PSIFF09—25 Films Michael Hawley Would See If He Were Going To Palm Springs….

The benchmark 20th anniversary edition of the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) gets going on Tuesday, January 6 and runs until Monday the 19th. During the past two decades, this annual celebration of cinema in the California desert has established itself as the first major U.S. film festival of the calendar year. I had the great pleasure of attending as press in 2007 and 2008, but will regrettably have to miss out on 2009.

When I learned that I couldn't come this year, I vowed not to torture myself by looking at the schedule when it was announced December 27—a prohibition that lasted all of two days. The good news is that of the 80-some films still lingering on my 2008 wish list, only 25 of them are being screened at Palm Springs. The bad news is exactly the same as the good news. So here's a somewhat forlorn, section-by-section look at what I'll be missing at PSIFF 2009, along with a fervent hope that these 25 films will turn up in the Bay Area in the months to come.

AWARDS BUZZ

The first thing I noticed about this year's program is that it's considerably leaner – down to 209 features from 2007's all-time high of 252. This particular section, which compiles the submissions for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and is PSIFF's claim to fame, is no exception. Last year, 55 out of 63 possible submissions were screened, and this year it's down to 50 out of 67. Still, there's an amazing selection of films here, including nine from my list.

1. The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Germany) A historical drama about the 1960s/1970s German terrorist group RAF (Red Army Faction), starring my favorite German actor, Moritz Bleitreu as Andreas Baader.

2. Eldorado (Belgium) A junkie and a car dealer hit the road in a film that won rave reviews when it screened in Cannes' Director's Fortnight. With French boogeyman Philippe Nahon (I Stand Alone, Calvaire, High Tension) in a featured role.

3. Last Stop 174 (Brazil) Veteran director Bruno Barreto (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Four Days in September) has made a narrative feature of the events depicted in José Padilha's astounding 2002 documentary Bus 174 (about a Rio bus hijacking that became a major media event).

4. Lion's Den (Argentina) It seemed as though every major Argentine director released a new film in 2008, making it an unenviable task to choose just one for Oscar consideration. The winner was this women's prison drama from Pablo Trapero (Crane World, Rolling Family).

5. Snow (Bosnia and Herzegovina) A Bosnian village populated by war widows is the setting for this Cannes' Critics Week Grand Prize winner.

Three Monkeys (Turkey) The country's leading auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant, Climates) left Cannes with the Best Director's Prize for this familial thriller. One of the films I'm most desperate to see.

7. Tony Manero (Chile) Another must-see. In 1978 Santiago, a Saturday Night Fever-obsessed psychotic is determined to win a John Travolta look-alike contest, even if it means bumping off the competition. And during Augusto Pinochet's reign of terror, who'd notice?

8. Tulpan (Kazakhstan) A young sheepherder recently released from the army struggles to find a wife in this top prize winner from Cannes' Un Certain Regard.

9. White Night Wedding (Iceland) The latest from Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavik), whose Jar City was one of my ten favorite films of 2008.

Also screening in this section are several films I've already seen. Strongly recommended are France's Palme d'Or-winning The Class, Italy's Neapolitan mafia exposé Gomorrah and Israel's genre-busting animated documentary Waltz With Bashir (seen respectively at the SF Film Society's French Cinema Now, New Italian Cinema and SF International Animation Festival). Less successful, but still of interest are Switzerland's The Friend and Jordan's Captain Abu Raed. Austria's Revanche is one I look forward to seeing later this month at our local Berlin & Beyond festival.

If I'd found myself with extra time on my hands in Palm Springs, I might have been tempted to also look at these: Everlasting Moments, the latest from Swedish master Jan Troell (The Emigrants, The New Land); Norway's O'Horten from Kitchen Stories director Bent Hamer; Iran's The Song of Sparrows by Majid Majidi, a director I've both loved (Children of Heaven, Baran) and loathed (The Color of Paradise, The Willow Tree); Spain's The Blind Sunflowers, a Spanish Civil War film that just received a hefty 15 Goya Award nominations; and Tear This Heart Out, the big-budget historical epic Mexico bizarrely chose as its submission instead of its smaller, international prize winners.

It's worth mentioning here that the Bay Area has its own series of Best Foreign Language Film contenders at the Smith Rafael Film Center. For Your Consideration runs from January 15 to 22, and features 13 films. Unfortunately, the series runs about a week shorter than in years past, and of the 10 films mentioned above, only Eldorado has been included.

MODERN MASTERS

Three films from this section are on my list:

10. Four Nights with Anna (Poland) Jerzy Skolimowski, last seen playing Naomi Watt's uncle in Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, directs his first film in 15 years.

11. Of Time and the City (UK) Terrence Davies' (Distant Voices/Still Lives, The Long Day Closes) love/hate cinematic ode to his native Liverpool, England. Highly anticipated.

12. The Window (Argentina) I mentioned 2008's wealth of new releases from this country's top directors—here's another one, the latest from Carlos Sorin (Intimate Stories, Bombón el Perro, The Road to San Diego).

