La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator

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La Chambre Akerman
The Captive as Creator
Ivone Margulies

1. Manny Farber, Negative Space (New

York: Da Capo, 1998), p. 339.

When they take place inside a room, Chantal Akermans films take on
the stark directness of theatre. A sequence of ritualised actions
are staged and repeated. Extended symmetrical shots impose an
ostensive quality on objects and people. Her characters face us with
an oblique attention, speaking in quasi-monologues, and their
redesigned everyday gestures attain a ceremonial intensity. The
central image in this spare ascetic cinema consists of a shallowboxed space, (1) where a few people are seen enacting simple tasks.
Most often it is a lone woman, and most strikingly the filmmaker
herself as she cleans, eats, cooks, moves furniture, rocks under a
blanket and writes.
It is in this confined theatricality that Akerman works out her very
particular contribution to the discourse of the everyday, through a
highly personal set of re-enacted cinematic figures. These are
examples of neither the artists self-portraiture nor an involuted
revelation of the qualities of the medium. It is the heightened
concentration of the camera on gestures, and of gestures of the
tasks at hand, which enacts an ambivalent relationship to the
everyday.

2. Luce Giard quotes Chantal Akerman

as well as Delphine Seyrig on Jeanne
Dielman to justify her method of
representing womens relations to
cooking and their bodies. Cf. de
Certeau, Giard & Pierre Mayol (trans.
T.J. Tomasik), The Practice of Everyday
Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking
(Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1998),
pp. 154-155, 199.
3. Multiple variations of the artists work
and everyday are the subject of
Akermans films and videos; apart from
those discussed in the text, see Family
Business (1984), Letters Home (1986),
Le Marteau (1986), Les trios dernires
Sonates de Franz Schubert (1989),
Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher
(1989), Chantal Akerman par Chantal
Akerman (1996), Le Jour o (1997) and
Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton (2002).

Akerman's interest in the everyday emerged from a number of

different discourses that informed artistic and political practices
in the 1970s. The figure of the mother, issues of feminine autonomy,
and 70s avant-garde film were each inescapable elements shaping her
production. As a result, her work found a deep response amongst a
wide variety of groups. For instance, the amplified materiality of
household chores in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles (1975) was so striking that it inspired Luce Giard, one of
the co-authors of Michel de Certeaus The Practice of Everyday Life,
to avoid the generality typical of ethnographic accounts in her
collection of oral narratives on doing-cooking. (2) Jeanne
Dielmans lesson for the social scientist lies in the manner it
defamiliarised the everyday, making it more singular and concrete.
In its positivist instrumentality, this homage misses the
consequences of an excessive focus on the everyday a cost Akerman
dramatises by substituting the kitchen for a room with closed doors.
Both a mothers and an artists everyday feature constantly in
Akermans films. (3) Indeed, the desire to extricate the artists
quotidian from the mothers banality is one of the impelling forces
in Akermans dry transmutation of daily life. Although this motherdaughter scenario is fraught with psychology, Akermans
representation is not thus defining its difference. She creates
opaque characters blocking psychological projection. Their concerted
attention to the tasks at hand are steady, at times even manic,
statements against fusion.
The problematic relation between a womans daily routine and her
creative everyday is dramatically highlighted through the flight
into a secluded room in which the stakes of her art will be
proven. It is in this room apart that Akerman performs rituals of
order and disorder, as if carrying out a continuous aesthetic
experiment. This room is especially charged with an obsessive
quality that points to a central problematic in her films: the
autonomous person.
A meta-theatrical space of this kind characterises contemporary live
performance that needs to communicate, amidst the vague contours of
art and life, the expressive qualities of a work. Akerman has

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La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator

4. Maureen Turim has likened

Akermans task-like performances to
Yvonne Rainers choreography and
other performance artists. She
compares Je tu il elles first part to
Marina Abramovics Lips of Thomas
(1975), in which the naked artist slowly
eats a kilo of honey from a silver
spoon, and progresses through a
series of violent self-flagellations. Cf.
Turim, Personal Pronouncements in I
... You ... He ... She and Portrait of a
Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in
Brussels, in Gwendolyn A. Foster
(ed.), Identity and Memory: The Films
of Chantal Akerman (Trowbridge: Flicks
Books, 1999), pp. 24-25; also my
Nothing Happens: Chantal Akermans
Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1996), pp. 48-50.
5. The easy slide of Akermans long
take mode into the artworld shows how
the stringent rigour of structuralminimalist film has come to be filtered
through a vacuous pictorial sensibility.
The holistic nature of a shot depicting
simple actions that devolve in an arc of
subtle change conforms to the duration
span of gallery attention with minimal
challenge.

6. In Sorry Guys (1997), Chantal Michel

repeats this notion minus the pathos.
Her video camera gyrates and, if she
achieves feats comparable to Bruce
Naumans with her body, it is mainly
because of her cinematic rather than
pro-filmic prowess.

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primarily made films, videos and installations containing screened

images. This room as a partition, a place and time adjacent yet cut
out from the rest, is similar in its function to the cell-like
spaces of body-art experiments. (4) Can the Akerman-chamber serve as
a path to rethink the relation of her films to her artwork?
We can pursue Akermans theatricality through the figure of the
artist, a persona most vividly found in her films frontally
displayed inside a sealed-off room. This spatial configuration la
chambre Akerman or Akerman-chamber becomes more noticeable once
the filmmaker starts to make single and multi-channel video
installations. The filmmaker redeploys long takes severed from her
films in the installations DEst: au bord de la fiction (1995),
Self-portrait Autobiography in Progress (1998), Woman Sitting
After Killing (2001) and From the Other Side (2002). (5) This
excision-as-self-citation is especially telling in the context of
her move from the film world to the gallery, for it isolates the
trope of her self-contained shots and spaces as Akermans artistidentity-badge.
In film, Akerman explores the implications of the shift towards
liveness that began in the 60s with performance and body art. She
adopts a presentational format and invests her room-acts with a
declarative stance. Her extended presence instantiates a contained
experiential world. A small room becomes the set for transforming
everyday action into images of obsessive intentness. The room scene
showing the artist boxed in a space, reinventing her own version of
a home, is a set-up familiar to performance and video art.
Existential journeys, as well as new forms of writing with ones own
body, find their best display format in the compact space of a room
and of a video monitor in the late 60s and 70s. Vito Acconcis
Room Piece (1970), a performance in which he brings personal objects
from home into a neutral space, was an example of this attempt to
redraw the line between art and life by making daily objects into
props. The boxed frame was used as an analogue for television in
Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), where Martha Rosler brandishes
domestic utensils as she ironically vents her frustration. The tight
space can also occasion an acrobatic gyration around the walls, an
attempt to walk through the cube. This is the pretext of Bruce
Naumans Wall-Floor Positions (1968), in which he attempts to perch
himself on a wall and falls with a recurrent thumping sound. Often
the monitor is used live as a mirror, to guide and guarantee a fit
between the corners of wall and frame. The contrast between the
solid fixed walls and the bodys failure to defy gravity is
instrumental in promoting the performances principal object the
rhythmic demarcation of an obsessive purpose, a repeated and
pathetic insistence that one is an agent. (6)
We can read the Akerman-room as a sort of artists installation, a
reduced stage on which the filmmaker re-enacts her agency as artist.
Despite the affinity of this room with other video and performance
images, la chambre Akerman can be found only in her films. For this
room gains its performative raison dtre from its relations to
other spaces. The primary impetus for the room is its erection of a
separate, rigorously demarcated space for the self. Whether the
room-set takes over the entire film as in La chambre I (1972) and
Saute ma ville (1968), or whether it delimits a need for temporary
seclusion as in Je tu il elle (1974) and Tomorrow We Move (Demain on
dmnage, 2004), the Akerman-chamber works as a display case for the
conflict between artistic autonomy and the temptations of another
less productive, obsessive kind of autonomy. While this struggle may
be shared by anyone in their attempts to shape their everyday and
flee its indeterminacy, the thematic polarity of household routines
and a wandering free creativity incites both formal rigor and
nervous bouts of energy in Akerman. As I tour some of Akermans
rooms, I will note the ways in which an artists everyday is
asserted, represented and performed.
The spatial autonomy of Akerman-rooms is always relational. It may
translate a phobic sensibility to intrusion from the outside, as in

