
78 Longfellow claims that this last image sustains "the memory of her refusal and
something else: a rage and a passion which might just permit the journey ofthe
mother to the side offeminism" ("Love Letters," 84).
79 See Stephen Koch, Stargazer, 137. Koch's linkage of Warhol's themes, the stillness
of his films, and his arbitrariness with his fascination with death is, of
course, particularly relevant for a study of Jeanne Dielman, which owes so
much to Warhol's durational strategies. The main paradigm for an understanding
of the "lethal" qualities of minimal hyperrealism is Warhol's work, as well
as Koch's accurate insights.
80 Akerman, "Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman," 120.
81 Joan Copjec, "Apparatus and Umbra: A Critique of Feminist Film Theory"
(Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1986), 10. See also Joan Copjec, Read My
Desire: Lacan against Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 39-63.
82 Copjec, "Apparatus and Umbra," 10.
83 Having as his main reference Freud's "Repeating, Remembering and Working
Through," Lacan refers to the notion ofreproduction (in analysis) as pertaining
to "the optimistic days of catharsis." He says: "One had the primal scene in
reproduction as today one has pictures of the great masters for 9 francs 50. But
what Freud showed ... was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed or burnt,
except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia" (The Four Fundamental
Concepts ofPsychoanalysis [New York and London: Norton, 1978), 50).
If I bring this impossibility up in relation to the film, it is because the same
underlying anti-essentialist claim is valid in both the case of psychoanalysis
and in that of film. Moreover, this film intimates, in its running thematics of
inertia and obsessive compulsiveness, a continuous clarification of the sort of
repetitions operative in both the film and the character's life.
84 Copjec, "Apparatus and Umbra," 8. Copjec's argument leads ultimately to a
pointed critique of the determinism underlying the ongoing feminist debate of
the cinematic apparatus. My own interest in these versions ofthe term "automaton"
is justified by a similar concern in disproving causality as a representable
entity in film.
85 Copjec, "Apparatus and Umbra," 10.
86 Copjec, "Apparatus and Umbra," 9.
87 The successful invocation of two apparently contradictory endings in Jeanne
Dielman is, in some ways, similar to the procedure pointed out by Noel Carroll
in his reading of Citizen Kane in "Interpreting Citizen Kane," Persistence of
Vision 7 (1989). The two conflicting interpretations of the film-the Rosebud
image and the "puzzle structure," the enigma view-are both posed in an extremely
clear way and are each backed up in the film at several points. Carroll
claims that Citizen Kane's proposal of these two views about life constitutes
both the movie's special appeal for its audience and the possibility ofthe film's
establishing itselfas art as well as mass product.
4 Expanding the "'": Character in Experimenta' Feminist Narrative
1 Denise Riley, "Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of "Women" in
History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 111.
234 Notes to Chapter 4
2 See Julia Lesage, "Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film," in
Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brundsdon (London: British Film Institute,
1986).
3 See David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989), 321-24.
4 Laura Mulvey, "Film, Feminism, and the Avant Garde," in Visual and Other
Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 117.
5 Mulvey, 123.
6 David James's analysis of Sigmund Freud's Dora clarifies feminist film's embrace
oftheory. See Allegories ofCinema, 334.
7 The close relation between Rainer's films and the theoretical debates around
them becomes increasingly explicit in her later films such as Journeys From
Berlinl1971 (1980) and The Man Who Envied Women (1985). For a comprehensive
picture of the implications of this dialogue, see Noel Carroll, "Interview
with a Woman Who ... ," Millenium Film Journal 7/8/9 (Fall/Winter
1980-81); Rainer's response to Camera Obscura's claims about her formal politics,
"Yvonne Ranier: Interview," Camera Obscura 1 (Fall 1976); and James's
Allegories ofCinema, 326-33.
8 For an interesting analysis of what is called "theoretical" in avant-garde or
experimental cinema, see Carroll, "Avant Garde Film and Theory," Millennium
Film Journal 4/5 (Summer/Fall 1979), 141. See also Northrop Frye,
Anatomy ofCriticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 90.
9 In "A Quasi Survey of Some 'Minimalist' Tendencies in the Quantitatively
Minimal Dance Activity midst the Plethora. or an Analysis of Trio A." Rainer
parallels minimalist sculpture and dance. defining some of the constants of
minimalism. Collected in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock
(New York: E. P. Dutton. 1968).
10 Rainer. "A Quasi Survey." 269.
11 Janet Bergstrom notes this distinction in "Jeanne Dielman. 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman." Camera Obscura 2 (Fall 1977),
114.
12 Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer Work 1961-73 (New York: New York University
Press, 1974). 276.
13 Peter Kubelka, Stanley Brakhage. and Maya Deren are only three of the filmmakers
who confront the syntagmatic order that had become the norm for
cinema's legibility. Deren establishes a distinction basic to an alternative narrative
form. one she claims is more akin to the intensity of poetic associations
than the linear. "horizontal" logic of linear narrative or prose. ("Poetry and
Film: Symposium. with Maya Deren. Arthur Miller. Dylan Thomas. Parker
Tyler. Chairman Amos Vogel. Organized by Amos Vogel," in Film Culture: An
Anthology, ed. P. Adams Sitney [London: Secker & Warburg. 1971]. 174. 178.
179).
14 In later work-Kristina Talking Pictures (1976). for instance-Rainer makes
more use of heterogeneous material. Here. her collage consists mostly of interrupting
the linear and dramatic flow. always adding one more example. The
narrative swells without advancing.
15 For a critical assessment of Rainer's cinematic attack on the mechanisms of
Notes to Chapter 4 235
identification in The Man Who Envied Women, see Peggy Phelan's brilliant
analysis of Rainer's rearticulation of spectatorial address in Unmarked: The
Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). See also B. Ruby Rich's
"Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction" and Berenice Reynaud's "Impossible Projections,"
in Reynaud, ed., The Films of Yvonne Rainer (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989), 1-23, 24-35; Teresa de Lauretis, "Strategies of Coherence:
Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer," in Technologies
ofGender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987), 107-26.
16 See also. Robert Starn, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and
Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 20.
17 Following Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva suggests that the dialogic word or text appears
primarily in autobiography, polemical confessions, and hidden dialogue-generic
structures out of which the films of Rainer and Akerman make a
privileged stage for articulating the personal and collective dimensions of discourse.
"Word, Dialogue and Novel," in The Kristeva Reader. ed. Toril Moi
(New York: Columbia Univflrsity Press, 1986), 44.
18 Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Visual and Other Pleasures,
19.
19 That these two models were adopted respectively by the first and second
phases of feminist film is telling. Psychoanalysis precluded the fantasy of an
essential self to be uncovered by its workings; how could it posit the notion of
a surfacing, albeit topically oriented, collective consciousness'? Psychoanalysis
becomes mainly a theoretical tool; thematically it helps refine analysis
of sexual difference, and structurally it shapes, through its intrinsic antiessentialism,
a critique of transparency.
20 Noel Carroll, "Interview with a Woman Who ... ," 38.
21 As Regis Durand suggests in "On aphanisis: A Note on the Dramaturgy of the
Subject in Narrative AnalysiS," "[Though] there are moments when Lacan's
description of the 'subversion' of the subject, of its complex strategies of ruptures
and displacements, reads like a compendium of 'modernistic' narrative
and discursive strategies: ... feints, snares, an enunciation that renounces
itself.... The 'modernistic' fiction ofthe elusive deceitful subject conceals thfl
much more implacable logic of the division and dispersal of the subject, its
'intersubjective distribution'" (in Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic
Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Robert Con Davis [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983], 863).
22 See Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of
Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 136-37.
23 The excessive use of irony and ambiguity is seen as being ultimately cooptable
within a romantic tradition of self-rel1ection (Gasche, 136-37). The politically
void nature of Rainer's flair for juxtaposition and collage is directly addressed
by James' analysis of Film About a Woman Who . .. (Allegories of Cinema,
326-37).
24 Yvonne Rainer, "Journeys from Berlin/1971 ," script in, Berenice Reynaud, ed.,
The Films of Yvonne Rainer, 151.
