The exhibition Chantal Akerman: Facing the Image, hosted by Artium Museoa in recent months, is not an exhibition about Chantal Akerman, but rather by Chantal Akerman, as its curator, Claire Atherton, a frequent collaborator with the filmmaker in editing her films as well as realising her installations, has taken upon herself to qualify. It is the filmmaker’s work that charts a course revealing an intimate experience with the moving image through space, rather than offering an interpretation of that work. A fragmented experience that addresses the breadth, complexity and depth of Akerman’s work, thereby expanding its meanings.
When discussing how to envisage a seminar around the exhibition with Arantza Santesteban, Artium Museoa’s curator of Research and Public Programmes and filmmaker, questions about words and nuances arose once again: should it be a seminar about Akerman, from Akerman, with Akerman? The choice of wording implies working from a specific perspective, framing the basis of the reflections, relationships and tensions that occurred in the seminar, which I will attempt to summarise in this text: what thinking through Akerman entails. Thinking about the way in which the forms and themes addressed by Akerman have implications beyond her work, acting as a context for relating a variety of images, ideas and sensibilities.
Based on this perspective, thinking through Akerman means engaging with her work while glimpsing how other feminist filmmakers have worked from other languages and geographies. This is not a risk-free task, for it requires letting go of the author’s hand and venturing out to propose particular tentative connections, without neglecting, of course, that the main reason for the seminar, the name at the top of the proposal, is that of Akerman, and that there exists a firm commitment to her and her work.
We could have dedicated the seminar to examining and disseminating her work, and this would undoubtedly have been interesting and valuable. Although we consider Akerman to be an revered filmmaker, one of the most important figures in contemporary cinema, we cannot ignore that there is still a reluctance to treat her as an acclaimed filmmaker in her own right.[1] Nonetheless, to coincide with the tenth anniversary of her death this year, several exhibitions and retrospectives of her work have been held in Paris, London, Lisbon, Brussels, New York and Taipei, among other places. All of them will serve to delve deeper into her legacy, demonstrating her relevance within various film-related communities, including our own. This is another reason to deviate from more authorial approaches: thinking about Akerman’s cinema alongside a community that has embraced it, as is the case with several contemporary women filmmakers who acknowledge her influence on the way in which they understand cinema.
The seminar took place between 14 and 16 July and consisted of three sessions. In the first, the editor and curator Claire Atherton spoke about her experience with Akerman and shared her though-provoking personal vision of cinema, a cross between technique and poetics. In the second, the academic and writer Erika Balsom began to explore the possible echoes of Akerman in other feminist cinemas through a programme of short films. And in the third, before the collective closing, Arantza and I set out to imagine a few connections with specific fringe cinematic practices produced in the Basque Country.
Claire Atherton’s experience is divided, on the one hand, between hands-on work on more than fifteen of Akerman’s films and installations and, on the other hand, the development of an understanding and intuition that have led her to form, almost involuntarily, a personal theory of film, a way of thinking that circulates between material work and mystical contemplation. Something of this is reflected in the title of her talk, “The Art of Editing” – also the title of a text she published at AMAonline – which translates into a personal, non-transferable account of how elements as disparate as Taoist philosophy, feminism, her connection with Akerman and, of course, chance shape her particular world.
Throughout this course, the careful editing of the film D’est (1993) assumes particular significance, as does the way in which this very same project, which originated as a museum proposal, ultimately evolved into the installation D’est: au bord de la fiction (1995), in which images multiplied and words appeared, reflected in the beautiful text that Akerman titled The Twenty-Fifth Image. By discovering the possibilities of working with installations, the materials were freed from the linearity of the story, and the images definitively became rhythm, movement and emotion above all else. This is all present in some way in the exhibition Facing the Image through a gallery made up not of film stills, but of images taken from the installation’s videos, in turn opening up to a kind of media archaeology.
A link between cinema and political commitment can be found in Atherton’s biography, given that she worked for a time at the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, a decidedly feminist centre dedicated to the archiving and production of women’s films. It was in fact through this centre that she met Akerman. Nonetheless, Akerman’s relationship with the feminism represented by such a centre was admittedly distant. For this reason, a few doubts may arise when it comes to identifying the feminist and political aspects of her work.
Atherton defends the importance of the political in Akerman’s work, not because of a question of themes or the dissemination of ideas, but rather because of the “motion” it generates. Its political quality lies in the way it shows reality, its ability to make “the invisible resonate in what is seen”. In Atherton’s words: “[Her films] put us directly in relation with the world and ourselves. Chantal didn’t want to copy reality or represent it. She didn’t want to explain anything because explanations prevent questions. In her films, the present and visible resonate with the hidden and invisible. And these resonances, these shifts, open space for thought.”