There are two additional films in this section I would also be tempted to see: Modern Life, Raymond Depardon's most recent documentary on rural living in contemporary France; Kabei, in which Yôji Yamada follows up his recent Samurai trilogy (The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade, Love and Honor) with this, his 80th feature film. There are also new films from Paul Schrader (Adam Resurrected) and Germany's Doris Dörrie (Cherry Blossoms), which I would not be tempted to see.

WORLD CINEMA NOW

It's worth noting here that the PSIFF has eliminated its Cine Latino section for 2009 (not that there's a dearth of Latin American films to be found). Also, there are no special sidebars, such as 2007's SKØL: Scandinavia and 2008's New Israeli Cinema: L'chaim! That said, World Cinema Now is where I'd be spending most of my time this year, with 12 films from my list.

13. The Desert Within (Mexico) Rodrigo Plá's follow-up to La Zona, this tale of religious madness won all the major awards at last year's Guadalajara Film Festival.

Goodbye Solo (USA) An unlikely friendship develops between a suicidal, 70-year-old white southerner and a Senegalese taxi driver half his age in this Venice FIPRESCI prize-winner from Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop).

15. Heaven on Earth (Canada) An unhappy woman in an arranged marriage enlists sorcery to solve her problems in Deepa Mehta's follow-up to 2006's Oscar-nominated Water.

16. Hunger (UK) The last six weeks in the life of Irish republican hunger striker Bobby Sands is the subject of this Cannes Camera d'or winner for best first film.

17. Il Divo (Italy) Director Paolo Sorrentino won Cannes' Prix du Jury for this saga of infamous Italian politician Giulio Andreotti.

18. It's Not Me, I Swear! (Canada) A 10-year-old boy wildly acts out against his dysfunctional family in Philippe Falardeau's follow-up to 2006's fanciful Congorama.

19. Lake Tahoe (Mexico) A small town car crash is the catalyst for this minimalist, deadpan comedy from Fernando Eimbcke, director of 2004's wildly creative Duck Season. Winner of the Alfred Bauer Award and FIPRESCI Prize at Berlin, it's the 2008 film I'm anticipating most.

20. Moscow, Belgium (Belgium) A Cannes' Critics Week favorite, in which a 40-year-old working class Mom is romanced by a young truck driver. This dramedy has been favorably compared to early works of Mike Leigh.

21. Pedro (USA) Biopic about Pedro Zamora, the openly gay, HIV-positive AIDS activist and cast member of MTV's Real World—San Francisco.

22. The Sea Wall (France) Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh (S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine) directs Isabelle Huppert in an adaptation of Marguerite Duras' novel set in 1930s Indochina.

23. Sugar (USA) Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's follow-up to Half Nelson, in which a Dominican baseball player emigrates to Iowa to play for the minor leagues.

24. Tokyo Sonata (Japan) Genre master Kiyoshi Kurosawa leaves the metaphysics behind for a different brand of modern day horror: the unraveling of a family caused by a father's loss of employment. Also highly anticipated.

I've seen two films in this section that I can easily recommend: Turkey's My Marlon and Brando and Italy's Black Sea. Cloud 9 is another film I look forward to catching at Berlin & Beyond.

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

25. Public Enemy Number One (Parts I and II) This is the epic tale of notorious French career criminal Jacques Mesrine, who was gunned down on the streets of Paris in 1979 after 20 years of bank robberies and prison breaks. Starring Vincent Cassel, with an all-star supporting cast that includes Ludivine Sagnier, Mathieu Amalric, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Consigny, Cecile de France and Gerard Depardieu.

TRUE STORIES

Another program you won't find at this year's PSIFF is the Awards Buzz: Best Documentary Features and Shorts. In recent years the festival made it a point to screen all (or nearly all) of the docs shortlisted for Oscar consideration. This year they'll only be screening three of them: Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, The Garden and Pray the Devil Back to Hell. This section contains a total of 34 documentary features, of which I can recommend two I've seen: Be Like Others and Walt & El Grupo.

There are a few remaining PSIFF sections I should touch upon. ARCHIVAL TREASURES will feature three screenings, including John Schelsinger's Midnight Cowboy. A dozen films by first or second-time directors can be found in NEW VOICES/NEW VISIONS. VALLEY VIEWS offers eight films that have a major connection to Palm Springs and the surrounding Coachella Valley, whether they were shot or take place there, or were produced or directed by a long-time resident. Finally, there are five GALA SCREENINGS, including opening nighter Last Chance Harvey and festival closer The Burning Plain, which is the directorial debut of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Babel).

Cross-published on film-415.