25 B. Ruby Rich points how the use of a psychoanalysis session "is redolent with
236 Notes to Chapter 4
formal implication." She identifies "the patient's testimony" uncovered by
Roy Schafer's analysis with Rainer's handling of narrative and temporality.
"Yvonne Rainer: An Introduction," in Reynaud, ed. The Films of Yvonne
Rainer, 18. The bend toward "that idiom of somewhat manic autoanalysis that
characterizes life and love in a therapeutically oriented culture" had already
been mentioned in Annette Michelson's analysis of Lives of Performers in
"Yvonne Rainer, Part Two: The Dancer and the Dance," Michelson, Art/arum
12.6 (February 1974), 32. Likewise Noel Carroll sees Rainer's juxtapositional
aesthetics as pervaded with a self-perfection mechanism modeled on psychoanalysis
("Interview with a Woman Who ... ," 37-68).
26 Andrews, "Bruce Andrews on Yvonne Rainer," Cinemanews 79 (Spring 1980),
14.
27 Paul Arthur, "The Desire for Allegory: The Whitney Biennials," in Motion
Picture 2.1 (Fall 1987), 6-7.
28 See Paul de Man, Allegories ofReading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Craig
Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part
Two," in October 13 (Summer 1980): 59-80.
29 Serge Leclaire, "La Realite du Desir," in Sexualite Humaine (Paris: Aubier,
1970),245.
30 Georges Bataille quoted by Jean Narboni in "La Quatrieme Personne du Singulier
Ue tu il elle)," Cahiers du Cinema 276 (May 1977), 10.
31 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Their
writings in The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking Press, 1977), and "Rhizome"
in On The Line (New York: Columbia University, Semiotext(e), 1983) expand
the notions of a collective disseminated enunciation.
32 Michel Foucault's preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiv.
33 Akerman, "Ie tu iJ elIe" (press release from Unite Trois). Akerman names her
films' three parts: "time of subjectivity," "time of the other or Reportage," and
"time of relationship."
34 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960).
35 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company,
1969), 94.
36 Turner, The Ritual Process, 94, 95.
37 Victor W. Thrner, "Frame Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public
Liminality," in Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and
Charles Caramcllo (Madison, Wis.: Madison Center for lWentieth Century
Studies, Coda Press, 1977), 33. Turner notes the use of the subjunctive mood in
verbs during the liminal phase, a verbal conjugation open to chance.
38 I borrow this phrase from Jean Narboni's brilliant analysis of the tactics of
display in Je tu il elle in "La Quatriemc Personne du Singulier (Je tu il e11e)," 9.
39 Akerman, "Ie tu il e11e."
40 I shall refer to Chantal Akerman's presence as a performer by her first name,
following the clue of her naming the "Je" in the credits as Julie, the sole name
marked out by its fictive anonymity. I'd rather use Chantal instead of Julie to
clarify the terms of Akerman's dual presence in the film.
Notes to Chapter 4 237
41 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University
Press, 1987), 43.
42 Roland Barthes comments on the characteristics of a linguistic temporality,
elaborating on Benveniste's study on Indo-European languages. He will say
that in these languages the system is two-fold: "1, a first system or system of
discourse proper, adapted to the temporality of the speaker, whose speech-act
is always the point oforigin; a second system, of narrative history, appropriate
to the recounting of past events, and consequently deprived of future or present,
its specific tense being the aorist (or its equivalents, like the French passe
simple). In view ofIe tu il elle's constitution ofa liminal identity it is important
that the character makes extensive use of this apersonal tense. Barthes, "To
Write: An Intransitive Verb?" in The Rustle ofLanguage, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 14.
43 Narboni, "La Quatrieme Personne," 11.
44 Narboni, 11.
45 Narboni,11.
46 In a brilliant literalization of how writing is significant mostly as a "prop" for
Akerman's mise-en scene, Chantal tacks all the pages carefully onto the floor,
filling the space between her bed (inactivity) and the camera (her filmmaking
activity).
47 Discussing the problematics of confinement in Akerman's work Jacques Polet
compares the use of a truck in Marguerite Duras Le Carnian and in Ie tu il elle.
"It is as if Akerman chose the motif ofthe truck (defined par excellence ... for
its relation to an external space) to better signal to us, through a sort of absurdist
demonstration that her filmic universe is basically structured by the element
of enclosure" "La Problematique de l'enfermement dans l'univers filmique
de Chantal Akerman," in Chantal Akerman, Cahier 1, ed. Jacqueline
Aubenas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982), 176.
48 Thus she avoids facilely representing heterosexuality as "bad," as opposed to
the "good" lesbian relationship (Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole
[Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 132-33). In "Three Moments
toward Feminist Erotics," Fabienne Worth, remarks how without any marks of
voyeurism or fetishism, the man becomes the object of the female gaze in the
film's second part (paper presented at the annual conference ofthe Society for
Cinema Studies, Montreal, Canada, April 1987).
49 Mayne and Worth both remark on this exception.
50 Mayne, "The Woman at the Keyhole," 130.
51 Narboni, "Le Quatrieme Personne," 7.
52 Andre Bazin, "La Mort tous les apres midi," in Qu'estce quele Cinema?, vol. 1,
(Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958), 70.
53 Narboni lists, as elements that announce the film's "closeness to the porn" and
to its "ruin," the use of long takes, the amplified noise track, the filmmaker's
presence in a homosexual scene, and its corruption of the "glorious eternity of
porn sex scenes" by introducing the sex scenes through a laconic commentary
in off: "She told me I should leave in the morning." This commentary also
"interdicts, ... all the pathetic connotation attached to the idea of precariousness
and fugacity." Narboni, "Le Quatrieme Personne," 7.
54 See Narboni, 7.
238 Notes to Chapter 4
55 The filmmaker states: "One tends to represent love between women as young
adolescents of David Hamilton photographs." Akerman. "Ie tu il e11e."
56 Mayne, "The Woman at the Keyhole," 132.
57 Mayne, 130.
58 Akerman, "Entretien Avec Chantal Akerman."
59 Brenda Longfellow. "Love Letters to the Mother: The Work of Chantal Akerman,"
in Canadian/ournaI ofPolitical and Social TheoI}' 13.1-2 (1989), 86.
60 Other writings on the film that heavily resort to psychoanalysis are Fabienne
Worth's "Ie tu il e11e: Three Moments toward Feminist Erotics"; and Francoise
Aude's "Le Cinema de Chantal Akerman. la nourriture, Ie narcissisme. !'exil,"
in Chantal Akerman. Aude's article is especially heavy-handed in its analysis
of the characters' behavior: the "bulimics of sugar" and the "avidity" with
which the sandwich prepared by the female lover is eaten "translate a fundamental
disequilibrium: that of anorexy." She reads the reference to menstrual
period in the film's first part as the start of a normal life after the "amenorreiac"
loss of temporal parameters for the character. In this optic the film's third part
can only confirm the first part, by having Julie establish her narcissistic complement
through a female lover who feeds her. As Judith Mayne remarks in a
footnote, Aude's analysis is "instructive" for the overly "developmental" reading
of /e tu il elle providing "more than a tinge of homophobia." The conclusion
ofthe film "demonstrates" according to Aude. the necessity for separation
and departure." Mayne, "The Woman at the Keyhole," 244.
61 Mayne, 127.
62 Mayne, 133. See Aude. "Le Cinema de Chantal Akerman."
63 Mayne, 133.
64 Emile Benveniste. "Subjectivity in Language," in Critical TheoI}' Since 1965,
ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University
Press. 1986), 730.
65 Benveniste, 730.
66 Narboni, "Le Quatrieme Personne," 10-11.
5 "Her" and Jeanne Dielman: Type as Commerce
1 Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (London: Hillway Publishing Co..
1950), 145.
2 Mytheme is a neologism by Fernand Braudel. Following an ethnographic reflection,
it refers to historical invariables. elementary traits that persist within
the longue duree. As cited by Michel Vovelle in "A Hist6ria e a Longa durar;:ao,"
in A Hist6ria Nova, ed. Jacques Ie Goff (Sao Paulo: Livraria Martins
Fontes Editora, 1990),83.
