Chantal Akerman: Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Meetings with Anna (1978)
Continuing the series of film-related posts this article looks at two of Akerman's early feature films that cemented her reputation as the most innovative film-maker of her generation.
Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was born in Brussels into an orthodox Jewish family, who had come to Belgium from Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Her mother, Natalia Akerman, who died aged 86 in April 2014, survived the Auschwitz concentration camp where her parents had been killed. Her father survived the war hidden with his family in a Brussels cellar (Akerman, Ma Mère Rit 28).
The Holocaust created a distinct periodization, a traumatic before and after, for generations of post-Holocaust Jews that heightens the experience of loss and rupture (cultural, historical) already inherent in the passing of time. The effect for Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent is the “the old country” becomes a sign without referent, an imaginary construct with no actual, geographical correlate (Lebow, “Memory Once Removed” 36)
Akerman was active as an installation artist, composer. writer and filmmaker.[1] Her relationship with her mother was central to Akerman’s work. In Une famille à Bruxelles, published in 1998, Chantal Akerman, alternating between her own voice and that of her mother, imagines her mother’s thoughts about her husband, his illness and death, her two daughters, Chantal and her younger sister Sylvaine, who lives with her husband and two young children in Mexico, and her mother’s extended family in Belgium. In Ma mère rit,[2] published in 2013, Akerman narrates the trajectory of the serious illness and recovery of her mother, set alongside the traumatic and ultimately violent collapse of her relationship with a younger English woman, named C. The death of her mother in 2014, movingly documented in in her last film No Home Movie (2015), presaged her own death by suicide a year later.
It has escaped no one that the maternal is a figure that recurs throughout Akerman’s oeuvre. Brenda Longfellow proclaimed, back in 1989, that “if there is a phantasmatic core to the work of Chantal Akerman, it lies in the desire to reconstitute that image of the mother, the voice of the mother.” If, as Tijana Mamula writes, in “virtually all her work” Akerman “keeps her mother very much alive,” then No Home Movie appears to be an attempt to reconcile herself to the fact that her work could no longer do so. (Lebow, “Identity Slips” 58)
Akerman was a prolific filmmaker, directing 46 films, ranging from art house and experimental films such as Toute une nuit (1982) and L’homme à la valise (1983), to the more mainstream films La Captive (2000), based on Marcel Proust’s novel La Prisonnière (1923), and Almayer’s Folly (2011), based on Joseph Conrad’s first novel published in 1895. This article will focus on two seminal films Akerman wrote and directed early in her career: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings with Anna) (1978).
Jeanne Dielman records three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, played by the veteran actress Delphine Seyrig, and her interaction over that period with her son Sylvain, played by Jan Decorte, three successive male johns, the neighbour whose baby she minds, and the repetitive and the increasingly erratic performance of her domestic tasks.
Jeanne Dielman is Akerman’s most sustained and powerful meditation on the mother. “I didn’t escape from my mother …”, Akerman noted in an interview,” … this is a love film to my mother. It gives recognition to that kind of woman, it gives her “a place in the sun”. On one level, Jeanne Dielman functions as an act of reparation, a repairing of the distance between daughter and mother, a “love-film” which provides for a sublimated return to the corps à corps with the mother. Equally, it is an act of political reparation, in its loving attentiveness to the domestic world of the mother, in its precise documentation and cinematic validation of the gestures which constitute her experiential state. (Longfellow 81)
Margulies notes the influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967).
It is possible to see Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as representing a case of the kind explored by Godard in Two or Three Things I Know About Her, an examination of the social implications of prostitution. Jeanne’s reasons for taking afternoon clients at first seem amenable to the same social and economic analysis to which Godard exposes his protagonists. But the ten–year period that separates Godard’s film from Akerman’s demands an understanding of the differences in their use of a woman’s quotidian and the mytheme of housewife/prostitute to portray a broader social and economic picture. (Nothing Happens 128)
Later in the same chapter, Margulies analyses Akerman’s use of character.
In Two or Three Things, a critique of capital and semiological investigation converge in alienation. In Jeanne Dielman, the embrace of individual specificity and the representational hyperbole of a character’s behaviour (inflected, of course, by Akerman’s procedures of repetition) push the representation of the individual to the untenable point of representing both a collective entity and a pathological case – i.e., a case more peculiar and specific than any individual case. Clearly the pathology of Akerman’s characters is a mimicked one. As in Bresson, a lack of psychological motivation translates into a nonnaturalistic performance; the character’s performance is given an external motor, which resonates, however, with the energy and randomness of obsessive compulsion proper (see Jeanne Dielman, Je tu il elle, Saute ma ville, Toute une nuit, J’ai faim j’ai froid). (146) … The titles of Godard’s and Akerman’s films are as suggestive in their articulation of both the singular and the general as their protagonists are. The title Two or Three Things I Know about Her plays on the elasticity of the shifter “her” to accommodate substitution and paradigmatic association, to welcome the “outside world.” The title Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, on the other hand, makes an absolute nominal and spatial claim that blocks the possibility of any shared reference. (147-48)
The film culminates in Jeanne stabbing to death the third male client in her bedroom after a shot showing both climaxing during sexual intercourse. “Akerman claims that the film is feminist not because of the murder but because “[it gives] space to things which were never, almost never, shown that way, like the daily gestures of a woman” (Martin, 24)” (Kinsman 223). The film ends with a seven minute shot of her sitting immobilised at the dining room table.