LEADING COUPLES

Turner Classic Movies has all their bases covered, don't they? Not only do they provide the best programming of vintage films on television (providing my main incentive for subscribing to cable); but, they also feature original programming that captures my eye, especially their interviews. As someone who is always monitoring interview technique, it's wholly instructive to watch Robert Osborne interview his guests with avuncular charm (upcoming is Osborne's "Private Screenings" interview with Ernest Borgnine on Monday, January 26, 2009, followed by screenings of Marty and From Here to Eternity). Elvis Mitchell's "Under the Influence" sessions explore the films that have influenced his guests with a refreshingly hip and maverick savvy (most recently, Edward Norton, Joan Allen, John Leguizamo and Richard Gere). Richard Schickel likewise continues his in-depth interviews, maximizing his guests' 90 minutes by deferentially structuring his absence (his most recent documentary—on the coattails of the theatrical release of Frost/Nixon—celebrated Ron Howard's 50 years in film). It pleases me that I've had the opportunity to interview all three interviewers!

Along with their creative programming, TCM's online database rivals IMdb's, and they periodically publish volumes on cinema; the most recent being Leading Couples: The Most Unforgettable Screen Romances of the Studio Era, which follows-up on their two previous collections, Leading Men and Leading Ladies. All three volumes, published by San Francisco's Chronicle Books, feature introductions by Robert Osborne and/or Molly Haskell. Andrea Sarvady authored the text for Leading Ladies, on which Frank Miller served as editor, and Miller authored the text for Leading Men and Leading Couples. These are thoroughly entertaining volumes full of lustrous photographs, rare production stills and poster art, biographical overviews with complete filmographies, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and killer quotes. (My favorite quote? Kong: Grawwwwrrr! Fay Wray: Aaaaaaaah!!!)

It seems only fitting to mention TCM's Leading Couples in the context of upcoming and ongoing San Francisco/Bay Area programming. Though, ordinarily, these "fantastic pairings" are imagined as acting duos, filmmaking as a whole is much more accommodating. For example, the pairing of actress and composer is tunefully highlighted in the current Henry Mancini retrospective running at San Francisco's majestic Castro Theatre; that pairing being—of course—Mancini with the slim-necked Audrey Hepburn, who is showcased in four Mancini ventures: Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Charade (1963), Wait Until Dark (1967) and Two For the Road (1967).

The Castro Theatre then follows suit with a Humphrey Bogart/ Lauren Bacall weekend Saturday, January 10, and Sunday, January 11, wherein To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948) will be showcased on the Castro's big screen. Bogart & Bacall are one of the duos written up by Frank Miller in Leading Couples ("The gruff cynic and the tough glamour girl were united by their freewheeling battle against anything that smacked of phoniness").

The Pygmalion pairing of actress and director—Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg—is amply represented in Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive retrospective, "Eros and Abstraction"—running January 15-February 22, 2009—in which the two limn the screen with silver through their collaborations The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is A Woman (1935). I'm reminded of Jack Smith's infamous quote: "Marlene Dietrich was Von Sternberg in drag."

CHANTAL AKERMAN—The Early Shorts

Caught the first program of early Akerman films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was quite pleased to hear their announcement that Akerman will be present to introduce SFMOMA's upcoming screening of Jeanne Dielman.

Saute Ma Ville (Blow up My Town, 1968)

When I was a young man working in the law firms, I had to negotiate the stress induced by my overflowing in-box. I was reminded of the task of the miller's daughter in the fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin". Do you recall? The miller has bragged that his daughter can spin flax into gold and the king imprisons her in a lonely cell with a huge pile of flax expecting her to do just that. I often felt that I, too, had to turn my in-box full of assignments into gold. I took refuge in something Joseph Campbell was fond of saying: that it is in the performance of our everyday tasks that our radiance shines through.

Of course, all these years later I have to admit that radiance goes only so far. Responsibility goes only so far. Every cultural ideal is complicated by inherent personal limitations and issues of adherence. I can now read the story of "Rumplestiltskin" as a cautionary tale of what happens when the patriarchy (fathers, kings, lawyers, judges) tells a young woman (or a young man for that matter) what she (or he) can, must or should do. In the face of such patriarchal presumption, obedience might be the first option, but inevitably anarchic resistance becomes the abiding temptation.

Allegedly inspired by Akerman's chance encounter at 15 with Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou—and, indeed, somewhat of an homage to Godard—Saute Ma Ville is an amusing, exuberant and alluringly anarchic sing-song, subsidized—Wikipedia reports—"from shares she sold on the Antwerp diamond exchange, procuring its remaining budget through clerical work." In 1971 the film premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival. At L.A. Weekly, Scott Foundas suggests Akerman's performance is as much an homage to Anna Karina as Godard. He states that Saute Ma Ville "radiates such convulsive energy that it seems the product of someone who ran immediately from the cinema showing Pierrot, picked up a camera and began to shoot." As synopsized by the Pacific Film Archive: "Chantal Akerman's first film prefigures the most progressive aspects of her later work. Akerman herself plays a young woman who finds a new solution to the problem of housework. The whimsical nature of the story is rendered serious by the quality of the claustrophobic framing and the oblique camera angles."

