In Praise (or Not) of Chantal Akerman

Or, in the case of D'est, drifting in and out of sleep.

yeah there's nothing like 'watching' a film when your eyes aren't on the screen

that had better be the last time you make that philistinish boast. also fuck housework now and forever

i'd rather watch Delphine Seyrig do it

akerman did have some installation pieces, often reconfigured from her later films.

i'm not sure that her earlier films would really benefit from a kind of passive attention or fluctuating attention. they're pretty rigorously designed to have a /cumulative/ effect.

Morbs' apartment:

http://www.trashitman.com/img/Hoarders-Apartment-Cleanout-NY.JPG

my preferred aesthetic: "early Unabomber"

or perhaps "crazy cat lady in advanced stages of arthritis"?

she was at French Institute here last week? re this doc, now on Icarus disc

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/over-there-chantal-akerman-presents-from-the-other-side-at-fiaf/

(mentioned by KJB six years upthread)

ok despite the date header of today, fc piece is from 2012

dumbfounded - rip Chantal

RIP

A bit gutted at the moment...most impactful celeb/famous person death for me in some time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=8pSNOEYSIlg

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-chantal-akerman

so The Captive, yes? Haven't seen it.

Nor I. Curious

It's been awhile, but I'd say yeah re:Captive.

Philippe Garrel ("bon voyage Chantal") and Dennis Lim both paid tribute before PG's film at NYFF tonight. About a quarter of the audience gasped; they hadn't heard. (Linc Ctr age demographic at work?)

There's a 1080p version of News From Home on YouTube...

Wonder what the Filmmaker in Residence will say about it tomorrow during her free talk?

who?

I wrote in my brief blog obit that, contra Morbs, her work, because it presents work so rigorously, is best consumed while polishing tables and scrubbing floors.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the context of a marginal (in the grand scheme of things most obits are going to focus on JD, which leaves another 30 years of film-making) figure who has just killed herself calling for a lack of attention and disguising as an oh so clever joke is tasteless.

Also don't think we should be speculating on reasons for the suicide.

vaguely recall having read how young she was when jeanne dielman was made, nonetheless thought she would have been quite a bit older than 65

RIP

― noɪˈɣiːələx (nakhchivan), Tuesday, October 6, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Akerman talked about how people were expecting someone a lot older to have made JD, and how some assumed that a man made it.

In the context of a marginal (in the grand scheme of things most obits are going to focus on JD, which leaves another 30 years of film-making) figure who has just killed herself calling for a lack of attention and disguising as an oh so clever joke is tasteless.

I don't see what one thing has to do with another, especially if you haven't read the post and the post is about the work, not the creator.

You clearly don't, that's what I said.

who?

Imagine writing an insouciant, brief take on one of the best filmmakers of the last half century, what apostasy.

“Even if I have a home in Paris and sometimes in New York, whenever I was saying I have to go home, it was going to my mother,” Ms. Akerman said with the deep, lilting tones familiar from the voice-overs and monologues that define many of her films. “And there is ‘no home’ anymore, because she isn’t there, and when I came the last time, the home was empty.”

One of her last Interviews

Watching the twilight scenes in News from Home juxtaposed against those letters in voice-over while it poured outside my apartment last night was a fraught experience.

From Brody's piece

From Brody's piece:

And that’s what in fact happened—but first I saw the film with astonished delight, and then witnessed the Q. & A, which was unlike any that I’ve ever seen, before or since. The audience was composed mainly of young people, of the age of college students or recent graduates, and, after the screening, they were eager to engage Akerman in discussion about the film. A young woman sitting behind me raised her hand; Akerman called on her, and the viewer asked a fairly complex question filled with academic language. Akerman responded sharply, “Is that how you talk to your friends?” The woman stayed silent; Akerman persisted, asking whether the question represented the way that the young woman talks in real life and wondering why that’s the way she chose to talk to Akerman.

Reminds me of the Q&A I was in, as there was someone who did seem to ask Akerman a question using academic terms she never bothered to learn, and then she went off on a rant instead.

One of the few Q&As with a film maker I attended, and one of the few needed.

that was cheering. i've had friends ask non-academics questions full of academic jargon, and i've always been both embarrassed for them and a bit ashamed of academia.

I put that bit on my Facebook page yesterday. An acquaintance privately asked if I sided with Brody, lol

even better: http://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2015/daily/on-chantal-akerman/

brody strikes me as a poseur most of the time but that tribute (?) to akerman was admirably heartfelt and straightforward.

The last screening from the year-long Akerman fest is later this month: https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/nos-amours-chantal-akerman-25-la-folie-almayer

Will be a tough night.