3 Bazin, in a footnote to "An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism," in What is Cinema?
vol. 2. trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
21,22.
4 Pascal Bonitzer, "Neorealismo, Quale Realismo?" in 11 Neorealismo Cinematografico
Italiano: Atti del convegno della X Mostro Internazionale Del Nuovo
Cinema, ed. Lino Micciche (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1975). 225 (my transla-
tion).
Notes to Chapter 5 239
5 Likewise, the need for this validation of the working class as protagonist issues
from the sense of an impending socialist revolution after World War II.
6 Andre Bazin, "A Note on Umberto D," in What is Cinema? vol. 2, 77.
7 Jean Luc Godard, "One Should Put Everything into a Film," in Godard on
Godard, 2d ed. ed. Tom Milne (New York: a da Capo Press, 1972), 239.
8 Prendergarst argues that the issue of representativeness and type can indeed be
considered a matter of police. His first example is the prosecutor's argument
during the trial of Madame BovaIY: "Flaubert's ... blasphemous intention lay
in the fact that ... Emma's commingling of religious and erotic feelings ...
could not conceivably be deemed an accurate representation ofthe psychological
condition of girls educated in the French convents." The second is Brecht's
account of "his meeting with the official Censor to discuss the suicide incident
in the film Kuhle Wampe. ... To Brecht's claim that the episode was based on a
documented case, the Censor replied that he had no objection whatsoever to its
depiction as an isolated incident; what was not acceptable was the film's implication
that the despair the suicide evokes might correspond to a 'typical'
state of affairs: as Brecht sardonically concluded: 'He had read us a little lecture
on realism. From the stand point of the police'" (The Order of Mimesis
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 40).
9 Jean Luc Godard. "My Approach in Four Movements," in Godard on Godard,
239.
10 Godard, "My Approach in Four Movements," 239.
11 Georg Lukacs, "Intellectual Physiognomy," in Writer and Critic and Other Essays,
ed. and trans. ArthurD. Kahn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1971), 154.
12 Lukacs, "Intellectual Physiognomy," 154.
13 Lukacs, "Intellectual Physiognomy," 154.
14 Lukacs, "Narrate and Describe," in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, 131.
15 Lukacs, "Narrate or Describe" and "Intellectual Physiognomy" (1936) and Michael
Fried's "Art and Objecthood" (1967), roughly frame my consideration on
the decentering power of description. Consistent in both critics' work is an
outrage against what was felt as an antihumanist movement in representation.
What seems endangered in the equivalence promoted by description and by
literalness is the notion of a center whose homology with subjectivity is perceptively
denounced in the theoretical essays on the New Novel. Lukacs, in
Writer and Critic and Other Essays and Fried, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968).
16 See J. L. Godard's "My Approach in Four Movements."
17 Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in
History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
18 Nouvel Observateur issues 71 and 77 from 29 March and 10 May 1966, reprinted
in CAvant Scene du Cinema 70 (May 1967), 46.
19 From extracts of a dialogue published in Lettres fraIll;:aises on 3 November
1966-"Ou va not[() civilisation," L'Avant Scene du Cinema 70.
20 Colin MacCabe, Laura Mulvey, "Images of Woman, Images of Sexuality," in
Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics, ed. Colin MacCabe (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980), 87.
21 MacCabe and Mulvey, 94.
240 Notes to Chapter 5
22 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971), 73.
23 William Empson, The Structure ofComplex Words (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and
Littlefield,1979), 39 and 321.
24 Claude L~vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, trans. Claire Jacobson
and Brooke Grundfest (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 61.
25 Christine Brooke-Rose, "Woman as Semiotic Object," in The Female Body in
Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1986).
26 Brooke-Rose, 308.
27 John Kreidl,/ean Luc Godard (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980).
28 Kreidl,180.
29 See Kreidl's chapter "Godard, Women and the Metaphor of Prostitution."
30 Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1964),87.
31 Godard's film stands at that delicate juncture where the reproduction of a
"compacted doctrine" can be taken as his acceptance of such a reality (in
which case he would be a mythmaker) or as a means ofmaking this represented
reality available for critique.
32 Among several others reflecting on the "natural" sign in Godard's films see:
Alfred Guzzetti's Thro or Three Things I Know about Her: Analysis of a Film
by Godard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Marie-Claire
Ropars Wuillemier, "Form and Substance, or the Avatars of the Narrative," in
Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S. Brown (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall,
1972); Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature from D. Quixote to J. L.
Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Susan Sontag, "Godard,"
in Styles ofRadical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).
33 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 59.
34 Barthes, Roland Barthes, 59.
35 Barthes, Roland Barthes, 59.
36 Barthes, Roland Barthes, 59. Barthes goes on to say that "it is ... the only
position which the subject can assume without falling into two inverse but
equally abhorrent images: that of the egoist ... and that of the saint."
37 The image of housewife-hooker as a mythical incarnation ofCapital is fed by a
series ofsatellite data: the series of women complaining about their life conditions
in a documentary, cinema v~rit~ format certify the myth: its raison d'iltre
(to pass for truth) is verified by the alibi of multiple "witnesses."
38 In this context it is important to rethink how the practical implications of a
prostitute's life in Jean Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie (1962) are presented. Godard's
treatment of this scene constitutes an acknowledgment of this reality's
more complex social register.
39 Jacqueline Aubenas-Bastie, "68-78: Dix ans de Feminisme en Belgique," in
Les Femmes et Leurs Maitres, ed. Jacqueline Aubenas-Bastie, with a preface by
Maria A. Macciocchi, S~minaire Paris VIII Vincennes (Paris: Christian Bourgois
Editeur, 1978), 314-20.
Notes to Chapter 5 241
40 See Les Temps Modernes 333/334, issue Les Femmes s'entetent (April/May
1974).
41 Nicole, "Les Pommes de Terre," Les Temps Modernes 333/334 (April/May
1974): 1732-35.
42 See Marsha Kinder's illuminating analysis in "Film and the Subversive Potential
ofthe Iterative," Film Quarterly43.2 (Winter 1989-90), 8.
43 Akerman, "La Vie, il faut la mettre en scene," interview by Marie-Claude
Treillou, Cinema 206 (February 1976), 90.
44 Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap,
1964),43.
45 Serge Daney et aI., "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Fram;:ais," Cahiers du
Cinema 257 (May-June 1975).
46 Eric de Kuyper. "L'Aphasie du Quotidien: (A propos de Jeanne Dielman)," (:a
Cinema 14 (1st trimester, 1978), 27.
47 de Kuyper, 29.
48 de Kuyper, 29.
49 de Kuyper, 29. Jeanne's social function as a character is to provide a critique of
women's role in society. As played by Seyrig, however, Jeanne is meant to question
an objectifying cinematic representation. As Akerman states: "They've
accused me of degrading her. But it is as a mythical woman that she is degraded.
Because there (in other films) one makes a woman-object without confessing.
I made a woman object but ... consciously." Akerman in statements
gathered by Marie-Claude Tremois in "A partir de quelques images de man
enfance," Teierama 1357 (14 January 1976).
50 Akerman, "La Vie, il faut la mettre en scene," 90. Akerman rebels against
another misconception about the housewife type. "Why have I chosen her
pretty? Because men always imagine that the women who are at home are ugly.
My mother is pretty" (90).
51 Akerman, "A partir de quelques images de man enfance," 67.
52 Akerman, "A partir de quelques images de man enfance," 68.
53 Amy Taubin, "A Woman's Tedium," Soho Weekly News (25 November 1976),
31. B. Ruby Rich criticized Taubin's "reformist position" which has forced
Taubin into a reading of the film "limited by notions of realism that she, as an
avant garde critic, would have ordinarily tried to avoid." Rich, "In the Name of
Feminist Film Criticism," in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols
(Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1985), 346.
54 Jonas Mekas as cited by B. Ruby Rich. "Why did she have to ruin the film by
making the woman a prostitute and introduce the murder at the end, why did
she commercialize it?" Rich, 346.