If—as Jonathan Rosenbaum has suggested—Akerman's "masterpiece" Jeanne Dielman is, in effect, a remake of Saute Ma Ville—specifically in its negotiation with the invisible labor of housework—Saute Ma Ville is a young woman's defiant protest against culture's charge that women create domestic order. This is an age-old proscription of sorts, condemning the second sex to unending servitude. I am reminded of my years working among the Maya in Central America and how their central myth involved raising the World Tree within the three hearthstones of creation. This is, of course, a story about the differentiation of consciousness from unconsciousness, a shift from darkness to light, but it is wholly predicated upon those three hearthstones of creation; the matrix of order. The guidance of myths is such that within the average Mayan household it is the mother's responsibility to wake first each morning to light the fire within the three hearthstones found at the center of every Mayan household. I can only imagine that every now and then, perhaps more often than not, a mother simply wants to sleep in? To Hell with order!

In Saute Ma Ville, a young woman (played by Akerman) messes up her kitchen in disruptive abandon. With frenetic enthusiasm she polishes her boots and ends up polishing her shins as well. Already playing with compressions and elongations of time to simulate the experience of real time, Akerman wolfs down a plate of spaghetti so quickly that I thought she was going to choke. Already exploring the disjunctive rewards of asynchronic sound, the film's actions are accompanied by an almost-maddening sing-song. This aspect of the film made me chuckle despite myself remembering the few instances when my digital recorder has accidentally turned on in my pocket while I'm in transit, recording my self-mumblings, likewise in sing-song. (And then I wonder why strangers look at me as if I'm crazy!) At one point, sitting on the floor, Akerman glances over at her reflection in a mirror. If—as a good friend of mine has written—the silent mirror forfeits, then you have to admire Akerman for acting out to counter the silent reflection.

La Chambre (The Room, 1972)

Speaking of mirrors, the camera lens (i.e., the spectator) serves as such in Akerman's vertiginous La Chambre. As PFA synopsizes: "In La Chambre (shot by Babette Mangolte), the camera takes in a room in 360-degree pans; a woman (Akerman) lies eating an apple. Offscreen voices reflect, in a kind of verbal counterpoint, the 'mirror' into which the young woman informs us she is looking. A film of enclosure and repetition." It's also a film that suggests exteriors through its obsessive preoccupation with interiors. Malcolm Turvey writes in his Art Forum essay: "Akerman's repeated pan of her apartment in La Chambre 1 refuses to privilege the filmmaker lying in bed as it takes in the surrounding space and its contents." And yet it seems that the camera is trying to privilege Akerman, searching back and forth across her image, struggling to settle there. In his intriguingly ambulatory essay—"Chantal Akerman: Walking Woman" (replicated by Harry Tuttle at Unspoken Cinema)—Adrian Martin writes: "Akerman provides a mirror for our own activity as spectators, as we negotiate the illusions and lures of narrative." There's certainly that sense in La Chambre.

Hôtel Monterey (1972)

As PFA further details: "In 1971 Akerman came to New York where she was particularly influenced by the work of Michael Snow. That influence is evident in La Chambre and decisive in Hôtel Monterey, which consists of several single shot segments: city views through windows, a long tracking shot down a corridor, a stationary shot of an elevator, and the inhabitants of the Hotel Monterey as they come and go." PFA quotes Christina Creveling (Camera Obscura)—"Shot by Babette Mangolte; warm, warm colors in such restricted spaces"—and Gary Indiana (Art Forum)—"In Hôtel Monterey the camera remains fixed at Chantal Akerman's eye level—she is about 5 feet, 1 inch tall-giving a low angle. Except for a few crepuscular tracking shots, there are no camera movements. Shots are sustained so far beyond normal duration that the eye, even when confronting static space, experiences a lavish range of optical events. The film's survey of a seedy welfare hotel is more architectural than anthropological; human beings stray in and out of the frozen frame, sometimes registering mild surprise at the presence of the camera, and eventually disappear from the film altogether.... What Akerman's camera records, without distraction or augmentation, is the experience of space over time, how the eye receives information, breaks it down into constituent parts, and recomposes it."

In his above-referenced essay, Adrian Martin quotes Akerman from a Camera Obscura interview, wherein she described her experience as a runaway young Belgian landing in the Soho of the '70s—at the time when she became influenced by Michael Snow—as a core moment of personal indefinition among "people as blurred (indéfinis)" as herself. Martin suggests that Akerman "internalizes and projects in her art, as if it were her destiny, a vision of the 20th century world citizen: displaced, nomadic, rootless." Quoting from Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est by Kathy Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins, Martin adds: "From an amalgam of Warhol, Snow, Godard, the painter Edward Hopper and other influences, she developed a style based on 'the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy'." As previously cited, Rosenbaum believes Hôtel Monterey "reveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has had on her work."