I mentioned this a few years ago when it happened, a story similar to the Akerman one: Frederick Wiseman's withering brevity and coldness when someone asked him a lengthy question couched in academic language at a TIFF Q&A.

i admit to sometimes having the same question that akerman did, i.e. "do you talk to your friends that way?"

i don't encourage a flattening of discourse. obviously you write an essay or book in a different way that you would speak aloud in a casual social context. and an academic book is going to read differently from a popular book, and so forth. but sometimes academic jargon is so deliberately obtuse and circumlocutious and show-offy that i can't help but picture the full-of-himself author trying to talk to, i dunno, his grandma that way. i appreciate that akerman and wiseman aren't afraid to give these folks the occasional reality check.

and the abstruse prose often masks an ability to write a simple declarative sentence.

yes. and/or it's just a weird sort of careerism--if you talk in riddles, people think you're a genius, and that can be good for business.

just to pick one example, here's a particularly opaque description of a research/book project from someone's faculty web page:

I am currently at work on two book projects. The first, A Theory of Regret: The Thought of Bureaucracy pursues the unexpected, and in most cases unwelcome, relation that pertains between theories of thinking in continental philosophy and bureaucratic logics, insofar as both are typically defined in terms of withdrawal. If the bureaucrat is the one who disappears behind an appearance, which is shown to us simply as a distraction, then what are we to make of the fact that most claims for thinking also privilege the moment in which we ourselves fall away from appearances? If in thought we fall away from appearance while remaining an appearance for others, expressly so that we might reflect on what is before us with respect to something that has already passed or that might be done next, what will it mean for us to carry on describing the bureaucrat as stupid, when his/her actions mimic the very logic of thinking? For one, we will have to admit the bureaucrat is not, strictly speaking, stupid, if “stupid” implies an inability to withdraw from appearance. A Theory of Regret is an attempt to reckon with the consequences of that very problem, so that we might find modes of resistance that do more than merely produce in us a state of melancholic fixation on the thing that should have been but has nevertheless gone missing. Instead, it will be shown that regret, which helps us to distinguish between non-voluntary and involuntary states (pace Aristotle), enables us to think the future as something more than a mere perfecting of what once seemed good but did not quite work the first time.

was this written with any audience in mind? it's really impossible to imagine anyone who could follow all of the allusions, nod at all the assumptions (there are an awful not of very iffy "If..."s), and come out with a real grasp of whatever this professor thinks he is up to.

sorry for thread derail.

If in thought we fall away from appearance while remaining an appearance for others, expressly so that we might reflect on what is before us with respect to something that has already passed or that might be done next, what will it mean for us to carry on describing the bureaucrat as stupid, when his/her actions mimic the very logic of thinking?

brb gonna pour a scotch

I'm the first person to make fun of such language, but I remember feeling bad for the guy at the Wiseman film. He'd undoubtedly spent some time formulating his question to get it just right, wanted Wiseman to think of him as a kindred spirit, and he got a two- or three-word answer. Akerman's response was even more deflating.

I go through a bit of that when I send a question to the baseball writer Bill James, who similarly has no patience for acronyms, jargon, etc. I fuss over the questions endlessly, making sure there's nothing he can jump on. I've pretty lucky, although once he sort of cut me down.

wiseman is just kind of a cantankerous dude in general, which you'd know if you ever read an interview with him. a lot of the times his answers to (even pretty good) questions are along the lines of, "i have no idea what you're talking about. i don't think about it that way. next question."

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/obituaries/chantal-akerman-guiding-light

Her films will be running for free on Hulu through the 21st:

http://www.hulu.com/search?q=chantal+akerman

is it just for the US? Watched all those but I'll certainly re-watch one or two of these.

Yes it is :-(

obit from Romney: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/08/chantal-akerman

I dunno, academic and theoretical language is a context based practice- people who are fluent in it speak it, those who aren't don't, and the awkwardness described is like someone just speaking French to you when you speak English- they are presuming fluency for all present in a way that can just seem gauche or irrelevant. But If I know you speak French and I speak French then is it really so rude to just ask in French? It is if you're not in a Francophone context. And so then the question is: is public space so generic that theory jargon is banned? wouldn't a Chantal Akerman Q+A be a pretty plausible space in which to wheel out certain terms that make certain kinds of conversations move faster given who tends to like her work? Without hearing the text of the question it's hard to go further.

Re: that book project above, I don't think the problem there is jargon (not saying you said it was) but that there's a failure to make the core analogy stick: bureaucrats "withdraw" (okay, maybe) and so do philosophers (yes, to a degree) but the concept of "regret" is not a moving part, and that book proposal does not succeed in showing how or why. Since that's a key term for the project, it sounds shaky and tendentious. Which is bad at the level of the thinking, not the terminology.

wouldn't a Chantal Akerman Q+A be a pretty plausible space in which to wheel out certain terms that make certain kinds of conversations move faster given who tends to like her work?

Its plausible if two people who are familiar with that kind of language are talking in those terms about her films, and if other ppl want to watch that its not like you can complain too much that this is taking place.

Akerman is pretty clear she had no familiarity in particular ways her work was talked about - so plenty to say about that gap, and how her work attracts that kind of language when the person who spent all the making it was so uninterested in it.

Yup

Learned my lesson on this when I tried to chat briefly with Bob Rafelson about his version of The Postman Always Rings Twice and he scowled at me when I used the words film noir. Decided to keep that stuff to a minimum so that years later at a Claire Denis Q&A I just told her I liked the traffic sounds in her soundtracks and she laughed and said it was the result of budgetary constraints and shooting on location.