55 Loader, 338. In response to this sort of comment I quote Akerman: "I never
thought 'Oh I'm going to talk about women's alienation.' I had the idea ofthe
story in its totality from the start: I am going to tell that this woman is like this
and this, etc.... After, when the film was finished, I realized I spoke about
women's alienation, something I wouldn't even have thought in the start"
(statements collected by Jose Vieria Marques, in press-book ofJeanne Dielman
in Festival de Figueira da Foz, Berlin, July 1975).
242 Notes to Chapter 5
56 John L. Lyons, Exemplum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 26, 32.
57 Brenda Longfellow, "Love Letters to the Mother: The Works of Chantal Akerman,"
Canadian Journal ofPolitical and Social TheOI}' 13.1-2 (1989), 84. John
Pym states, "At the end Jeanne registers not as a woman who has finally 'liberated'
herself by breaking the mould of her life, but rather as a mistery and very
probably a deranged mistery" (Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles," Monthly Film Bulletin [Great Britain146.543 [April 1979], 72).
6 Forms of Address: Epistolary Performance, ""analogue, and Bla, Bla, Bla
1 Caroline Champetier, "Rencontre avec Chantal Akerman: Les Rendez-vous
D'Anna, Cahiers du Cinema 288 (May 1978), 53. Akerman is referring to Delphine
Seyrig's tone as she reads a letter in Jeanne Dielman.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
3 Brenda Longfellow, "Love Letters to the Mother: The Works of Chantal Akerman,"
Canadian Journal ofPolitical and Social Theory 13.1-2,1989.
4 Akerman has claimed that the rhythm of her mother's letters is not that of the
French language but of Yiddish, and that she tried to keep this rhythm in her
reading of the French version of the film. See "Getting Ready for The Golden
Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal Akerman by Gary Indiana," Artforum
21.10 (Summer 1983), 57.
5 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1985).
6 Derrida, The Ear, 51.
7 Derrida, The Ear, 51.
8 See Jaques Derrida, "The Theater of Cruelty and The Closure of Representation,"
in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978.
9 Akerman, in Champetier, "Rencontre avec Chantal Akerman: Les Rendez Vous
D'Anna," 54.
10 Akerman, in Champetier, 54.
11 Akerman, in Champetier, 54.
12 In fact this is the same sort of frontality that one sees in classical Hollywood
cinema. It is the extension of the monologues, the avoidance ofreaction shots,
the extreme emphasis on the text and its very content that creates a real differ-
ence.
13 Robert Langbaum, The Poetry ofExperience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern
Literary Tradition (New York: Random House, 1957), 147. He also states
that with the dramatic monologue there is no conclusion, for it lacks the logical
completeness of soliloquy and of dialogue. It is in fact only one voice of the
dialogue, and no reversal of perspective is, therefore, available (155, 156).
14 Langbaum, 156.
15 Langbaum, 182.
16 Langbaum, 88.
17 Chantal Akerman, "Entretien avec Chantal Akerman," in Chantal Akerman,
Cahier 1, ed. Jacqueline Aubenas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982), 14.
Notes to Chapter 7 243
18 Akerman, "Entretien avec Chantal Akerman," 14.
19 Franz Kafka, The Diaries 0/ Franz Kafka, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York:
Schocken Books, 1948), 27-28.
7 Tha Rhythm of Cliche: Akerman into the '90s
1 Chantal Akerman, "Toute une nuit," in Chantal Akerman, Cahier 1, ed. Jacqueline
Aubenas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982), 179.
2 See Akerman, "Entretien avec Chantal Akerman: Fragments Bruxellois," interview
by Alan Philippon, Cahiers du Cinema 341 (1982), 20.
3 Benning's 11 x 14 presents a primarily formal narrative conception: the road's
accumulation of ever new sites, ever new events within a series, creates the
pretext for a disjunctive narrative. The limited recurrence ofcharacters and the
black leader that divides the shots establish the film's tension between a protonarrative
and a series.
4 William Uricchio, Ruttmann's Berlin and the City Film to 1930 (Ph.D. diss.,
New York University, February 1982), 223.
5 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 369.
6 Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1981),211.
7 See E. Richard Sorensen and Allison Jablonski, "Research Filming ofNaturally
Ocurring Phenomena: Basic Strategies," Principles o/Visual Anthropology, ed.
Paul Hockings (The Hague and Paris: Mouton Publishers, 1975), 154.
8 As Catherine Russell points out in a conversation, one cannot overlook the
centrifugal connotations of "escape."
9 Marsha Kinder, "The Subversive Potential ofthe Pseudo-iterative," Film Quarterly
43.2 (Winter 1989-90), 15. Kinder's use of Gerard Genette's terminology
to account for figures of recurrence (the iterative) or singularity (the singulative),
and her analyses of Toute une nuit's strategic opposition to the singulative
thrust of conventional narrative, are provocative. Her analysis of Akerman's
work alongside two neorealist films also follows a strategy similar to the
one I developed in my comparative study of neorealism and Akerman.
10 Kinder, 15.
11 The evidence ofNight and Day notwithstanding, Akerman's cinema is neither
paradoxical nor absurdist. When Julie and Jack start hearing their neighbors'
voices, the sounds' echo-quality suggests a representation of subjective imagination
that is quite alien to Akerman's usual approach, which creates an unfamiliar
reality through a linear, albeit elliptical, realism.
12 When first released in the United States, Akerman's French film Les Annees
Quatre Vingts (The Eighties) was titled The Golden Eighties (1983), a mistranslation
that created some confusion with her next film's title which was
The Golden Eighties, an English title for France. The second film from 1986
was then titled Window Shopping for distribution in the United States.
13 Akerman, "La Galerie," in Chantal Akerman, 116.
14 See Susan Barrowclough, "Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception,"
Monthly Film Bulletin (Great Britain) 51 (April 1984), 104.
244 Notes to Chapter 7
15 Robert Alien, Speaking ofSoap Operas (Chapel Hill and Londrin: University of
North Carolina Press, 1985), 65. Several elements are striking in the parallel
between The Eighties and the soap opera: the increased scale of the characters
in relation to the background, the syntagmatic openness, and the paradigmatic
complexity.
16 Allen, 69, 72, 65.
17 Allen, 66.
18 Allen, 70.
19 Allen, 70. See also Charlotte Brunsdon, "Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera," in
Imitations of Life: A Reader of Film and TV Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
20 See Jane Feuer, "The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,"
in Genre: The Musical, cd. Rick Altman (London: Routledge, 1981), 159-74.
21 The film seems to aspire to the borderline status of the dialogue in Jacques
Demy's Lola (1960). The naming of the protagonist "Lili," and the dissonant
chant and dance around this sorceress's name, are only the most blatant clues.
22 See Richard Dyer, "Entertainment as Utopia," in Movies and Methods, vol. 2,
ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 220-32.
23 See Alain Lacombe, "I:Ecran Chanteur," L'Avant Scene du Cinema 369 (March
1988), 4-72.
24 Akerman, "Rencontre avec Chantal Akerman: Les Rendez Vous D'Anna," Interview
by Caroline Champetier, Cahiers du Cinema 288 (May 1978), 54.
25 I would like to thank David Jacobson for his suggestion that I read Mary Wigman's
writings in connection with Akerman's "expressive Jewishness."
26 Mary Wigman, The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings, ed. and trans. Walter
Sorell (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 155.
27 Wigman, 156.
28 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 21.
29 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka. 23.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 22, 23.
31 Akerman, in conversation with the author, January 1987.
32 Akerman, "Le Manair et Le Domaine," in Chantal Akerman, 143.
33 See Theodor Reik, Jewish Wit (New York: Gamut Press, 1962): "Talmudic texts
treat punctuation and sentence structure very casually so that a statement can
be read in a positive or negative sense. can express an assertion as well as a
doubt" (204).
34 A Filmmaker's Letter (1984) is another example of Akerman's interest in explaining
and presenting her own identity, precisely the issue she holds at bay
in other work.