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La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator

7. Jacques Polet, La problmatique de

lenfermement dans lunivers filmique
de Chantal Akerman, in Chantal
Akerman (Cahier no. 1, Atelier des
Arts, 1982), p. 171.
8. Ibid, p. 173.

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The Man with the Suitcase (LHomme la valise, 1983) or it may be

the result of an acute representation of split desires, as in Jai
faim, jai froid (1984): a young woman has her first sexual
experience off-frame while we see her friend satisfy her desire by
eating a barely cooked egg. It is always the act of isolation from
another space that brings into sharp focus Akermans themes and
aesthetics. Jacques Polet has pointed out that the 360-degree pan in
La Chambre maps out a literal movement of encirclement completed
once the pan reverses, as if the camera had demarcated the minimally
essential space for the performance. (7) Conversely, in Hotel
Monterey (1972), when the camera looks towards exteriors, this same
agoraphobic amnagement of filmic space is registered by the
hypercautious quality of its movement. (8) The ambivalence Akerman
displays towards the outside world is paralleled significantly by
the ease with which she films strong city grids and apartments.
In L-bas (2005), her most recent film, Akerman hides behind the
shades of a Tel Aviv apartment, filming little vignettes of everyday
life out of her blocked window, as well as a few excursion shots to
the beach. Her title, a reference to Israel as spoken about by the
Northern European Jewish community, follows the trend set with DEst
(1993), South (1999) and De LAutre ct (2002) to use generic
geographic coordinates to amplify the resonance of her documentaries
on racial and ethnic discrimination, borders and forced
displacement. Akerman is present solely as voice-off in direct
phone conversations with Israeli friends and as voice-over, a
commentator on her distanced relation to Israel. The film gives
sequence to Akermans persistent fixation on her Jewish identity,
and as such fits perfectly with all the other documentaries that
speak about a newly configured Eastern Europe, James Byrd Jrs
murder, or Mexican immigrants troubled border crossings into the
US. In each of these films, Akerman purposefully lets her humanist
preoccupations mesh with a more visceral relation with Jewishness, a
relation she has most explicitly linked to her parents and
grandmother. In its play of disjunction between subjective voice and
objective vision, L-bas is close to News from Home (1976). In that
film, the daughters exile and link with her mother are posited
simultaneously, as the daughter reads her mothers letters, voicing
the mothers words and yet distancing herself from her. In the Tel
Aviv apartment of L-bas, as Akerman excuses herself on the phone
for not going out with friends, saying each time that she is
working, one notes perhaps for the first time in such a stark way
the connection between retreat, depression and creativity.

9. Akerman in an interview with

Dominique Pani on the Artificial Eye
DVD of La Captive.

Asked why she had returned, in La Captive (2000), to her rigorous

apartment compositions, Akerman indicates that she did not have to
go very far: It is the mother, she says, smiling. (9) The opening
sentence of Molloy I am in my mothers room becomes in
Akermans work: I am in a room next to my mothers. Hearing how
domestic images of her mother and aunt at the kitchen are imprinted
on her memory, one understands that the protected but suffocating
space of the home is the first object for testing creative autonomy.
In Saute ma ville, Akermans first film, a sprightly Chantal bounds
up the steps leading to a tiny studio apartment, mostly taken up by
a kitchen. Her determination and precision are evident, but the
tasks follow a not altogether clear pattern. As she energetically
polishes her shoes, Akerman keeps going with the same obsessive
gesture until she has also brushed her legs and stained the floor
around it black. The same gesture seems to produce at once disarray
and tidiness. For a while, it is enthralling to try to sort out one
from the other. The pleasure derived from witnessing these fully
finished actions follows from the rapidity with which mess and
neatness (contrasting sharply with each other) are reciprocally
wiped out. The framing of these unexplained gestures can be likened,
in its reduction of focus, to the single-shot frame of minimalist
films trained on a single action carried to completion. But while
the action in Richard Serras Hands Scraping (1971) comes to a close
on a blank, clean screen, Akermans space is not neutral. The
kitchen immediately defines a domestic space, and other social