Certainly, the sense of disconnection and alienation of urbanites from each other masterfully prevalent in Hopper's work is likewise evident in Hôtel Monterey where—as Malcolm Turvey states it—"all we learn about the hotel guests is what we can infer from their brief appearances as they pass through the lobby, corridors, and elevator. When we do see them inside their rooms, they are either turned away from the camera or facing it impassively." In some instances the residents seem to resent the intrusion of Akerman's camera into a space that—though common—is begrudingly shared.

As if confirming the quality of "walking" upon which Martin ruminates, The Guardian's Adrian Searle describes Akerman's camera as "a silent walker, a leading character in a movie without a plot." Searle notes Hôtel Monterey's silence—"the only sound I hear is the scratching of my pen and the hum of the projector"—and, in my viewing, I too was struck how the sounds of the audience served as a score for the film: the burgeoning impatience as spectators began fidgeting in their seats, one man snoring unabashedly, seats flipping back as exasperated patrons left the theatre, my own breathing. Hôtel Monterey," Searle concludes "is full of suspense, but entirely without resolution" and is "an atmosphere as much as a movie." Searle likewise notes Akerman's painterly compositions—which Rosenbaum frequently references—not only Hopper but in one still image of a seated pregnant woman seen through a doorway, Vermeer.

As Martin also writes: "In Akerman, the tenacious sense of duration, of 'time taking place' [overtaking space?], is married to a penchant (rigorously adhered to for virtually her entire career) for pictorial frontality—not only in static frames but in her famous signature lateral tracking shots." Though Snow is credited as the guiding influence of Akerman's exploration of structural and architectonic filmmaking, I was startled to sense Stanley Kubrick. A sudden shot of a neatly-made bed reminded me of a similar sequence in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) filmed a few years earlier and the shots of long, empty corridors suggested the same haunting menace as in Kubrick's The Shining (1980), filmed eight years after Hôtel Monterey. Whether such structuralist aesthetics reflect cultural attitudes of the decade or distinct influences of one filmmaker upon the other (has anyone explored structural affiliations between Snow and Kubrick, for example?), the template suggests the visual fecundity of the rectilinear composition. When Akerman's camera begins to move forward down the empty hallway, it approximates the S.S. Discovery's movement into the black monolith and—just as astronaut Dave Bowman is astonished to witness that the rectangular monolith is "full of stars"—so are whole universes present in the empty spaces and rectilineal compositions Akerman stresses in Hôtel Monterey. Even if this "lavish range of optical events" is projected or imagined by the audience.

ROSENBAUM ON AKERMAN

I find it gratifying when a film critic as accomplished as Jonathan Rosenbaum champions the work of a filmmaker as accomplished as Chantal Akerman. Such a symbiosis of visions and styles adds critical breadth and heft to the cinematic endeavor. I'm charmed that a critic can entertain an ongoing relationship with a filmmaker over an extended period of time, such that his own body of work becomes an intensely personal reflection of the artist he mirrors.

Rosenbaum's overview of Akerman—"Romance of the Ordinary"—not only offers insight into her films but provides one of the best working definitions of mise en scène I've ever read. Rosenbaum details the term's introduction into American film culture, lobbies against the pretension of hyphens, and emphasizes its service to a lesser-known term: decoupage. "In this context," he cautions, "it is misleading to talk merely about Akerman's mise en scene in spite of her close attention to framing, because from that vantage point, many of her movies look rather anemic. It's her decoupage that matters—that is, not only what happens in her shots but what happens between them, among them, across them, and through them."

In general assessment Rosenbaum writes: "Virtually all of her films, regardless of genre, come across as melancholy, narcissistic meditations charged with feelings of loneliness and anxiety; and nearly all of them have the same hard-edged painterly presence and monumentality, the same precise sense of framing, locations, and empty space. Most of them are fundamentally concerned with the discomfort of bodies in rooms."

As if indirectly commenting on the shift from the theatrical screen to the gallery space—the current emphasis in Akerman's career—Rosenbaum quips: "[A] good many of her movies qualify as remakes of her earlier works."

Rosenbaum observes that the recurring theme of exile in Akerman's work underscores not only her Belgian-Jewish roots (which positions her as "an outsider in an international context") but a nearly neurotic compulsion towards normalcy. "[T]he desire to be 'normal'," he suggests, "is largely reflected in the efforts of the heroine simply to inhabit a domestic space"; a "yearning for the ordinary as well as the everyday" that runs through Akerman's work "like a recurring, plaintive refrain." In his wholly fascinating write-up of Akerman's Night and Day (1991), Rosenbaum expounds on a characteristically Belgian trait—their "decorous sense of the everyday"—and references what the English writer and broadcaster George Melly once said about Belgian painter Magritte: "He is a secret agent, his object is to bring into disrepute the whole apparatus of bourgeois reality. Like all saboteurs, he avoids detection by dressing and behaving like everybody else."