Akerman’s next feature-length film Meetings with Anna was shot from 2 January to 23 February 1978 on a more substantial budget and cast with established actors (Petit; Kinder 43; Fowler 158).[3] The central character Anna Silver, played by Aurore Clément, is a Belgian filmmaker on a promotional journey through West Germany, Belgium and France. Anna “is the diegetic stand-in for Akerman (by virtue of biographical details such as her name [Chantal Anne Akerman] and her profession [Anna is a filmmaker]” (Stukator 126). During her travels, Anna has a series of meetings: with Heinrich, played by Helmut Griem, a teacher with whom she has an interrupted one-night sexual encounter in her hotel in Essen and the next day visits for his daughter’s birthday at his mother’s house where he lives with his daughter since his wife had left him; with Ida, played by Magali Noël, at Cologne train station, a friend of the family who has moved from Brussels to Germany and whose son has been engaged to Anna but twice rejected by Anna; with Hans, played by Hanns Zischler, a stranger she meets on the train to Paris; with Anna’s mother, played by Lea Massari, first in a restaurant at Brussels Midi station and then at a hotel bedroom where they spend the night togeterh and where Anna tells of her life on the road as a director and a recent lesbian encounter in Italy;[4] with her lover, Daniel, played by Jean-Pierre Cassel, who collects her at the train station in Paris, and after she masturbates him in the car, they go to his apartment where, as they are about to make love, he suddenly feels unwell and Anna brings him medicine from a late-night pharmacy. In the final scene, Anna returns to her apartment where she listens to her answering machine messages, including one from her Italian lover.
In Meetings with Anna, every character Anna (Aurore Clément) comes across delivers a monologue, placing Anna as a relay for the spectator – her distracted absorption in the other characters acts as a surrogate for our own. Each of the blocks of discourse triggered by Anna’s passage entails a location, a character, a story. The film sets an Au Hazard Balthasar effect. À la Bresson, emotions and long-unsaid truths are catalysed not so much by what is said as by an emoted presence. The result is a certain cinematic intensification, where tone and rhythm constitute a “bla, bla, bla” that foregrounds expressivity at the expense of “making sense.” … The characters in Meetings with Anna touch, but barely. These self-absorbed presences make fleeting contact at best. That Anna comes into the lives of the other characters is perhaps less telling than the brevity of her contact with them, and the vague attentiveness with which she listens to them. The performer’s opacity derives neither from a momentary involvement with inner thoughts nor the distraction of external events. Her disengagement delineates a character intrinsically split. Anna’s politeness is not to be understood through a psychological grid; her semiabsorption and inattention establish the film’s sole channel of complicity with the audience. Meeting no response within the film itself, the characters’ utterances broadcast their double-voiced nature. (Margulies 155-56) … Meetings with Anna ends with the only form of verbal address otherwise absent from the film: the voice-off. Lying on her bed, Anna plays her answering machine. After each disembodied message we hear three short beeps; then, in the second-to-last message, a voice says, in an Italian accent, “Anna, dove sta, Anna, where are you?” The message stresses the question of Anna’s whereabouts; and her absence from any one place, her wandering, is a direct function of her identity as a filmmaker. The Italian voice also gives provisional closure to Anna’s distracted stance throughout the film; she has been bothered by continually missing a connection with her lover in Italy. (Margulies. Nothing Happens 161)
Anna’s travels through the landscape of post-war Western Europe are marked by the subliminal memories of the Nazi period.
Meetings with Anna articulates the mix of curiosity and demilitarisation for a nation (Germany), on the part of a transnational individual (a wandering Jewish woman) in all its intricate, post-holocaust reverberations. ... Slowly, these monologues, echoing one another in their plaintive sonority, construe a troubled portrait of Europe” (Margulies, “Echo and Voice” 62, 64).[5]
The film, with scenes and characters seen as influenced by Hitchcock (Margulies, “Echo and Voice” 6; Rowley 1-2, 5-6) and the road-movie tradition, was less well-received critically than Jeanne Dielman.