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indices are marginally present.

With the kitchen fully in order, Chantal eats spaghetti, spills wine
and food over herself. She then she leans her head on the stove and
lights a match. The explosion happens over a freeze frame, in sound
only. Here, she presents us with the literal image of a compression
chamber, the implicit consequence of the mad chemistry she performs
in every one of her boxed-in spaces. Saute ma ville announces,
literally and with a bang, Akermans entry into artistic adulthood.
It is well known that suicide is a favorite subject of adolescents
first films. Indeed, it would be interesting to check if those who
go on to live creatively declare so loudly, as Akerman does in this
filmic rite of passage, their future tools, elements, genres.
Brushes, spaghetti, water and soap dance animistically with Akerman.
In this first film-room, droll humor and tragedy, slapstick and
rigorously concerted process alternate in disturbing in-distinction.
Saute ma ville presents in swift succession as if they all
pertained to the same order of events cleaning, cooking and
committing suicide. This perversion of categories, of banal and
dramatic, of the literally performed action taken to the point of a
suggested death, is frontally presented, enhancing these actions
paradoxical equivalence.
With Jeanne Dielman comes the structural lesson: the stark
separation between the scene and the obscene defines how an
excessively dutiful domestic concern replaces the desire relegated
to the elided room. In Akerman, every single space stared at for too
long will bear witness to the cost of this economy. In a didactic
exposure of the fragility of order, the frame remains the same
whether a fork falls, dishes remain unwashed, or a shoebrush drops.
This intrusion of objects moving on their own gives plastic shape to
the unwelcome, recurring thoughts that obsessive-compulsive
characters attempt to suppress.

10. This book (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2005) is essential for
understanding the central link in
Akermans aesthetics between
obsession and a problematic
autonomy.

11. Sigmund Freud. Notes Upon a

Case of Obsessional Neurosis,
Collected Papers, Vol III (New York:
Basic Books, 1959), p. 367.

Excessive doubting is the most common feature of this condition. In

Monomania: the Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art,
Marina Van Zuylen brilliantly explores how the panic of the mutable
engenders the ide fixe and obsessive behavior. (10) Even though
rituals are an important part of day-to-day life, and normal people
use concentration to keep away what is irrelevant, the obsessivecompulsive finds the manifestation of ambivalence unbearable. A
submission to external orders and schedules always feels better than
having to decide for oneself. Manic activity is an attempt to bypass
a depressed sense of autonomy through a minute, circumscribed
competence. The escape from situations felt as being too contingent,
too confusing to bear, is performed through invented orders, made-up
series and a reasoning that is mostly lacking in logic. In his
description of the typical synapses that occur as a result of
obsessive behavior, Sigmund Freud stated: Repression is effected
not by means of amnesia but by a severance of causal connections
brought about by a withdrawal of affect. (11) Compulsive acts in
two successive stages, of which the second action or thought
neutralises the first are for Freud another expression of this
inability to deal with conflict. (12) Akerman mimics such severed
causality by having actions and words follow each other in
continual, almost self-annulling revision.