Rosenbaum compares and contrasts Night and Day to Akerman's earlier work, "[c]onsidering all the oppositions that inform the work of Chantal Akerman—such as painting versus narrative, France versus Belgium, being Jewish versus being French and Belgian, and the commercial versus the experimental." I especially appreciate his take on what Malcolm Turvey terms "Akerman's unique spatiotemporal sensibility." "In broad terms," Rosenbaum posits, "the polarity between painting and narrative is one between persistence and development. A painting exists in space, a narrative in time; persisting is what a painting does in time, and developing is what a narrative does in space. Consequently, insofar as Akerman's films resemble paintings, character and plot development is always something of a problem, and insofar as they impose narratives, the persistence of people and places without any development is also something of a problem."

Rosenbaum amplifies his overview of Akerman's career with individual reviews of her films:

Hotel Monterey (1972)—"[R]eveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has had on her work."

Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974)—"[T]he minimalist structure is both potent and haunting."

Jeanne Dielman (1975)—"[O]ne of those lucid puzzlers that may drive you up the wall but will keep you thinking for days or weeks."

News From Home (1976)—"[O]ne of the best depictions of the alienation of exile that I know."

Window Shopping (1986)—"[O]ne of the most ambitious efforts of a strikingly original independent."

American Stories (1989)—"[S]teeped in the brooding melancholia and the nocturnal, insomniac ambiance of Toute une nuit, one of her best films … its distinctive bittersweet taste lingers."

Night and Day (1991)—Both capsule ("Akerman brings a lyricism to the material that makes it sing like a musical") and incisive essay ("Insomnia has long been a basic element of Akerman's nocturnal poetics…. But until now Akerman's take on it has seemed troubled and neurotic. Her magically luminous nighttime exteriors and claustrophobic interiors, like those of her painterly influences, Belgian surrealists Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte as well as Edward Hopper, glower with abnormal degrees of presence. In Night and Day, by contrast, insomnia seems a kind of precondition for utopian romance.")

Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1996)—Both capsule ("Consists mainly of clips from her previous films, but the selection and arrangement of these are canny and subtle, and Akerman's on-camera introduction is touching and revealing") and a more in-depth review ("Exalting the Everyday").

South (1999)—"Virtually all the works of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman are worth seeing, and her 78-minute video documentary about Jasper, Texas, is no exception."

The Captive (2000)—"[N]ot only her first truly literary film, but perhaps the one that works best in narrative terms."

From The Other Side (2002)—Both capsule ("A major work that creeps up on you gradually") and a more in-depth essay ("The Great Divide").

02/05/09 UPDATE: Jonathan Rosenbaum has graciously responded to this entry by offering the following at his own site: "Missing from this list is the first thing I ever wrote about Akerman—an account of Jeanne Dielman in my 1975 article "Edinburgh Encounters," originally published in the Winter 1975/76 issue of Sight and Sound, and reprinted on pages 40-44 of my 1995 collection Placing Movies. This isn’t easily importable to this site, but here’s a link to it on Amazon, where you can access it a page at a time. (There’s also a chapter devoted to Akerman in my book Film: The Front Line 1983, equally available on Amazon, but not available online.)"

ANTICIPATING AKERMAN

I am woefully unfamiliar with the work of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, having only seen Tombée de nuit sur Shangaï, her contribution to the Portuguese omnibus O Estado do Mundo (State of the World, 2007). Thus, it is with considerable enthusiasm that I anticipate this weekend's welcome launch of the Akerman retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), running January 3 through February 28, 2009.

It's keenly appropriate that this retrospective should be within a museum setting given Akerman's recent gallery installations, whereby she has given a second life to several of her earliest films. Cognizant of that creative evolution, SFMOMA's retrospective focuses on the films—the raw material—that Akerman has recycled in her installation work; notably, her documentaries D'est (From the East, 1993) and De l'autre côté (From the Other Side, 2002)—reconfigured into installations in 1995 and 2002, respectively—and her two other nonfiction videos, Sud (South, 1999), and Là-bas (Down There, 2006). Rounded out by some of her better-known earlier films, including her critically acknowledged masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1974), SFMOMA's selection tracks with the March 2004 Akerman retrospective mounted at REDCAT in Los Angeles (though, unfortunately, San Francisco does not have the benefit of Bérénice Reynaud's erudite stewardship). Doug Cummings did a fine job of dispatching to Film Journey from the REDCAT retrospective, as did Scott Foundas for the L.A. Weekly. Their guiding insights to Akerman's films are invaluable.

In his November 2008 Artforum essay, Malcolm Turvey has finessed the creative permutation of Akerman's oeuvre from theatrical screen to gallery space and observes: "Akerman's unique spatiotemporal sensibility, honed in her remarkable films of the 1970s, translates well into the space of the gallery, which she has used to great effect to amplify certain core features of her practice." Turvey then performs an admirable service of bullet pointing these "core features." His essay comes highly recommend for its working grasp of Akerman's evolving aesthetics.