In terms of its homogeneous texture, oblique mise en scène frontality, and emphasis on denaturalised dialogue, Meetings with Anna displays the radical antinaturalism of Erich Rohmer and Robert Bresson. And yet, the film was generically labelled a “European art film”, comparable in its theme and episodic linearity, with 1970s existentialist road-movies such as Wim Wenders’ Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the road, 1976) and Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974). Given its production history, as well as its relative polish- this was Akerman’s first film to be distributed by Gaumont – the film was felt, at the time of its release and in the context of Akerman’s trajectory as an avant-garde narrative filmmaker, as something of an aesthetic compromise. (Margulies, “Echo and Voice” 60).
Akerman’s principal characters in Jeanne Dielmann and Meetings with Anna speak in a manner that is clear but startlingly dispassionate, “simultaneously engaging and defamiliarizing the spectator” (Margulies, Nothing Happens 60) If Anna can be seen to represent Chantal Akerman and Jeanne her mother, they express a common sense of alienation as if the mother had passed on to her daughter the traumas of her past.
If Marlon Brando’s mumblings in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) are to signify a specific affect and feeling, Anna’s or Jeanne’s clear but distended delivery in Meetings with Anna and Jeanne Dielman also works expressively, rather than functioning solely to inform. (Margulies, Nothing Happens 54)
Margulies has stressed the function of Akerman’s repeated use of monologues in both films, “signs of hindered communication, sound masses that rhythmically break the silence but are sealed from functioning as actual conversational exchange” (Nothing Happens 54-55). While the worlds inhabited by Anna and Jeanne on the surface seem poles apart, the cosmopolitan, rootless, peripatetic existence of Anna and the narrow, constrained, Brussels-cantered existence of Jeanne, the presentation of the characters below their superficial differences reveals a common malaise rooted in the traumatic experiences of a Europe indelibly marked by Nazi atrocities which emptied language of its meaning.
Works Cited
Akerman, Chantal. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Directed and written by Chantal Akerman, performances by Delphine Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman and Jan Decorte as Sylvain Dielman, Paradise Films/Unité Trois, 1975.
---. Les Rendez-vous d’Anna [Meetings with Anna]. Directed and written by Chantal Akerman, performances by Aurore Clement as Anna Silver and Hans Zischler as Hans, Hélène Films/Paradise Films, 1978.
---. Ma mère rit. Mercure de France, 2013.
---. Une Famille à Bruxelles: Récit. L’Arche, 1998.
Fowler, Catherine. The Films of Chantal Akerman: A Cinema of Displacements. 1995. PhD Thesis, Warwick U. wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4048/1/WRAP_THESIS_Fowler_1995.pdf.
Kinder, Marsha. “The Meetings of Anna by Chantal Akerman.” Film Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, 1979, pp.40-46. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1212063.
Lebow, Alisa. “Identity Slips: The Autobiographical Register in the Work of Chantal Akerman.” Film Quarterly, vol. 70, no.1, 2016, pp. 54-60.
---. “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est.” Camera Obscura 52, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 35-83. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu.
Longfellow, Brenda. “Love Letter to the Mother: The Work of Chantal Akerman.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. XIII, no. 1-2, 1989, pp. 74-90.
Margulies, Ivone. “Echo and Voice in Meetings with Anna,” pp. 59-76. Identity and Memory: The films of Chantal Akerman, edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Southern Illinois UP, 2003.
---. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. Duke UP, 1996.
Petit, Samuel. “’Les-Rendez-Vous d’Anna’ de Chantal Akerman: Genèse.” Cinémathèque française, February 2018. https://www.cinematheque.fr/article/1174.html, accessed 12 January 2021.
Rowley, Alison Jane. “Between Les rendez-vous d’Anna and Demain on Déménage: m(o)ther inscriptions in two films by Chantal Akerman.” Studies in the Maternal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010. doi: 10.16995/sim.83.
Stukator, Angela. “Critical Categories (Il)logic of Identity.” Revue Canadienne d'Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 2, no. 2/3, 1993, pp. 117–28. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24402194.
[1] The Fondation Chantal Akerman in collaboration with CINEMATHEK, repository of the archives of Chantal Akerman and Paradise Films, has developed a website as a center for research into Akerman’s oeuvre: chantalakerman.foundation.
[2] Translated into English as My Mother Laughs, translated by Corina Copp, The Song Cave, (2019).
[3] The fonds Roman Goupil, assistant editor in the film, archive of material on Meetings with Anna is held at the Cinémathèque française. The script by Chantal Akerman and Eric de Kuyper is published as Les Rendez-vous D’Anna, Albatros, 1978.
[4] For an analysis of Anna’s meeting with her mother, see Amy Taubin, “Love: Les Rendez-vous d’Anna.” Film Comment, vo. 52, no. 3, May-June 2016, pp.29-33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43824966&site=jst.
[5] See also: “The Travels of Chantal Akerman.” Cinéaste, vol. 42, no.1, 2016, pp. 17-21, at p. 18,