12. Ibid, p. 330.

It is an unwritten rule of Akermans cinema that, once she retreats

into a room, a perversion of categories and registers is sure to
take place. The oscillatory energy maintained in the closed-off
experimental chamber is borrowed from the doubting dynamics of
obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Controlling measures such as counting
and cataloguing are invalidated in their futile attempt towards
achieving absolute certainty. And yet, by retracing this
impossibility, Akerman reasserts her own independent expression.
It is important to note how in her work the indecision associated
with obsessive thinking is immediately transposed onto a specific
space. In Moving In (Le Dmnagement, 1992), a monologue shot for
French television, the character played by Sami Frey starts by
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measuring the dimensions of his new apartment. He walks its length,

then its width, twice with different results. Rationality is belied
by the very need to repeat the action, and this first physical
tracing of doubt is followed by a verbal enunciation of myriad
permutations among the characters possible love choices:
Juliette, Batrice, Elisabeth I loved all three with an
immense love ... Elisabeth was from Toulouse, Batrice was
from Toulouse, Juliette was from Toulouse, and none had a
dog. Each had a room. Elisabeth had a room, Juliette had a
room, Batrice had a room. None had a dog. There was a
strong concentration of Toulousians in an apartment in
Paris.

13. Rosalind Krauss, LeWitt in

Progress, in Originality of the Avantgarde and Other Modernist Myths
(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985).

Akermans refusal to subsume her list within a category, and her

contrary insistence on naming each of the terms in the series,
echoes writers and artists like Beckett, Sol LeWitt and RobbeGrillet who have challenged classical logic through absurdly
extended sequences of obsessive thought. (13) Such alogical
permutations are best demonstrated within a sparsely furnished room
enclosed by three rigid walls, in which the characters recital is
revealed in all its starkness. In this regard, Je tu il elle is
exemplary for its structural boldness. It unfolds in three
autonomous sequences, of which I will discuss here the first, a
chamber sequence.
Je tu il elles first statement And I left is spoken over an
image of Akerman sitting at a small table by her bed, her back to
us. The room is fully furnished. We see an armchair, a little table,
a side table, a vanity and a bed. In this black-and-white film, she
initiates a further referential slippage announcing that on the
first day she painted the furniture blue, and on the second she
painted it green. Akermans use of verbal description, and its
sporadic reference to what we see, creates an eroded indexicality.
From the very beginning, the temporal indicators are unhinged by an
unmotivated skipping of days. This descriptive instability gradually
places the character and scene into a liminal state. The liminal
moment in a rite of passage is often accompanied by a stripping-down
of rank and status, the loss of ones possessions, and an untried
state of unformed identity. And indeed, precisely because this
process is not psychologically inflected, this originally
anthropological category describes Akerman's denuded aesthetics well
especially as she covers her body randomly with clothes. In this
non-psychological take on indeterminacy, character and space have to
match.
Of the many pieces of furniture in the initial scene of Je tu il
elle, we see only two being pushed out not out of the room but out
of the frame. She moves a mattress to each corner of the room,
cataloguing every possible position in turn. These initial shots map
the limits of the character's enclosure. Filming in axes
perpendicular to the walls, Akerman performs a descriptive tour of
the room's four sides. As she positions herself and the mattress in
relation to the camera, she is recording herself in the process of
constructing a mise en scne: she is physically and optically
charting the space. Her single prop (the mattress) becomes a
compositional element: she lies on it, or sits in its shadow as it
leans against the door.
Whether she looks at the camera or perfectly enframes herself, these
tableaux confirm Akermans mastery of the mise en scne. Her resting
poses after each movement underscore her self as movable object. The
performance artist Joan Jonas describes a similar process in her own
choreographed videos: At first I treated my body as material to
move or to be carried by others, stiff like a mirror to be moved
by or to move props, to be part of the picture to make the picture.
The simplicity of her movements and of her relationship with this
prop can also be likened to the purposive concentration with which
Yvonne Rainer uses objects in her task-oriented dances. (14) This

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La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator

14. Sally Banes describes this
particular transformation in dance from
everyday to art in Terpsichore in
Sneakers (Connecticut: Wesleyan
University Press, 1987), p. 43.

15. Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of

Props (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003), p. 12.