Along with the customary biographies to be found at Wikipedia, IMdb, Icarus Films, f-films, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Film ReferenceArtforum piece, there have been two major books written on Akerman's work. The first, Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman is the Southern Illinois University Press reissue of the first true collection of essays devoted to Akerman, edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and originally published by Flicks Books in Britain. Reviewed favorably by Michael Rowin for Film Comment, Rowin states the collection "opens up the auteur's work for the newcomer, while casting light on hidden corners of it for the enthusiast", touching upon "Akerman's complex search for, and expression of, identity, as well as her preoccupation with recollection and history."

One of the contributors to that collection, Ivone Margulies, next authored Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday, published by Duke University Press. Nothing Happens was favorably reviewed by Acquarello for Strictly Film School who wrote that it "provides a comprehensive examination of the minimalist visual imagery, deliberate pacing, and recurrent themes of disconnection, wanderlust, isolation, and longing that define Akerman's intensely personal cinema." An excerpt from the second chapter of Nothing Happens—"Toward A Corporal Cinema: Theatricality in the '70s"—can be found here and Rouge has published Margulies' essay "La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator." Of related interest, Ricky D'Ambrose's interview with Margulies for Tisch Film Review provides an essential purview of Margulies' familiarity with Akerman's work.

Between Turvey's Artforum essay and Tisch Film Review's interview with Margulies, certain essential descriptions of Akerman's aesthetics are pronounced. First would be her adherence to a "tradition of dedramatization" pursued by directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. As Turvey explains: "Dedramatization does not mean the absence of drama. Instead, conventionally dramatic occurrences coexist with what theorist André Bazin famously referred to as the 'microaction' beloved by the Neorealists…. The mundane is treated with just as much significance as the dramatic, thereby 'ruling out the slightest hierarchy,' as Bazin put it, between the two. Akerman pushes dedramatization even further than her cinematic forebears, fully reversing traditional narrative hierarchy and focusing on microactions." As Margulies equally argues: "Akerman's boldness as a filmmaker lies in her charging the mundane with significance." Akerman proposes what is dramatic and non-dramatic by way of a dedramatized vocabulary.

The reversal of "traditional narrative hierarchy" is likewise achieved through a tension struck between storytelling and the long take. Margulies queries: "What does the sensibility of the long take constitute? What is it that you're paying attention to once you're in front of a long take? Why are people interested in that?" She conjectures that what's interesting about telling a story through using a long take is that it creates a tension, a suspense, and Akerman has her own rigorous way of framing and suspending this tension. Or as Turvey phrases it: "The long take coupled with dead time produces a feeling of anticipation: The viewer waits for something significant to happen, and becomes acutely conscious of that waiting."

Said rigor—which one could argue is predominantly structural and visual—involves a homogeneity of purpose and a means of concentrating the mundane through the minimal. In this sense Akerman is not really a realist or naturalist filmmaker, but more a hyperrealist and an anti-naturalist. Especially in her films from the '70s, Akerman eschews analytical editing, montage, close-ups and shot/reverse-shot sequences in favor of long-shot framing and deep focus, and thereby retains a homogenous texture to her films, wherein—as Margulies describes it—"Everything seems to fit perfectly. It's not extraneous. There is a concreteness to it, there is a kind of object-like quality."

Whether or not these early films of Akerman's are minimalist is perhaps not as compelling as how they are minimalist, since the mileage on minimalism varies. One of the things that interests Margulies about minimalism is the "phenomenological engagement of the spectator—the way in which you're drawn, precisely because you have these very simplified shapes in front of you." Simplicity, rendered as a repetition of action and the minimization of detail captured in the long take, expresses Akerman's rigorous excision of the superfluous. "What is this repetition about?" Margulies asks. "It's almost like the Jewish joke, the structures of Jewish jokes, which have a lot of listing, enumerating, accumulation."

Said rigor also incorporates compositional symmetry. Turvey observes that—by placing her camera at the same height perpendicular to the setting, coupled with numerous camera movements at a slow pace—Akerman "creates a high degree of stylistic consistency, sensitizing the viewer to subtle motifs, symmetries, and repetitions." He extrapolates: "Symmetrical frame composition, with the camera placed at the same height perpendicular to the setting, creates a noticeable rectilinear patterning from shot to shot as well as a high degree of uniformity, sensitizing one to subtle changes over time." Turvey concludes that the sum effect of this style of filmmaking can be described as "objectivity without omniscience. These films impart an almost tactile sense of what it is like to observe, from a respectful distance, the people and places they record and the concrete sights and sounds one would experience in doing so. Yet most other information is withheld, underscoring the limits of what one can discover through perception alone." On a related note, Margulies recalls a film enthusiast who actually measured the physical film of Jeanne Dielman and discovered that it was exactly halfway into the film that all of the interesting things begin happening in the "plot." Though she doubts Akerman was conscious of this, she nonetheless insists that it's "pretty staggering" that "these shifts take place in a film where symmetry is so important."