35 Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's "D'Est" is a multimedia installation
programmed for exhibition in the United States, France, Belgium, Germany,
and Spain. starting in 1995. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration
between the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Kathy Halbreich and Bruce
Jenkins) and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu du Paume in Paris. The financial
support for the filmic material to be used in the exhibition was obtained from
several European networks. and Akerman traveled to Poland and to East Ger-
Notes to Conclusion 245
many with a small crew in the summer of 1992. One year and two trips later
D'Est was concluded and premiered to broadcast audiencf)s in Europe and at
major international film festivals. Kate Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins, introduction
to the exhibit catalog of Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's "D'Est,"
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1995.
36 Kathy Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins, 8.
37 The project was first mentioned to Akmman in 1989 (Halbreich and Jenkins, 8).
38 Hoberman points to the affinity of Akerman's project with "the more underground
American filmmaker Peter Hutton who has made silent "city symphonies"
in Budapest, the former Leningrad and Lodz" ("Have Camera, Will
Trave!," Premiere [July 1994], 38).
39 Akerman, quoted in Annick Peigne-Giuly, "Face-a-face avec L'Est," Liberation,
18 September 1993.
40 Akerman as quoted by Peigne-Giuly.
41 Catherine David, "D'Est: Akerman's Variations," in Bordering on Fiction:
Chantal Akerman's "DEst, " 58.
42 Poems of Akhmatova, trans. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Boston and
Toronto: Little Brown, in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973),
99.
43 Akerman, press-book for D'Est.
To Conclude: It I. Time
1 The cliche is characterized by being "not only 'detached' [from its context] but
also 'frozen' in the time and space from which it originates." Laurent Jenny,
"Structure et Fonctions du Cliche: A Propos des Impressions d'Afrique," Poetique:
Revue de theorie et d'analyse litteraire (Paris), 12,498.
2 See the Princeton Enc.yclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 407-8.
3 Eric de Kuyper, "L'Impossible Melodrame," in Chantal Akerman, Cahier 1, ed.
Jacqueline Aubenas (Brussels: Atelier des Arts, 1982), 120.
4 As Alain Lacombe succinctly puts it, song "translates the presence of the public
into the interior of the film's development" ("L'Ecran Chanteur," L'Avant Scene
du Cinema 369 [March 1988], 5).
5 See Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B.
Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), chapter 1.
6 For further discussion of Leslie Thornton's magnum opus, see Linda Peckam,
"Total Indiscriminate Recall: Peggy and Fred in Hell," Motion Picture 3.1-2
(Winter 1989-90). For a discussion of Peggy Ahwesh's mobilization of children's
mimicry, see Ivone Margulies, "After the Fall: Peggy Ahwesh's Verite," in
the same issue of Mation Picture.
7 Given Akerman's feminist allegiances, the affinity between her strategy of hyperrealist
cinematic naIvete and the strategy of mimicry advocated by Luce
Irigaray is highly suggestive. According to Irigaray, "To play with mimesis
is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse,
without allowing htlrselfto be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit
htlrself-inasmuch as she is on the side of the 'perceptible,' of'matter'-to
246 Notes to Conclusion
'ideas,' in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine
logic, but so as to make 'visible,' by an effect of playful repetition, what was
supposed to remain invisible: the coverup of a possible operation of the feminine
in language." Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine
Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76. For Mary Ann Doane, "the
ability to enact a defamiliarized version of femininity" in the "women's films"
of the 1940s is analogous to this strategy; in this respect Doane's notion of
"doubling" is also relevant to my understanding of Akerman's distancing tactics.
See Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987), 182.
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INDEX
Absurd nominalism. See Minimalism(ist):
and absurd nominalism
Adams, Parvcen, 16
Adorno, Theodor, 211
Adynata, 100
Aesthetics ofhclerogcneity, 11, 56,
103-4,105-8,133,137; via juxtaposition,
57, 64, 103, 106-8, 185; via
juxtaposition and allusion, 169. See
also Anti-illusionism; Brecht, Bertolt;
Godard, Jean-Luc; Rainer,
Yvonne
Aesthetics of homogeneity, 11, 39, 56,
57-58,59,63,67,75,80,87-88,92,
94-95,104,118,126,133,172,175,
225 n.36, 228 n.7
Ahwesh, Peggy, 108, 212
A-individual, 18, 121, 126
Akhmatova, Anna, 200
Alice in the Cities, 162
Alienation: Brechtian, 54, 58, 153, 154;
cinematic effect of. 40, 69,124,145-
46,163; postwar, 26-27, 33-34, 132-
37; women's, 241 n.55
Allegory, 22, 107-8, 137-38, 144, 205
Allen, Robert, 185
Alphaville, 20, 35. 57, 84
Andrews. Bruce, 107
Animism, 89-92, 98
Annales school, 9, 12-15, 24
Ann-Margret, 191
Anthology Film Archives, 3,48
Anti-anthropomorphism, 70, 132
Anti-essentialism(ist), 61, 110,124,144
Anti-illusionism(ist), 5, 8,11,43.54-
55,58-59,61,68,83,138,188,210.
See also Aesthetics ofheterognneity;
Brecht, Bertolt; Godard, Jean-Luc;
Rainer, Yvonne
Antinaturalism, 11, 47, 48, 54, 56-58,
100,103,106,120,146,172,189,
193,210
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 24
Aragon, Louis, 25
Arestrup, Niels. 120
Arthur, Paul, 107-8
Aubenas-Bastie, Jacqueline, 140
Au hasard Balthasar, 155
Automatism, 56, 64, 73, 92. 97. 146
Automaton, 56, 64, 88, 90-91, 97-98
Autonomy, 90, 92, 95
Avant-garde film. See Experimental!art
film
Ayfre, Amedee, 28-29
Back and Forth, 53, 82
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 105. See also Dialog-
ism
264 Index
Balynt, Ezther, 195
Banal(ity), 4, 8, 10, 11, 21-22, 36, 39,
93,98,158,174,178,186, 188. See
also Dailiness; Everyday life; Mundane;
Quotidian; Woman's quoti-
dian/routine
Bartenieff, George, 195
Barthes, Roland, 9, 32, 33-35, 39, 48,
70,105,128,137-39,150,178,237
n.42
Bataille, George, 109
Baudrillard, Jean, 34, 48, 222 n.48
Bausch,Pina, 181,189
Bazin, Andre, 8, 9, 21, 23, 25, 27-32,
35,39,40,51,59,62,80,122,129,
133-34
Beauty #2, 40
Beckett, Samuel, 15,56,72,93,193,
206
Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 2, 80, 83
Benjamin, Walter, 108
Benning, James, 44, 46, 47,53,175,243
n.3. See also Hyperrealism; Minimalism;
Serial structure
Benveniste, Emile, 126
Bergson, Henri, 97
Bergstrom, Janet, 6
Berlin, Symphony ofa Great City, 176
Bicycle Thieves, 40
Blanchot, Maurice, 21, 24
Bloch,Marc, 14, 25
BlowJob,38
Blue Angel, The, 189
Bonitzer, Pascal, 59, 129
Borden, Lizzie, 101
Bordwell, David, 62
Brakhage, Stan, 32, 234 n.13
Brando, Marlon, 54
Braudel, Fernand, 24
Breathless, 20, 35, 83
Brecht, Bertolt, 48. 54-57.58-59.62.
109,131.153.225 n.34. 239 n.8. See
also Aesthetics ofheterogeneity; Alienation;
Anti-illusionism; Quotation
Brechtisme, 59
Bresson. Robert, 11. 20. 24. 31-32.40.
44.47,56.57-58.60,61,62,63-64,
100.146, 155, 164, 225 n.36, 225-26
n.45, 227 nn.67-69. See also Aesthetics
of homogeneity; Corporeal
cinema; Layering ofregisters; Realism,
modern cinematic; Theatricality
Bride, the Pimp and the Commedienne,
The, 57
Brooke-Rose, Christine, 136
Browning. Robert, 157
Burch, Noel, 28, 228 n.8
Burke. Kenneth, 65
Cage, John, 50
Cahan, Abraham, 195
Celine and Julie Go Boating, 52
Cezanne, Paul, 42
Chambre 1, La, 3, 52
Chambre 2, La, 3, 52-53, 172
Chelsea Girls, 38, 40, 51
Childs, Lucinda, 50
Chronicle ofAnna Magdalena Bach,
47,63
Chronicle ofa Summer (1960),22,31
Cinema novo, 22
Cinema of duration, 8
Cinema verite, 8-9, 31, 38, 40, 61,102,
221 n.39, n.41
City-symphony, 175-76
Clair, Rene, 189
Clement, Aurore, 155, 156,162-63,
167-68,173,182,187,191,206
Cliche, 19, 38, 83-87, 98,106,146,
159-61,171,174,178-79,184,185-
89,203,205,208,211,212,245 n.1.