16. Cf. Nothing Happens, pp. 109-118.

Jean Narboni calls attention to the
cosmogony of Akermans naming and
counting strategies in recreating her
world from scratch in La quatrime
personne du singulier (Je tu il elle),
Cahiers du cinma, no. 276 (May
1977), pp. 5-13.
17. Quoted in Willoughby Sharp, Body
Works, Avalanche (Fall 1970), p. 14.

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move was essential for the choreographers trajectory towards a

minimalist reconfiguration of the everyday. If Akermans actions
resemble the dancers stage and choreography, it is because, in
cinema, the destabilisation of everydayness starts with an
abstractive manoeuvre: the theatricalisation of space. Objects loose
their functional pretence and the scene is bared for the act to
start.
In The Stage Life of Objects, Andrew Sofer states that the prop is
not defined by size or potential portability ... the prop must alter
as a result of the actors intervention ... a prop is something an
object becomes rather than something an object is. (15) Akerman
clears her space and introduces new props, juggling with them as
Beckett did before her. In Je tu il elle there are sheets of paper,
a pen, a spoon and a paper bag. She writes a letter furiously and
eats from a sugar bag. It is not by chance that, in this second
tempo of Akermans staging of the characters indeterminate, liminal
position, she should actively initiate a chain of obsessive
undoings. A letter is the perfect instrument for the exercise of
narrative suspension since, in conventional drama, letters and
documents are central markers of time and place. Even before they
are read, letters indicate to the audience a change in direction,
fulfilling the need for exposition and plot twists. Here, the sheet
of paper signals simply the beginning of another work cycle. But it
does matter that the writing paper multiplies. In Akermans films,
to see the character as agent is also to witness her indecision. She
writes three, six and then eight pages. She further enriches her
choreographics with the addition of yet another rhyming movement: a
distracted and then determined vertical dip into the paper bag. Such
mundane actions are charged with rhythm and design in Akerman.
Concentration and distraction alternate as affects, while spoon and
pen almost trade roles.

The spoon dips mechanically into the paper bag, counteracting the
lateral gestures of erasure. Crossing-out is another mise en scne
for writing, a shift in the direction of the pencil. Each movement
becomes, in this spare space, writing. Her intent absorption in her
own writing and in the floor arrangements compels our attention to
mise en scne as work. Split between their modular pattern and a
hint of a script draft, the pages become place-markers for Akermans
aesthetics, her particular intersection of narrative and series.
(16) Carl Andres statement that A work is not put in a place, it
is that place. And when the body is used as a place it is marked
resonates with Akermans territorial demarcation. (17) Her
straddling of an object/subject relation is similarly marked. With a
physicality closer to performance art than to conventional narrative
cinema, this scene in Je tu il elle suspends the very notion of
character, replacing the self with a shifter-like dependence on
actualisation.
As Chantal places the
space between her bed
activity), she stakes
territory. Her sudden

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pages carefully on the floor, filling the

(inactivity) and the camera (filmmaking
out serial narrative as her artistic
appearance from the camera side, after
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crawling over the pages, is the first sign of that traversal.

