Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris. © Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman, installation view (top) and detail (above) of "To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge" (2004)

October 2008 Reviews

Manifesta 7

Jeff Koons

Painting: Now and Forever, Part II

Erkka Nissinen

There is No There There

Elaine Duigenan

Kerry James Marshall

Peter Saul

John Massey

Bridget Riley

Pipilotti Rist

Thomas Helbig

Armando Andrade Tudela

Gary Hume

Marine Hugonnier

Sophie Calle Michael James Aleck Snow Chantal Akerman Stalking Collectors Sophie Calle The Greenroom Street Art, Street Life Miami Madness

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In the world of avant-garde filmmaking, Chantal Akerman’s reputation is fearsome. She’s often mentioned in the same breath as Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, and Jean-Luc Godard—the latter perhaps most appropriately, since it was his 1965 film Pierrot le fou (a title often hilariously translated into English as Crazy Pete) which so affected the 15-year-old Akerman that, she claims: “I decided to make movies the same night.” Three years later she made a brilliant short of a descent into madness, Saute ma ville, wherein we watch a young girl (played by Akerman herself) losing her marbles and committing suicide in her apartment. Akerman went on to direct an epic, three-and-a-half-hour-long consideration of domestic deviance in 1975. Titled Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, it contains many chilling scenes of inexorable potato-peeling chores and the like, before the eponymous Jeanne finally screws and then kills a gentleman caller, and it is revealed that she’s also a part-time prostitute. In addition to her staunchly feminist tackling of the male gaze as effected through the cinematic lens, Akerman’s filmmaking has been praised amid postwar realist cinema for these minutely observed, occasionally explosive female lead performances, but mostly for her slow, minimalist pacing and detached, abstract visual language: for the time and space her films allow for reflection and human encounter.

None of Akerman’s melodramatic early works made it into this predominantly subdued selection of her films, nor into the accompanying screening program; her first public museum showing in the UK is nevertheless a stylish affair, necessarily presenting only a partial history of a substantial career. First is Hotel Monterrey (1972), an hourlong, almost forensic examination of its subject via excruciatingly long static shots of dark linoleum floors and  magnolia passageways. The creepy retro corridors and psychic spaces bring to mind more recent interior monologues by Jane and Louise Wilson or Gregor Schneider, but clearly the intent was for a cinema verité exploration of accidental narrative and, more importantly, of the passing of time—something this film is so generous with that it ends up testing the viewer’s endurance.

Leap forward to 2004 and Akerman gets personal in the deceptively titled installation To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge. A split-screen video shows the artist and her mother discussing Chantal’s maternal grandmother, the now-absent third generation of the family. In front of this conversation hangs a third projection on a diaphanous muslin screen, showing letters written by the grandmother, aged 15, before she was taken to Auschwitz. As the descendents read the Polish scrawl, we piece together the Akermans’ Jewish roots and the young girl’s growing fears of internment. The passage that ends, “I have no one to think of,” brings both narrators to the emotional breaking point and tears, as they realize that without this woman’s stubbornness and strength neither of them would be here. A pencil self-portrait that flashes up alongside the words in mein Tagebuch (as the grandmother called her writing book) causes Chantal to doubt her own artistic abilities, perhaps remembering how different her circumstances had been at that age. Says her mother: “You do everything backward.”

All this “backward” translating and rereading evokes films by other artists who’ve worked in a documentary vein: Anri Sala’s dubious pseudointerview with his mother about her youthful political leanings in Albania (Intervista [1998]), for instance, and Sophie Calle’s rather crass deathbed video portrait of her mother, Pas pu saisir la mort (2007). Fortunately, Akerman stops short of either a passé questioning of authorship or of reality TV’s favored lump-in-the-throat voyeurism; but she has the additional difficulty, in To Walk, of deciding how best to commemorate the Holocaust, not only because the thorny subject has been so overused in recent art but also because it is receding ever further into the mists of our collective memory. Akerman deals with this complication admirably by blurring the two screens to varying degrees, suggesting that the elder of the two women might have the better historical vision and that such trips back in time grow a little hazier with each passing generation.