See also Repetition
Cocteau, Jean, 62
Conner, Bruce, 57, 108
Copjec, Joan, 14,97-98
Corporeal cinema, 9,19-20,41,42,47,
50,60,61,64,212
Cunningham, Merce, 50
Cycle/cyclicality, 19, 116-17, 176, 182,
205,211-12
Dailiness, 37, 141, 189. See also Banal(ity);
Everyday life; Mundane;
Quotidian; Woman's quotidian/rou-
tine
Dames du bois de Boulogne, Les, 31
Daney, Serge, 144
de Andrea, John, 91
de Beauvoir, Simone. 140
Debord, Guy, 25
de Brigard, Emile, 30
de Certeau, Michel, 34
Deconstruction, 18, 102, 103, 106-7,
139
Decorte, Jan, 160
de Duve, Thierry, 78, 93, 229 n,28
Defamiliarization, 10, 12, 60, 64,70,
72-73,107,147,160. See also Estrangement;
Making strange; Un-
canny
De-individualization, 109-10, 148
de Kuyper, Eric, 211
Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 15-16, 109, 149,
164,171,193
de Man, Paul, 96, 108
de Medeiros, Maria, 191
Demenagement, Lc (Moving in), 19,
206-10
Demy, Jacques, 186-87, 189
Deren, Maya, 234 n.13
Derrida, Jacques, 29, 152. See also Ecriture;
Repetition
De Sica, Vittorio, 21, 24, 129
D'Est (From the East), 10, 19, 172, 173,
192,194,199-203,211,244-45 n.35
Dialogism, 105, 235 n.17. See also
Bakhtin, Mikhail
Dialogue-qua-monologue. See Forms of
address; dialogue-quamonologue/talk
blocks
Diary films, 3
Diary ofa Country Priest, 47, 62, 63
Dietrich, Marlene, 189
Direct cinema, 9, 20, 31, 37-38, 176
Distanciation, 59, 106, 163, 188. 195
Doane, Mary Ann, 89
Donkey Skin, 187
Dreyer, Carl, 20,44,47,58,60,61-62,
63,225-26 n.45. See also Aesthetics
of homogeneity; Corporeal cinema;
Layering of registers; Realism, modern
cinematic; Theatricality
Duchamp, Marcel, 10
Dupont Lajoie, 144
Duras, Marguerite, 54, 100, 152, 182
Duration, 9, 10, 21,28,37-38,44,49,
51,58,59-60,66,68.72,73,115,
172,176. 204, 211,212;extended,3,
4,5,7,9,23.36,40,44-47,61,69,
71,77,122,212. See also Real-time
Eat, 37, 38
Ecriture, 153. See 0150 Derrida; Repeti-
tion
Eighties, The, 19, 162, 165, 171, 172,
173,185-91,206,243 n.12
Index 265
Eisenstein, Sergei, 22, 56
11 X 14,44,53,175,243 n.3
EllipsiS, 4, 30, 31, 67, 129, 177, 179;
radical, 4, 5,19,60,74-75,197
Empire, 38, 51, 81
Empson, William, 135
Enfant aime ou je joue ii etre une
femme mariee, L' (The Beloved child.
or I play at being a married woman),
68
Equivalence of events, 23, 24, 65, 66,
75,82,88,93,96-97,109,239 n.15
Essentialism(ist), 18, 22, 56, 102-3,
107,110,123-25,143,147
Estes, Richard, 45, 49
Estrangement, 10,46,160,199,206,
231 n.56. See also Defamiliarization;
Making strange; Uncanny
Ethnographic cinema/film, 7-8, 19,
119,176,199,203
Everyday life/Everyrlay(ness), 4,7, R-
9,15,21-27,33,48-49,50,103,
133-36,142,193; women's, 41. See
also Banal(ity); Dailiness; Mundane;
Quotidian; Woman's' quotidian/rou-
tine
Existentialism, 9, 24, 26, 27. 28, 36
Experimental/art film, 3, 5, 10, 19. 25.
32,47,48,68,101-3,108,142,172,
177,185,210
Family Business: Chantal Akerman
Speaks about Film, 162
Farber, Manny, 52, 80-81
Farge, Arlette, 13
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 57
Febvre, Lucien, 14, 25
Fellini, Federico, 12
Female spectator, 7
Femininity, 134-36
Feminism(ist), 4-8,11-18,24,41,
100-2,105-6,108,133,140,142-43,
146,148; aesthetics, 99; cinema/film,
4,5,101; documentary, 4,18,101,
102,106,108,148; experimental
film, 101; film criticism, 6, 12, 94-
95; psychoanalytic theory, 6; s(lcond
phase of, 101-2; studies. 14. See also
Women's cinema/film
Feminist history, 13. See also Micropolitics;
Women's history
Femme marhie, Une, 131
266 Index
Film about a Woman Who . .. ,103
film in which there appear sprocket
holes, edge lettering, dirt particles,
etc., 51
Filmmaker's Letter, A, 18, 149, 161,
162,163,166-70
Flaubert, Gustave, 131
Fluxus,50
Fonda, Henry, 20,35
Forms ofaddress: "bla, bla, bla," 149,
155,193; description, 18, 149, 153;
dialogue-qua-monologue/talk
blocks, 17, 19,47,63,74, 130, 145,
153-57,172,191; direct/frontal, 43,
53,54-55,57,58,60-61,102,115,
119-20, 121,137,143,160;mono-
logue,7,18,58,110,118,119,145,
149,150,153-59,164,182,198,203,
207,209,242 n.13; letters/writing,
15,18,117-18,124,125,145,149-
53,155,158-59,162,164,170,191,
194; posed indifference/selfabsorption,
53, 55, 115; singing/song,
185-93,195,205,211-12; soliloquy,
157,242 n.13; storytelling, 18, 149,
161,195-98,212; voice-off, 161, 168;
voice-over, 2, 64,110,113-15,117,
118,120,121,151,153,156,164,
168,182,184,196,200,206
Forti, Simone, 50
Foucault, Michel, 12-13, 14-15, 105,
109. See also Micropolitics
Frampton, Hollis, 51, 83
French New Wave, 184, 192
Freud, Sigmund, 90-91, 97, 98,231
n.56
Frey, Sammy, 207-10
Fried, Michael, 49,54-55,239 n.15
Full Moon in Paris, 60
Gallagher, Catherine, 15
Garbo, Greta, 33
Gasche, Rodolphe, 107
Gehr, Ernie, 81, 89
Gertrud,47,60,61,63
Gestalt theory, 28
Gidal, Peter, 59
Ginzburg, Carlo, 13
Godard, Jean-Luc, 2, 9-10, 11, 18, 19-
20,23,25,28,32,33-36,40,43,53,
54,56,57,59,80,83,84,108,109,
128-40,142-43,146-47,156,157,
184,189,210,220 n.5, 229 n.31. See
also Aesthetics of heterogeneity;
Anti-illusionism
Golden Eighties, The, 142
Geours, J. S., 137-39
Grand Union Dreams, 50
Greenberg, Clement, 48, 49,51
Griem, Helmut, 155
Guattari, Felix, 13, 15-16, 109, 149,
164,193
Halbreich, Kathy, 199
Handke, Peter, 59, 60
Hanson, Duane, 49, 91
Harvey, Sylvia, 58
Heath, Stephen, 68
Hegel, Georg, 27
Henry V, 62
Histoires d'Ameriques (American stories/Food,
family, and philosophy),
19,192,194-99,202
Hitchcock, Alfred, 20, 35
Hotel Monterey, 3, 10,43,45,52-53,
82,172,224 n.27, 229-30 n.36
Housewife/prostitute, 12, 18, 65, 128-
29,131,139-40,142-43,240 n.37
Huillet, Danielle, 23, 24, 40, 47, 54, 57,
59,60,62,63
Humanism, 15, 23, 26, 41, 133, 136, 139
Husserl, Edmund, 28-29
Hyperrealism(ist), 7, 8, 10-12, 42, 45-
46,67-72,84,90,91,128-29,142,
143,145,188,206,212,229 n.20; in
art/painting/sculpture, 9, 45-47,
48-49, 91-92; and description, 6, 8,
22,70-72; narrative, 66-69, 83-85.