If the seminar’s approach focused on the political perspective of Akerman’s cinema, it did so not with the intention of distorting her perspectives and positions, but rather to explore precisely those often hidden spaces of thought that her work illuminates with conviction.
In her talk “Beyond Akerman: Feminist Experiments with the Moving Image”, Erika Balsom specifically offers to go “beyond” the filmmaker’s work in order to outline a constellation of practices and themes shared by several feminist cinematographies. This involves, on the one hand, exploring the broad context of feminist cinema contemporaneous with Akerman and, on the other hand, identifying certain central themes or motifs in Akerman’s filmography – Balsom highlighted, among others, domesticity, confinement, the literary, the legacy of state violence and also comedy – in order to observe how they manifest themselves in filmmaking from geographically, politically, and artistically diverse realities, activated by a critical impulse that mainly stems from feminist thought. Once again, every relationship requires having a commitment and paying attention to both aesthetic texts and social contexts in order to paint a rigorous and thought-provoking overview, as Balsom did.
Her proposal – ultimately curatorial in nature – makes explicit one of the seminar’s substantial aims: to question the category of auteur, or as Balsom puts it, to “put pressure” on it. In general, and particularly in the case of Akerman. By reflecting on its position in the histories of cinema, on the critical apparatus that has shaped its reception, Balsom points to what is perhaps the most essential idea, which is that of thinking what it means to write not only a feminist history of film, but also how to do so in a feminist manner. This inevitably leads us to decentre “auteurism” and seek other methodologies that can aid us in this quest.
Balsom chooses to displace a few hegemonic elements. It is no longer about discovering women filmmakers who make feature-length fiction films, serving as exceptions so that they can be admitted to the select Olympus of auteurs, but instead exploring other paths and taking into consideration other practices that are not exceptional within feminist action, such as video activism, the essay film and observational documentary. This profoundly affects the way in which we understand cinema and its hierarchies, as well as shedding light not only on films, but also on their production and distribution. The other would instead respond to neoliberal feminism, as Balsom argues, following Nancy Fraser and Catherine Rottenberg’s reasoning, among other women thinkers.
What, then, are we seeking in those other paths? Balsom suggests looking beyond fiction, taking into account not only documentary and experimental cinema, but also short films and non-professional formats, such as Super 8 and video. She suggests looking at women filmmakers who do not have a large body of work, but who have made a few films alongside their commitment to other activities and movements. She suggests understanding films also within the context of their production, exhibition and reception, framed within their social and political context. In short: we can shift our focus from the assumption that few women are discussed in the history of cinema because only a few women made films, and instead start by acknowledging the abundance that is there to be seen as soon as the frame of reference is changed. Testing histories of cinema that are more expansive, dispersed and less individualistic.
Balsom’s ideas thus take shape in a programme comprising six short films. Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s Schmeerguntz (1965) is an exercise in dynamic montage that tears apart the exemplary image of American domesticity, as well as linking this critique of women’s oppression to struggles against racism and war. In In (1975) and Tarefa I (1982), Letícia Parente records two performance actions that treat her own body as an object, hanging herself on a hanger in a closet and lying on a board while a black woman dressed as a maid irons her, in two pieces produced during the military dictatorship in Brazil. VALIE EXPORT harms herself in Remote… Remote… (1973), cutting the skin around her nails with an expressionless gesture and dipping her injured fingers in milk; behind her, a photograph of two abused girls evokes the never-ending “temporality of trauma”. In Nice Coloured Girls (1987), Tracey Moffatt tells a tale of Aboriginal women and white men, a story of colonialism and sexual exploitation that celebrates their autonomy and pursuit of pleasure with irony and humour rather than descending into victimhood. Finally, Mona Hatoum’s video Measures of Distance (1988) can be tied directly to Akerman’s work, because it is about several letters written by the artist’s mother to her daughter; issues such as exile, identity and distance emerge from the materiality of the text and voice in a work about the Palestinian experience that calls upon the present, amidst the genocide in Gaza.
Articulating a critical proposal through the act of programming is not only valuable, but also enormously evocative. It invites us to think about cinematic relationships beyond preconceptions, through connections, reverberations and also contradictions, an example of what it means to take images seriously and think with them.
The third session, “A Genealogy in the Making”, arose from the same desire to broaden our perspective to other cinematographies and to question recent history, in this instance through cinema produced in the Basque Country. The talk covers some of the issues that Arantza and I have previously worked on in prior research, aiming to offer a situated study of two cases of feminist cinema that exist on the margins of Basque cinema history: the films made by the video collective Les Insoumuses in the territory[2] and the precarious, inspiring work of the recently deceased filmmaker Mirentxu Loyarte. A diverse, stimulating and fragile genealogy that deserves further exploration.
