chantal akerman: notes.

yrmixedfeelings:

It’s twenty years ago. My
conception of what it means to have a home is strangely mediated by the fact
that I’ve never known not having one, never had any home but this room, with
books lining the walls, my favourite ones placed so high that I’d have to stand
on the table to reach them, so they could be kept as far from the world, as
possible. I’m still afraid of the dark.

















There’s
a grotesque Minnie Mouse nightlight plugged into the wall, its eyeballs white
and worn from running my fingers over it as though it could tell me what the
future might bring. I run my fingers over the Minnie
Mouse eyeballs once, twice, thrice for luck and I go to bed. I go to bed but I
have a nightmare anyway, and I shriek like I’m dying. My dad comes running and
he tries to calm me. What’s the worst thing that could happen, he asks,
reasonably, stroking my hair. A monster under the bed? I’ll kill it with this
magic sword. An evil wizard in the closet? We’ll say a spell to wish him away. The
worst thing could happen, well, it’s not really so bad at all. 

It’s twenty years later. I’m supposed to be working, but
I’m distracted, my lover is supposed to meet me at home, but they’re a half
hour late, messy haired and callous, because they like to make me wait. What’s
the worst thing that could happen, I ask myself absently, like my father
taught me to, years ago, a method to calm myself. They could be dead. That
wouldn’t be so bad, I think to myself, uneasily, but I know that’s not true. I check my phone because
my hands feel too idle. Liz has posted on tumblr – Chantal Akerman has died.

What’s the
worst that could happen? The truth is that, while I sit
here, idle and expectant, someone that I love could leave me.

*

Chantal
Akerman’s last film is titled No Home
Movie. Home, what even is it. I’m not sure
but I know I want it. But maybe that’s just it. Home is a matter of wanting
things. It’s
about futurity, about forcing desire into a shape in which there has to be a
beginning, middle and end. ‘Going home’ necessarily means a journey. It means
finding a place to rest after all the time you’ve been roaming. One can have no
home, but the implicit suggestion is that everybody wants one, or should. No Home Movie. Say it out loud though,
short and curt, and you’ll hear the contempt in it. Home. I don’t want it. No
future. No home.

Chantal
Akerman’s first film, is titled Saute ma
ville, which literally means blow up my town. It was a film that taught me
how to breathe. A young woman, played by Chantal, arrives home. She seems to be
accomplishing a number of household tasks, she drags flowers by their stems haphazardly
through her door, she gets out any number of household items seemingly just to
put them to use, methodically, rigorously. She seems to be preparing for
something but she doesn’t know what. As she works, she hums, a sharp,
unpleasant sound piercing the banality of her movements. It seems absurd, the
tension is suspenseful but only because you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be
comic. She becomes frenzied, she looks in the mirror and tries to clean it but starts
laughing, or crying, joyously, at herself you can’t tell which. There is a
pitch that becomes unsustainable but the only person who lacks certainty about
what is about to unfold is you. The protagonist, there’s something she knows in
the brusqueness of her gestures. No home. She leans over the stove and lights
the gas on fire. There’s a bang, then black. No home movie.

*

In her post
about Akerman’s death, Liz quotes an article that speculates about the cause
for Akerman’s death, and the speculation surrounding her potential suicide
makes me queasy, a form too easily imposed on the feminine.

“Friends
said that Ms. Akerman had been in a dark emotional state after the death of her
mother last year, and that she had had breakdowns. She had recently been hospitalized
for depression…

Liz asks a
simple question, one impossible to answer –“Can we live?”

There’s a bang, and then black. But, can’t we live?

No, but somehow
Saute ma ville remains for me a form
for living. The first time I watched it, I sat back in my chair, I laughed, a
loose, pealing noise, not from happiness but from relief at its total refusal. The
thing is that for Akerman, everything – art, life, death, identity, politics,
exists in entwined architectural paradox. But sometimes all of that can be
evident in a graceful gesture of -  Saute
ma ville. Blow up my town. You will only ever get only what I choose to give.

*

Akerman films
are also a form about living, but more than living, they are about living as
waiting. They are about how living is nothing but an endless series of motions,
they are about the instrinsic nightmarishness of the present tense. It snowed for a very long time.

The sparse apartments, and streets of Akerman are never
abstract. Instead, they circle and caress the material conditions of the
void, and say This is life but is this
living? And the answer is no, mostly; and yes, sometimes. There is value in
the painful emptiness of real time, small elations and stupors in the very
fabric of it, its grooves and ridges. There’s intent and rebellion in the narrative
arcs despite the unintentional drama of how life just happens. And I waited.

