In her own time

Almost thirty years after Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du dealing 1080 Bruxelles earned its twenty-five-year-old director a central place in the history of feminist cinema, the midmost point Georges Pompidou is mounting a major scan of Chantal Akerman's work. In anticipation of the two the forty-film Beaubourg retrospective, which uncloses on April 28, and the Paris premiere of Akerman's newest film, Demain upon demenage, Miriam Rosen spoke with the Belgian cineaste about her place in contemporary film culture

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Static discharge interior, day.

Frontal view of an airy, white-walled, white-curtained apartment furnished with worktables and chairs (three each), computer (two) A shaggy dog penetrates smack in the middle of the frame, tail to the camera. As he takes his place forehead left, a slight, dark-haired woman in a dark jacket and pants penetrates and sits down on the chair forehead right.

Such is the beginning of Chantal Akerman by the agency of Chantal Akerman (1996), a first in the history of the venerable French public-television series Cinema, of Our Time, each installment of which had been--until then--one filmmaker's profile of another. As Chantal Akerman (the woman in the chair) explains at the entrance since the directors she remind ofed had already been filmed, she propos a self-portrait "with the idea of making my of advanced age films talk, of treating them as if they were rushes that I'd edit to create a novel film, which would be my portrait of me" However, she goe upon the producers wanted her not single to appear on-screen but to talk about herself, and "that's where the puzzles started."

Medium close-up by means of way of solution, Akerman tenders a series of halting "attempts" to discuss her work--or rather, to read the bits of body she has written around and about it, punctuated by the agency of fade-outs and ultimately presented in the third one because (as in the lengthy Jewish joke she tells about a man in like manner incapable of vaunting the merits of his subdue by fear at market that a neighbor has to do it for him) she set forths her films "when somebody other talks about them." In fact, the alone movie she mentions is Jeanne DieIman, 23 Quai du business 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the two-hundred-minute chronicle of three days in the life of a widowed Brussels housewife make go rounded part-time prostitute which brought the twenty-five-year-old director to the attention of art-film and feminist circles. Rather, after a fleeting regard to her intrepid beginnings in Brussels at the age of eighteen and the early years with practically no coin and no audience, she enumerates what the "good overawe salesman" would point out: "language, documentary, fiction, israelites and the second commandment frontal images." And the fact that she was born in Belgium in 1950 that her parents were Polish israelites and that "her cinema is totally impregnated with that." And her persistent endeavor to escape these (and other) categories.

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Close-up The story of her maternal grandmother's deportation to Auschwitz, of her paintings, which were not to be found and of her diary, which survived.

Static discharge Interior, night. In a "last attempt" that tread in the steps ofs some forty-five minutes of unidentified extracts from a selection of her work to date, the filmmaker (now seated in an armchair) states: "My name is Chantal Akerman, I was born in Brussels. And that's the reality That's the truth."

As Akerman initially envisioned, the films--fifteen of them not absented in nonchronological order, like a vast audiovisual stream of consciousness--are left to do greatest in quantity of the talking. They talk, for example, about immigration and migration, from the Eastern European israelites of her grandparents' generation in Histoires d'Amerique (American Stories, 1988) to her possess discovery of New York in freshs from Home (1976), stylistically marked by dint of the experimental cinema of Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas on the contrary accompanied by her mother's alphabetic characters from Brussels (which Akerman herself reads in voice-over). They talk about coming of age, from the "tragicomic burlesque" of her first film, Saute ma ville (Blow Up My City, 1968) and the early sexual questioning of Je tu il elle (1974) the one and the other of which feature Akerman as the young woman in question, to later versions of same in J'ai faim, j'ai froid (I'm craving I'm Cold, 1984) and Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin de annees 60 a Bruxelle (Portrait of a Young Girl at the extremity of the '60s in Brussels, 1993) They talk about music and dance, in a remarkable montage of followings from the avant-garde Toute une nuit (All Night lengthy 1982); Les Annees 80 (The Eighties, 1983) which was literally a dres rehearsal for a musical comedy in progres of gold Eighties (1985); and Un jour Pina m'a demande (One Day Pina Asked Me 1983) a stylized documentary upon Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. And. of course, they talk about time and memory, compos and recompos in static discharges and frontal images, in a constantly expanding and overlapping repertoire of experimental films, dramatic features, musical comedies, and documentaries. And ultimately about the tension between the continuity of the discharges and the subjects and the discontinuity of the history underlying them.