Claire Atherton in conversation with Dr.Kostas Prapoglou on the work of Chantal Akerman 

The distinctiveness of the visual language of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman is very well-known to everyone who has already been acquainted with her video works. The uniqueness and individuality of her narratives on a par with her special connection with space, time, identity and memory unfold an exceptional and rare cinematic style. Investigating the use of space and its properties through the creation of installations, Akerman succeeded in constantly evolving her material, rediscovering and transforming different elements of it. Two video installations –From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l’installation (2007)– have been recently presented at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris (“Chantal Akerman, From the Other Side” 9 December 2021 – 5 February 2022) + two rare screenings –Je tu il elle (1974) and De l’Autre Côté (2002)– at the cinema Luminor – Hôtel de Ville in Paris coinciding with the gallery show. 

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) created around twenty video installations, presented during her lifetime in numerous museums, such as the Jeu de Paume and Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; SFMOMA, San Francisco; and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany. She participated in Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the 29th Sao Paulo Biennale (2010); and the 49th Venice Biennale (2011). Her work and practice have been the subject of significant solo exhibitions at the EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2020); the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto (2019); Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, (2018); and Ambika P3 Gallery, University of Westminster, London (2015). Akerman’s installations are in the collections of the Centre national des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), Paris; the Jewish Museum in New York; and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).  She is also the author of several books including Hall de Nuit (1992), Une famille à Bruxelles (1998), Ma mère rit (2013).

I invited Claire Atherton, representative of the Fondation Chantal Akerman, long-time collaborator and film editor of Akerman to discuss with me the filmmaker’s artistic vocabulary and the ways she so masterfully achieved to engage the viewer with her stories and her perception of reality.

Kostas Prapoglou: 

Je tu il elle, l’installation (2007) features three characters involved in a peculiar and diverse narrative. The film is considered to be ahead of its time due to the issues it engages with and also because of its sophisticated technical parameters. Can you tell us more about it?

Claire Atherton: 

It was obviously an incredible provocation at the time to show two women making love on screen. When the film was released, Chantal received a lot of calls from people who saw themselves in what she was showing. It was a sign that, as she said, something was bubbling up. If so many people relate to the film, it is undoubtedly because of Chantal’s physical participation. At first, she tried to have an actress play her role, but she quickly realized that the part had to be played by herself, through her own body. And, when we see the film, we understand why: her physical presence touches us directly. We are faced with an intimacy without any voyeurism. Chantal did not want her film to be characterized as a lesbian film. She even refused its projection in festivals of lesbian films. She did not want it to become the banner of a cause; she wanted it to speak to us all. It is a film that welcomes us, that includes us. If this film is modern, it is obviously because of the subject matter that it tackles, but it is also and, especially, because of its form. This form escapes a traditional mode of narration, one in which the scene of love would be the apotheosis, to make us delve into a direct and real experience that brings us to touch the heart of our existence.

KP: 

In the visual vocabulary of Akerman, time seems to play a pivotal role. How does the viewer get involved in this relationship between time and space and how does Akerman orchestrate this situation?

CA:

Indeed, time is an essential element of Chantal’s cinema. It is a material in its own right as much as images and sounds. Chantal used to say that she wanted us to feel the passage of time in her films. When someone said: “Oh, I saw a wonderful film, I didn’t see the time go by”, she didn’t think it was a compliment. She felt that her time was being stolen. However, during the editing process, we never said to ourselves: “Here, we need a long shot”. We chose the lengths intuitively, and later we understood why: it was as if the shots themselves imposed their lengths. From the moment the film began to exist, it rejected certain scenes, so we did not hesitate to remove or shorten them. The relationship between time and space and the involvement of the spectator were at the heart of our work. We were looking for the right rhythm. The rhythm is the center of a work, its breath. It is also the association of colors, forms, and lines. Editing in the right way means organizing a network of resonances and echoes, opening up a space that invites everyone to receive the film in their own way and to have their own experience. This work has often made me think of a musical composition, but it is true that one could speak of orchestration.

KP: 

The same applies to the transition from film to installation. How easy or how difficult was this to be achieved? Did special techniques help the process of transforming the visual material?

CA: 

When Chantal was going to shoot a documentary, she didn’t want to explain what she was going to do. If she explained, she no longer had the desire to do it. She wanted to go on location, and be “an empty sponge”. This way of working, of discovering by doing, was even stronger when we were doing installations. We had no particular technique, we invented a new method each time, and Chantal loved that. She liked that we did everything “at home”, without having to explain to each other what we wanted to achieve. She felt a great freedom. She said that, even more than a film, an installation cannot be described in advance but is born little by little in the work itself. 

“When I work on the material of the installations, it’s like shooting a documentary, you don’t know where you’re going to end up, you sculpt the material and suddenly the work is there, it arrives as a matter of course. (…) In the installations I don’t follow any thread, it’s magic, the multiple possibilities arise while I knead the material and it’s the material that drags me. I work it, it becomes other, and there we are. The invention comes from the transformation, the process is free and fascinating, a pure pleasure» 

(Chantal Akerman in Interview in pyjamas, 2011).

KP: 

The videos on view at Marian Goodman Gallery will be shown in conjunction with two screenings at Luminor – Hôtel de Ville Cinema. What is the connection between these films and why has this particular cinema been chosen?

CA: 

We have chosen to show two films at the Cinema Luminor, Je tu il elle and De l’autre côté, because these are the films from which the two installations shown at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris were created. Each installation was born out of a different desire. For From the Other Side, Chantal wanted to put a screen in the desert, on the border between Mexico and the United States, to project part of her film De l’autre côté shot in this border zone, and to film the projection of this excerpt in its authentic space, the desert. She wanted this image to be broadcast live at Documenta 11 (2002) in Kassel, where the installation would be shown. This vision was the starting point of our work. We quickly thought that the image on the giant screen could be the end of the spectator’s journey. It would therefore be projected in the last room. And we imagined that the extract of the film projected in the desert would be diffused at the same time on a plasma screen, at the beginning of the installation, in a first room. The third room would therefore echo the first. Then we said to ourselves that we had to build a space that would separate these two sequences of images and lead the spectator from one to the other. In designing this second room, what guided us was to try to avoid any binary system. We did not want, for example, to show Mexico on one side, with its poverty, and then America, the Eldorado, on other screens opposite. Or, to compare Mexico with its traditional customs to modern America. We had to look for something else, an arrangement that would leave space for the viewer to think. In the end, we broke the film down into groups of three frontal monitors, as we did for the installation D’Est.

KP: 

Akerman’s practise inspires academics, curators, artists as well as the general public. Symposia and talks coinciding with the gallery show are scheduled to be presented surveying her work. Why do you think her oeuvre is still so important and topical?

CA:

I have often been asked if Chantal Akerman’s work is political. I think it is obvious. Chantal’s work is political, not because it deals with political issues, but because it puts us in motion. It connects us directly to the world and to ourselves. Chantal did not want to copy reality, nor did she want to represent it. She did not want to explain anything, because explanations often deter curiosity. In her films as in her installations, the present, the visible, resonate with the invisible, the underground. And these resonances, these displacements, open a space of thought. We discover a kind of new territory, and new meanings emanate, meanings that are not fixed. This is what makes Chantal’s work so strong and alive.