I’m waiting for
my lover to come home, but they’re not yet here and I’ve moved on to imagining
who I’ll call first when I find out that yes, they’ve been in a car accident,
shorn apart by metal; yes, they were jumped upon by strangers and beaten to a
pulp; yes, that is why they are gone, all, better seeming reasons than quite
simply, they don’t want to come to me. I feel loose and unmoored, I can’t find
the ground. I try to eat something but I can’t bear it - i can’t. I tear the
tip of my fingernail delicately with my teeth.

*

Home?
It’s always been the dream. With Akerman, we are always at home but it is never
ideal. I watch Chantal in Je tu il elle,
waiting in an empty room, sweetened only with the taste of sugar,
too-temporary, too-transient. We are in Jeanne
Dielman’s apartment, trapped by the stifling domestic, we are in her city, in
New York waiting for News from Home,
amidst the traffic and the crowds, we are in the stiff and yet languidly
generous still life of La Chambre, we
are in ancestral East Germany, D’Est.
In every Akerman film, home sweet home is a void even if it remains the center
of breath, the point from which a heartbeat begins to radiate.

Watching, what
I feel strongest always remains what is unseen – some impossible place beyond –
the unspoken claustrophobia of feeling, somehow, always not at home.

*

I’m
hungry. I’m a nightmare, I’m crying and railing and collapsing into the weight
of anxiety. I can’t find the rigid inside parts of myself that remind me how
I’ll be okay. I can’t find a form. My lover finally arrives. They hold me and
tell me to settle, as though I’m a cat. But I’m sharp and defensive like a
razor, I turn my head. I’m hungry, I say and I leave the room. I eat granola
but it’s not what I’m hungry for. Akerman’s women are always hungry. I’m hungry, Anna says, ins Les rendez-vous d’Anna before she finds
another friend, another lover, even her mother to fill a void. I’m hungry, the
narrator says, in Je tu il elle, when
she visits her ex-lover after days locked in her apartment with only a bag of
sugar. More, she says, after she eats a piece of bread spread with nutella, in
big, consuming bites. In Jai’faim Jai’froid, two teenage friends careen through
the city, careless and carefree. Nothing means anything. They smoke and steal
innocently. The banal conditions of a teenage schedule, instinctive, immediate, hungry. 

*

The
architect, Richard Neutra was influenced by the pop Freudian psychology of the
1950s, fascinated by
the way in which objects and layouts in Freud’s office were designed to aid
free association. Neutra went on to develop influential architectural design based on psychoanalytic surveys he sent out to clients and sought to develop a
relationship with his clients not unlike the transferential relationship of
psychoanalysis. In an age where Freud’s psychoanalysis had become but more of
like suburban proposition, it seems unsurprising that, like Freud, many of
Neutra’s clients were unhappy women, who believe that his approach could create
curative environments for them within which they could fill a void, houses to
make them feel as though they were enveloped in the embrace of a lover. A
Neutra house become an empathetic mirror, something that gave a woman’s life
form.

 I’m hungry, but I refuse to
believe that the world could give me any form that could cure me.

*

Jai’faim, Jai’froid.
Akerman’s women might be hungry but they aren’t searching for a form. They
aren’t even looking for a time, they don’t cater to the whim of the viewer to
find a frame, a narrative, simply because they don’t need one. Instead, what
one might call the realism of these films is affective, dynamic, moves beyond.  “Queerness is not yet here,” Jose Munoz
cautioned us at the beginning of Cruising Utopia, “The here and now is a
prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing
rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”

Akerman films are not here,
they’re like Jose says, always in the there and then, never fully in the present.
They’re half memory. What she presents is only a surface upon which to stage
the affective landscape of a past. They lose as much as they find. We see always what is ghostly, what is haunting the architecture of the living even as it remains banal. To work in the present tense is also to inherit
the stolid impressions of the past. Which is to say, Akerman films build with
loss, with how it feels to be famished. When we see the two women make love in Je tu il elle, it isn’t romantic. They’re kneading at each other, fighting, and
pressing and slotting into where they can’t and pulling against the sharp
melding of their bodies into each other. What they are building aren’t bodies, or
an erotic, or even romance. Rather, they shape and reshape with and within each
other’s hunger and loss, memory and desire, both individual and with what is older than themselves, an age, ages.

I don’t want to find a
correct shape. I don’t need a cure, or a form. Because Chantal Akerman taught
me that I can build a space that responds to my desire. That cuts, or revenges
or breaks, but also that nourishes and weaves and bends. Like Jeanne says, “I want to build an architecture to inhabit with you”. Something not home, but
then and there. Not home, but somewhere else. No Home Movie. The
nowhere to which we could belong. 

- trisha