See also Photorealism; Superrealism
Identification, 6, 70, 100, 102, 104-5,
125
Identity, 16, 18, 40,101,110-12,133,
151,162-63,167; collective/social,'
16-17,100-2,104-6,109,125,131,
133,166; Jewish, 164, 169, 193-94,
197-99; sexual, 18, 111, 123-25
India Song, 100, 145, 182
In the Realm ofthe Senses, 52
Irony, 209
rai faim, j'aifroid (I'm hungry, I'm
cold), 19,146,172,191, 192
Janie's Janie, 4,148
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce,
1080 Bruxelles, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10,
11,12,17,18,22,23,37,41,44,47,
48,53,54,55,60,64,65-80,82-99,
116-17,122,127,128,130,133,
140-48,149,150,153-54,157-60,
162,165,171,172,173,178,182,
209,210,211,217 n.14, 228 n.8, 230
n.45, 241 n.49, n.55
Jenkins, Bruce, 199
Jo tu il clle (I you he she), 10, 17, 18, 50,
53,55,64,102,103,109-27,146,
148,149,153,157,158,162,165,
166,171,172,173,183,209,210,218
n.28, 237 n.42, 238 n.60
Joan ofAre, 63
Johnston, Claire, 94
Journeys from Berlinl1971 , 103,106-7
Joyce at 34, 4, 148
Judd, Donald, 49
Jules and Jim, 184
Kafka, Franz, 15-16, 164-65, 192, 193
Kane, Pascal, 144
Kaprow, Allan, 50
Katzelmacher, 52
Kazan, Elia, 54
Kinder, Marsha, 177
Kings ofthe Road, 162
Kiss, 37
Kleist, Heinrich von, 63
Koch, Stephen, 81
Krauss, Rosalind, 50, 72, 81, 93
Kreidl, John, U6
Kubelka, Peter. 32. 56, 57, 176, 234
n.13
Kuhle Wampe, 131, 239 n.8
Lacan, Jacques, 33, 97, 98, 233 n.83
Lacanian theory, 18, 103, 106
Landow, George, 51
Langbaum, Robert, 157
Langmann, Thomas, 183
Last Year at Marienbad, 145
Laurel and Hardy, 164
Layering ofregisters, 4, 11, 18, 34-35,
47,48,61-62.206; figurative/
symbolic or abstractlliteral, 3, 10,
45-47,64,82,92,96,115,126,148,
158,204
Leacock, Richard, 31
Leclaire, Serge, 109
Index 267
Lefebvre, Henri, 9. 24-27, 34, 35,48,
135-36,140,222 n.48
Left-Handed Woman, The, 59
Le Goff, Jacques, 14
Letlre de Cineaste. See Filmmaker's
Letter
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 136
LeWitt, Sol, 72
Liminality, 16-17,19,98,109-12,
118-19,121,125-26,148,162,166,
183,210
Listing. Sec Seriality
Literalness, 5-6, 23, 24, 36-37,40-41,
44,66,71,73,83-84,88,94,98,103-
4,117,122-23,158,167-69,197
Lives ofPerformers, 102,103, 104, 177
Loader, Jayne, 95, 146-47
Londez, Guilane, 183
Lonesome Cowboys, 38, 40
Longfellow, Brenda, 95,124,147,150
Lukacs, Georg, 128, 131-33, 143, 144,
239 n.15
MacCabe, Colin, 134-36
Made in USA, 35
Magnificent Ambersons, The, 80
Magritte, Rene, 169
Making strange, 72, 73. See also Defamiliarization;
Estrangement; Un-
canny
Malina, Judith, 195
Man Escaped, A, 164
Mangolte, Babette, 3,48
Manor, The. 3
Ma nuit chez Maude, 63
Man Who Envied Women, The, 102,
104,107-8,110
Man with the Suitcase, The, 18,161-
67,172,206
Marquise d'G, 63
Marshall, John, 30
Martina's Playhouse, 212
Marxism(ist), 24, 26-27, 34, 137, 139
Massari, Lea, 155
May 1968, 14, 25, 101
Mayne, Judith, 88, 89, 123-25
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 52
Mead, Margaret, 37
Meetings with Anna (1978), 10, 15, 17,
18,47,54,55,60,63,149,150,153,
154-56,159-68,171,172,191,194,
202,203,206,210,211
268 Index
Mekas, Jonas, 3
Melies, Georges, 57
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 27-28, 34,
136
Michelson, Annette, 28, 57, 81
Micropolitics, 14, 23, 41. See also Feminist
history; Foucault, Michel;
Women's history
Millett, Kate, 101
Minimal hyperrealism(ist), 4, 5, 8, 11,
20,23,37,41,43,46-47,62,64,65,
72,92,96,204,212
Minimalism(ist), 7, 10, 23, 60, 92-93,
95.108,109,112,113,117.124,125,
127,156,158,165,171.175,193,
194; and absurd nominalism, 72. 93,
117,126-27,198; in art, 11, 48-52.
60.73.78.81.92,103.231 n.62; in
performance, 50, 102-3. See also Serial
structureI seriality
Minson, Jeff, 16
Mise-en-abime, 10
Modernism(ist), 23,48-49,51.54,57,
73,106,132-33,148.182.193.235
n.21; cinemalfilm, 4, 8. 10-11. 18.
39-40,42-43.47,56.58.100,156.
See also Anti-illusionism; Realism:
modern cinematic
Monologues. 210
Morin, Edgar, 25
Morris, Robert, 49-50,73,81-82
Mosaic, 176-77
Mosaik,176
Mulvey, Laura, 101-2,105,134-36
Mundane,4,9,23,146,173.186.See
also Banal(ity); Dailiness; Everyday
life; Quotidian; Woman's quoti-
dianlroutine
Myth(eme), 33, 128, 135, 137, 139-40,
142-43,238 n.2
Naivete, 31, 209-10, 212. 245-46 n.7
Narboni. Jean, 116, 126
Nathanson, Roy, 195
Naturalism: in cinema/film, 18. 56, 58,
61,64,75. 101,144-45,154,157; in
literature, 132
Neorealism(ist), 8. 20, 21, 22. 23, 27-
28,32,36-40,43.129,134.143
New History. 12-13,25
New Left, 15
New Narrative film, 107
News from Home, 10, 15. 18. 43. 44. 46.