Arantza alludes to Andrea Soto Calderón’s theorisation to clarify that the avenue of genealogy is not merely about “rescuing” that which has been abandoned or set aside, nor does it give voice to the “silenced”. Rather, it questions certain images that have been overlooked despite having been there in order to relate them to other historical moments and contexts, projecting other temporalities based on actual omissions.
One such moment occurred in 1975, at the end of Franco’s dictatorship, when feminist and anti-Franco movements organised a march in Hendaye to protest the execution of five activists by the Franco regime: Juan Paredes Manot (“Txiki”) and Angel Otaegi from ETA political-military, and Xosé Humberto Baena, José Luis Sánchez Bravo and Ramón García Sanz from FRAP. Two members from the Les Insoumuses collective, Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder, went there to document the demonstration with their video cameras as it moved towards the border, producing La marche des femmes à Hendaye (1975). Not only that, they also crossed the border to seek out the mothers of those who had been killed. In Les mères espagnoles (1975), Roussopoulos and Wieder present the testimonies of María Victoria, the sister of Sánchez Bravo; María Etxeberria, the mother of Otaegi; and Antonia Manot, the mother of “Txiki”. The images appearing in these videos shape a new imaginary, a representation that had not been present anywhere else.
These are political films that attempt to intervene in their historical moment, thereby distancing them from the features of Akerman’s work and the performances in Balsom’s programme. If they are part of the same constellation, it is due to the critical impulse that drives them and the sympathies they elicit. However, Arantza also indicates several formal motifs that could establish a connection between this cinema and Akerman’s. In the close-up interviews, she emphasises a political dimension of the face that enhances the power of the testimony, something that is not unrelated to the concreteness of the mise-en-scène in Akerman’s films and installations.
The power of the testimony is also evident in Ikuska 12: Euskal emakumeak (1982), one of two short films that make up Loyarte’s ephemeral filmography alongside Irrintzi (1978), to which should be added a similar number of unrealised projects. The testimony of the women interviewed in Euskal emakumeak challenges the idea that modernisation produces greater gender equality. Irrintzi is also largely based on words, declamations and bodies, albeit conjugated differently through poetry and choreographed theatricalisation.
Irrintzi premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival during a particularly eventful edition organised from the city itself rather than from Madrid, at the height of [Spain’s] political transition. While Irrintzi was being screened in the Official Section – not without controversy, as the police attempted to arrest Loyarte – in a double bill with Pedro Olea’s A Man Called Autumn Flower (1978), the San Sebastián Women’s Assembly organised a series of films directed by women, like a type of section within the festival.[3] The section was made up of 25 films produced in the 1960s and 1970s by filmmakers such as Agnès Varda, Márta Mészáros, Larisa Shepitko, Věra Chytilová and Chantal Akerman herself, including a screening of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In addition to the screenings, the series included a childcare service as well as other activities, such as talks and debates, including the participation of Loyarte and other women filmmakers. Beyond the anecdotal, the coincidence is relevant: the police pursuing Loyarte for the radical nature of her work, and feminist activists organising and debating a film by Akerman. The cinemas of Loyarte and Akerman met in time and space thanks to an unlikely intersection between a festival undergoing transformation and some feminist practices in action.
Ultimately, those trajectories that we embarked on in the seminar aimed to act as a kind of montage exercise that, by confronting certain images with each other, could reveal new possible relationships. This exercise as a whole allows us to see an indeterminate and suggestive landscape, as well as a productive methodology that will continue to contribute new elements to the discussion.
In order to continue thinking about the way we relate to filmmakers and their work, we can expand the concept of legacy, decentre “auteurism”, observe other cinemas, other formats, other movements, and project new genealogies from imagination and commitment.
It is a fascinating experience to get to know the world of Chantal Akerman and the world through Chantal Akerman. Likewise, imagining how this great body of work open to mystery can manage to converge with other cinemas in a shared project that critically subverts the apparent order of images. The motion generated by her work is the same that compels us to think about the histories of cinema politically and to do so in a collaborative manner.
[1] This is evident in some of the reactions when her film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) was proclaimed the best film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, reducing it to a mere question of political correctness.
[2] See Ros Murray and Arantza Santesteban, “Nire Amaren Etxea: Tracing Feminist Genealogies in La Marche des femmes à Hendaye, Manifestation à Hendaye and Les Mères espagnoles”. Zine: Film Research Series, 2 (2021): 5-48.
[3] See Neus Sabaté-Barrieras, “‘A wonderful ghetto’. Discovering the section Cinema Made by Women at the San Sebastian International Film Festival (1978) through the press”, Artxiboa, 2022. https://artxiboa.sansebastianfestival.com/en/research/a-wonderful-ghetto-discovering-the-section-cinema-made-by-women-at-the-san-sebastian-international-film-festival-1978-through-the-press/