Poetry, which is the preamble to all the arts, has a mysterious autonomy in relation to the powerful scale of materials, shapes, colors and sounds that followed it, not to mention if we compare it with photography and cinema. Over the last few decades, however, there have been moments of near-nuclear fusion among them. Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) starred in some. For the Belgian writer and film director, each cinematographic shot had to have the power of the letter as a minimum expression of the whole in its plastic dimension.
In each new film, Akerman started from a blank space. He did not make prior conjectures, but looked at the things around him as if he were going to photograph them, first they would be an image without representation, a framework, then a ready made. He did the same with sound: no matter how self-absorbed, these images would have music. Emotion and time would fill the scene with representation, taking care of accompanying the viewer's gaze from one side to the other. The shot, like the blank space of the poem, was the place where the filmmaker had to persist. Mallarmé says it: “The sheet of paper intervenes every time an image concludes or is reborn by itself, allowing the succession of others (…) and its appearance endures in a kind of spiritual and exact staging” (A roll of the dice will never abolish chance, 1897).
Each Akerman film begins and ends in that intimate space without giving up personal and collective memory, or the future. Hence his radical feminism. It is essential to understand his diamond confidence in feminine sovereignty if we want to value his cinema. To execute his works, he relied almost entirely on women, actresses, editors, directors, musicians: Babette Mangolte, Delphine Seyrig, the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton (who was his partner) or his mother, Nelly Akerman, a surviving Polish Jew. in Auschwitz, all contributing to an extensive filmography that we now see as scores of thought translated into silences, temporal dislocations, fugues. Features that identify his cinema for the big screen, but where they are best appreciated is in the installations, where the verse can appear off-center, high up, low down, containing other pages or screens, framed in a photographic wall or next to a object. Mallarmé was already talking about the “staging”, and this is precisely what we appreciate in this set of installations that are now on display in his exhibition at La Virreina in Barcelona.
Face the image It is the first exhibition conceived entirely by his close collaborator and editor Claire Atherton, and is made up of a dozen visual and sound pieces that invite a face to face with the ways of imagining and working of that loose verse that was Akerman, by far that it be related to the independent cinema of Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage or Michael Snow. His work is deeply individual and dreamy. Fun up close, dramatic (theatrical?) if we look at it from a little further away, overwhelming if we look at it from the side.
Like the works of Godard or Proust, Akerman's contains a hermeneutic proposal
In 2019, the Reina Sofía and the Spanish Film Library screened all of his film work, until his last installment in 2015. Not Home Movie, a declaration of love to his mother, filmed shortly before her suicide, with which he closed and sealed the circle opened in 1968 with the short film Saute ma ville. In his first 13-minute work there was already the germ that flourished seven years later with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brusselsthe best film in history according to a recent poll Sight & Sound. If in the first we saw a very young Akerman in an apartment in the suburbs of Brussels scrubbing the floor, eating, drinking wine, and in a dazed outburst, dada, she decides to seal the door with insulating tape, turn on the gas and blow everything up the airs, in Jeanne Dielman We witness for more than three hours the pathetic gestural rhetoric of a widowed housewife with a son, who has to prostitute herself to get ahead, until the final Beckettian moment, a collapse. The same year that the film was presented at Cannes, 1975, the artist Martha Rosler joined Akerman's constellation with the video Semiotics of the Kitchen, where he makes a housewife speak through kitchen utensils, exhibiting the value of the letter with the minimum expression of the word and the maximum expression of female oppression (and its sharp emancipation).
About the short The day that… (1997), Akerman writes: “I decided to think about the future of cinema, got up on the wrong foot, spilled the grapefruit juice and let my bathtub overflow. “I threw the coffee with a bad gesture and put my shirt on inside out.” This entire extraordinarily ordinary universe is contemplated in the La Virreina exhibition. There Atherton has organized the installations into fields of resonance based on a new bricolage of links and tensions between film sequences, which he composes in triptychs, superimposed screens, walls and photographic friezes around themes such as amorous encounters (Je tu il elle2007), devotion to the mother and memory of the Holocaust (Walk next to the cords2004; My mother laughs, Prelude, 2012), the contrast between the intimate (La chambre, 2007) and the collective (Night walk through Shanghai, 2009), the new historical traumas in the former Soviet republics (From the East, 1998), the racist murders in the United States (South1999) or the conflicts on the border of Mexico (A Voice in the Desert, 2002). The exhibition demonstrates that Akerman's cinema, like Godard's image albums or Proust's family album, is a hermeneutical proposal. Not even his look was innocent.
'Face the image'. Chantal Akerman. The Vicereina. Barcelona. Until april 14th.
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