As confidently as one can rely on the scholastic work of both Ivone Margulies and Malcolm Turvey to secure a working knowledge of Akerman's aesthetic enterprise, my tendency remains to allow the filmmaker to speak for herself. Akerman is generous and eloquent in three substantive conversations available online. The first is her conversation with Chris Dercon conducted in 1995 (replicated in the 2005 issue of Contour). The second is a transcribed Q&A exchange between Akerman and her students at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in June 2001. And the third is her April 2004 conversation with Miriam Rosen for Artforum.

Speaking to Dercon, Akerman recalls that she was 18 when she made her first film Saute Ma Ville in 1968. "At that time succeeding on the market was not an issue. Godard, Rohmer and the others are all older [than] 60 now. They are physically and mentally tired. I am younger than them, but I am tired already. I sometimes feel I have reached the end of what I can do and what I can give. That is why it's so agreeable to work in museums. There is a playful element involved. One thing leads to another, it's a form of energy. That's why I like writing and doing other things than making films. …In the world of cinema money is all that matters. In a museum or when you are writing you don't have to constantly think about money."

Speaking of the tension built up through her usage of long shots, she describes the effect as "fictional" and states: "I want the spectator to have a physical experience, for him or her to feel time. Films are generally made to literally and metaphorically pass the time. But I want you to experience the time of a character. I don't want you to just go through an emotional experience, but also another kind of experience, like with music, that is unique because it is purely physical." [Emphasis added.] In her conversation with Mirian Rosen she further identifies "the tension between the continuity of the shots and the subjects and the discontinuity of the history underlying them." In her interaction with her students Akerman articulates the "tension between these things that I love to work with, a face like a wall where you can project, or a face that you think you can see inside." She also equated her usage of long takes with violence: "I think that my movies have a kind of violence in the way I use the time, a very subtle violence, and instead of being a violence of explosion, it's a violence of implosion. It's a violent act when I push a shot as far as I can until it is just unbearable, and then I give another shot and you breathe again. It's a violence done to the body of the viewer, because it's becoming a physical experience."

Confirming her films are anti-naturalistic and hyperrealistic, Akerman explained to Rosen: "Everyone thought, for example, that Jeanne Dielman was in real time, but the time was totally recomposed, to give the impression of real time. There I was with Delphine [Seyrig], and I told her, 'When you put down the Wiener schnitzels like that, do it more slowly. When you take the sugar, move your arm forward more quickly.' Only dealing with externals. When she asked why, I'd say, 'Do it, and you'll see why later.' I didn't want to manipulate her. I showed her afterward and said to her, 'You see, I don't want it to "look real," I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes.' " [Emphasis added.] She adds later in their exchange: "You know, when most people go to the movies, the ultimate compliment—for them—is to say, 'We didn't notice the time pass!' With me, you see the time pass. And feel it pass. You also sense that this is the time that leads toward death. There's some of that, I think. And that's why there's so much resistance. I took two hours of someone's life." She summarizes by saying, "We sense time, so we sense ourselves. Face to face with an image, we sense ourselves."

This struck me as commensurate to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's reply when I asked him what was specifically Buddhist about his filmmaking. "Joe" answered: "The idea of living itself, I think, of watching movies. My films encourage the idea of self-awareness. To be conscious of yourself but, at the same time, try to get rid of the self. It's in conflict but it's not. You're aware of yourself, but at the same time you're just part of the universe; you're nothing. [Laughs.] To be able to be aware of this. When making a film, my films always encourage the audience to explore the movie but also themselves. Most of my films are talking about film watching. When you watch the film, you're aware of watching the film. Whereas in Hollywood films—and this is generalizing—you get into the story and you forget yourself. You get hypnotized by the story." He confirmed that watching a film would be like sitting mediation where you watch your own thought processes. "And you're aware of yourself. Like in the second part of Tropical Malady, once it shifts and you're five or ten minutes into it, you realize, 'This is a movie.' You realize about film. Suddenly you're not lost in the stream of narrative, you're aware of sitting and watching and your environment. This is the idea of awareness." Both filmmakers subvert narrative to pull the audience into the film's presence. By doing so, they both encourage attention.

In her exchange with her students, Akerman added: "That's narrative, but there's also something physical. I think what is more coercive is not so much what you can think about the narrative, but what the film does to you physically. Forgetting about the narrative. I know it's part of it but in a way there is something also abstract that works on you…."

and Turvey's the time of a character. I don't want you to just go through an emotional experience, but also another kind of experience, like with music, that is unique because it is purely physical." [Emphasis added.] In her conversation with Miriam Rosen she further identifies "the tension between the continuity of the shots and the subjects and the discontinuity of the history underlying them." In her interaction with her students Akerman articulates the "tension between these things that I love to work with, a face like a wall where you can project, or a face that you think you can see inside." She also equated her usage of long takes with violence: "I think that my movies have a kind of violence in the way I use the time, a very subtle violence, and instead of being a violence of explosion, it's a violence of implosion. It's a violent act when I push a shot as far as I can until it is just unbearable, and then I give another shot and you breathe again. It's a violence done to the body of the viewer, because it's becoming a physical experience."