52-53.64,149-54.155,157,159,
162,166-67,169.170,189,194.196,
199,201-2,224 n.27
Nichols, Bill, 176
Night and Day, 19,182-84. 205. 208,
243 n.11
Nomadism, 15, 162, 164-66,167
Nostalgia, 52
Nouveau roman, 33, 49, 70
Observational cinema, 8-9, 30, 37-38
Ode to a New Pre History, 212
Olivier. Laurence, 62
One DayPina Asked Me, 181.189
One Second in Montreal, 47
On the Waterfront. 54
Orientalism, 100
Othon.63
Ottinger, Ulrike, 101
Oudart, Jean Pierre, 144
Our Hitler, 57. 220 n,5
Owens, Craig, 108
Ozu, Yasujiro, 58, 59. See also Aesthetics
of homogeneity; PostGodardian
aesthetics
Paik, NamJune, 51
Parents Terribles, Les, 62
Paris vue par . .. , 192
Paris vue par: Vingt ans apres, 192
Patterson, Patricia, 52
Peggy and Fred in Hell, 212
Penthesilea, 102
Performanceart,48,49, 50, 51, 112
Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir, Le, 189
Phenomenology, 9, 20, 24, 27-29, 34-
35,73,136
Photorealism, 11. See also Hyperrealism;
Superrealism
Piaf, Edith, 189
Pickpocket, 63
Pierrot Ie fou, 2, 80
Poni, Carlo, 13
Pop art, 9, 35, 47, 48
Porter, Cole, 189
Positivism, 30
Poster, Mark, 33
Post-Godardian aesthetics I sensibility,
11,42,58,60
Postmodernism(ist), 9,10-11,19,47,
189
Potter, Sally, 102
Privilege, 103, 108
Proxemics, 43
Psychoanalyis, 102, 106-7, 235 n.19,
235-36 n.25
Quotation, 11, 35,48,54-57,102,103,
195. See also Brecht
Quotidian, 21-26, 28, 34, 36, 38, 66,
132,135, 140, 143. See also
Banal(ity); Everyday life; Mundane;
Women's quotidian/routine
Raiders ofthe Lost Ark, 168
Rainer, Yvonne, 11, 18, 50, 57, 102-9,
110,114,177. See also Aesthetics of
heterogeneity; Anti-illusionism
"Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx
to Dennis Young) by Wilma Shoen, 52
Realism(ist), 11, 12, 128, 130, 131-32;
cinema, 4,7-9,15,21-25,27-32,39,
43,46,48,122,132,144-45,147,
189; modern cinematic, 4, 11, 17, 29,
32,47,61-63; social, 8; textual, 63
Real-time, 8, 11, 20, 24, 36-37,47-52,
61,66,69,71,73,78,82-83,87,93,
115,180. See also Duration
Redundance, 20,63-64,84,118, 120,
150-51,160,178,186
Reflexivity, 53, 59, 106, 163, 165, 210;
post-Godardian,53
Region Centrale, La, 3
Renoir, Jean, 39, 189
Repetition, 19, 36, 56, 58, 63-64, 66,
68,69,84,94,98,118,122,144,152-
53,158-59,171,181,211-12,233
n.83, 245-46 n.7; of activities/
behavior, 88,113,125-26; formal/stylistic,
78, 125-26, 146, 194;
in minimalism, 50-51, 58, 72, 125; of
situations, 74,173,l77-78;ofroutine/tasks,
26, 76, 88, 141, 143; verbal,
56, 197-98. See also Cliche;
Derrida; Ecriture
Resnais, Alain, 32
Rich, B. Ruby, 7
Riddles ofthe Sphinx, 102
Riley, Denise, 14, 100, 133
Rise to Power ofLouis XIV, The, 47,63
Rivette, Jacques, 57
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 33, 69, 70-73
Rohmer, Eric, 11, 20, 47, 55, 58, 60-61,
Index 269
63. See also Aesthetics ofhomogeneity;
Layering of registers; Realism:
modern cinematic; Theatricality
Rosen, Philip, 29
Rossellini, Roberto, 9, 11, 21, 23, 24, 28,
29-30,38-40,47,61-62,63,134.
See also Aesthetics ofhomogeneity;
Layering ofregisters; Neorealism; Realism;
modern cinematic
Rouch, Jean, 22, 24, 40
Ruttmann, Walter, 176
Salkin, Pascale, 191
Sanders, Helke, 101
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 33
Saute ma ville (Blow up my town), 1-2,
3-4,116,146,162,172,210-11,215
nA
Scary Movie, 212
Schamus, James, 63
Schor, Naomi, 91
Semiology, 24, 33
Semiotics, 36, 102
Serene Velocity, 81, 89
Serial structure/seriality, 10, 19, 50-
51,59,78,84,93,104,151,158,172-
73,175,177,184-85,189,194,197,
202,205,206. See also Minimalism
Serra, Richard, 51-52
Seven Women Seven Sins, 101, 204
Seyrig, Delphine, 64,76,79,86,97,
141,142-43,145,153,182,186,187,
241 n.49
Sherman, Cindy, 35
Shklovsky, Victor, 73, 229 n.26
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 3, 195
Singularity, 121, 126, 142, 143, 146,
148,173-74,176-78
Sitney, P. Adams, 56, 81, 176
Sleep, 37,38,46,97
Sloth: Portrait ofa Lazy Woman, 162,
204
Snow, Michael, 3, 42, 46, 47, 51, 53,
80-83,89
Stein, Gertrude, 169
Straub, Jean-Marie, 23, 24, 40, 47, 54,
57,59,60,62,63
Structural/structural minimalism(ist)
film, 3, 11, 32, 43, 47, 50, 52-53, 78,
80-83,89,152,172,174-76,223 n.9,
229-30, n.36, n.41
Structuralism, 9, 33
270 Index
Structural materialist film, 51, 58-59,
68
Subject, 16, 90, 98, 103, 104, 106-7,
109-10,126
Subjectivity, 31,103,104,106,110,
112,116,121,125,139,151,156,166
Superrealism, 7,11. See also Hyperrealism;
Photorealism
Suture, 6
Sybergerg, Hans]urgen, 23, 57
Talk blocks. See Forms of address:
dialogue-qua-monologueI talk blocks
Taubin, Amy, 146
Theatrical, 48, 49, 54, 60
Theatricality, 20, 39,42,44,47,53,55,
61,210
Theatricalization, 62, 63
Thornton, Leslie, 100, 108, 212
Three Lives, 101
Three Women, 4
Thriller, 102
Toubiana, Serge, 144
Taus les gar{:ons s'appellent Patrick,
184
Toute une nuit (All night long), 10, 19,
142,146,168,171-82,184,185,189,
205,243 n.9
Thuffaut, Fram;:ois, 184
Thrner, Victor, 112
Two or Three Things I Know about Her,
18,24,35,57,108,128-31,133-40,
142-43,146-47
Type/typicality, 4,15,17,18,22-23,
64,91,101,109,128-34,143-48,
173,178,194,239 n.8; exceptional,
140,147
Umberto D, 8, 23, 24, 39,40,129,142,
220 n.3
Uncanny, 90-92, 231 n. 56, n. 62, 232
nn.64-65. See also Defamiliarization;
Estrangement; Making strange
Un Jour Pina m'a demande (One Day
Pina Asked Me), 19
Uricchio, William, 176
Vaneigem, Raoul, 25
Van Gennep, Arnold, 111
Vertov, Dziga, 22
Vinyl,38
Viva Las Vegas, 191
Vlady, Marina, 129, 137, 143
Voyeurism, 70, 228 n.14
Warhol, Andy, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10,11,20,22,
24,35,36-41,44,46,47,49,51,53,
58,59,61-62,81,97,233 n.79. See
also Aesthetics of homogeneity; Corporeal
dn~ma; Duration; Hyperrealism;
Minimalism; Pop art; PostGodardian
aesthetics; Real-time
Wauthion, Claire, 123
Wavelength, 53, 80-83, 89
Wenders, Wim, 59, 162. See also PostGodardian
aesthetics
Wigman, Mary, 193
Williams, Linda, 115
Windfrom the East, 59
Window Shopping, 19, 172, 185, 186-
88,191,243 n.12
Wiseman, Frederick, 176
Wollen, Peter, 102
Woman's Film, The, 101. 105
Woman's quotidianlroutine, 10, 128,
130,133,139,142,216 n.13. See also
Banal(ity); Everyday life; Mundane;
Quotidian
Women's cinema/film, 5, 12. See also
Feminism(ist): cinema/film
Women's history, 13, 14. See also Feminist
history; Micropolitics
Working Girls, 101
Wrong Man, The, 20, 35
Young, Colin, 8, 30
Zavattini, Cesare, 9, 21, 23, 24, 28, 36-
37,38,129
Zen for Film, 51
Zieschler, Hanns, 155, 156
Zola, Emile, 132
Ivone Margulies is Assistant Professor in the
Department ofTheatre and Film at Hunter College, City
University of New York.
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Margulies, Ivone.
Nothing happens: Chantal Akerman's hyperrealist
everyday / Ivone Margulies.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8223-1726-5 (cl : alk. paper). - ISBN
0-8223-1723-0 (pa: alk. paper)
1. Akerman, Chantal-Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PN1998.3.A435M371996
791.43'0233'092-dc20 95-30516 CIP