Visually she produces an image of intent concentration, but also a
surface laden with narrative potential. Fade-outs and pauses suspend
a clear demarcation of time, making us breathe along with Akerman as
both she and the narrative are held in abeyance. When she undresses,
lying on the bed to avoid wasting energy, we note the lulling
quality of someone occupying at once the parent and the child
position. A horizontal Akerman concludes one of the many cycles of
solipsistic activity performed in Je tu il elles first part. It
establishes the bed as critical to Akermans iconography. In this
film more than any other, the pendulum between bed and work signals
Akermans ritual commitment to the question of making art.
In Lettre dune cinaste: Chantal Akerman (1984), the filmmaker
peeks at us from beneath the bed covers. If you want to make a
film, you have to get up. So lets get up! In between the lazy
passivity in bed and making a film, a first, standing-up step is
needed. In Saute ma ville, Je tu il elle, The Man with the Suitcase
and Tomorrow we Move, the preamble for a film, its first threshold,
is a scene in which the protagonist arrives at an apartment and
charts her domain. The Man with the Suitcase starts at the same
point The Meetings of Anna (Les Rendez-vous dAnna, 1978) ended:
with the protagonist returning and reclaiming her space after some
time away. She opens the windows, checks the refrigerator, throws
the bad food out. After finding that her guest, a male friend of a
friend, has not left yet, her plan to start writing is frustrated.
In a pre-verbal tantrum, she retreats (table, chair and typewriter
in tow) to her bedroom. From then on, Akerman obsessively maps the
actions and presence of the intruder, drawing elaborate schedules of
his comings and goings.
The Man with the Suitcase describes a paradoxical domestic
entrapment. At the highpoint of exile in her room, Akerman follows
the invader through a surveillance camera. This figuration of
authorial control is a condensed image of the entire film. She
cannot write, but uses her own body to partition time and space. She
also carries a tray (a suitcase of sorts), holding food and a clock,
around the apartment. She thus thematises her own exile, as well as
her own uvre since duration and cooking offer a summary image of
Jeanne Dielman.
Akermans body perfectly fits the contrastive purposes of the sight
gag. The man who does not leave is very, very tall and oblivious,
while Akerman is very short and hyper-attentive. The corporeality of
the bodies, their contrast with each other, as well as the delay in
self-expression, suggest the affinity between The Man with the
Suitcase and Je tu il elle. To convey the postponed writing, Akerman
overuses gesture rather than speech, borrowing silent comedys
expressivity.
Akermans presence in her films answers a deep personal need. Her
move into musical and comedy, genres that thrive on incongruity and
failure, were stated attempts to break away from the perfection of
Jeanne Dielmans structural mastery. Especially when she appears, a
manic, excessive animation energises her mise en scne: in The
Eighties (1983) she conducts Magali Nols singing with a matching,
frantic gesticulation; she speeds up the slurring of her lines in
Lettre dune cinaste; she takes all of her vitamin pills at once to
save time in Sloth (1986). Such overstated compressions have become
Akermans signature: a set of themes and strategies she draws on
each time she feels the need to offset her dry, minimalist sobriety.
Given this ritual motivation to break the directorial sense of
formulaic rigidity these performances can only be carried out by
the director. At the same time, the Akerman-chamber is neither
conducive to psychodrama nor propitious to self-exposure. Akermans
presence in the films has a performative purpose rather than a
referential quality. If Akermans strongest films are propelled by
an interest in restaging the terms of her artistic autonomy, how are
we to expand these considerations beyond her literal presence? As
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La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator

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proven by Jeanne Dielmans success, any obsessive will do for

Akerman. As a character, the obsessive allows for a staging of a
peculiar form of creativity a revisitation of the everyday as
doubt. The basis of Akermans art lies in creating occasions for
this doubt to proliferate. She does so most successfully when the
frames rigour and the settings architecture conspire with a
characters compulsive need for certainty.
Traversing Prousts ample understanding of the insufficiencies of
the quotidian to animate desire, La Captive renews Akermans
investment in obsession as a dynamic force. She propels Simon
(Stanislas Merhar) after Ariane (Sylvie Testud) in a relentless line
of tension. His pathological need for control, a condition that
feeds on doubt, is met with a series of barriers. Arianes flank is
offered instead of her sex, the opaque glass separating her body
from him as she showers. Her body is always on call, yet it limns a
boundary whose pliable ambivalence becomes strikingly visible to us,
in what might be called Arianes eyes wide shut state her sleep
during sex. Arianes separate desire erects a closed door, always
inviting Simons eyes pained torches in search of yet more
uncertainty.
When, after splitting from Ariane, Simon drives her to an aunts
house, he feels that now, at last, he can demand that she confess
all the lies she told when they were together. After she mentions
two such lies, he pleads for more. What are two lies, give me at
least four, so I can trust you. Ariane refuses to say more,
explaining that her desire is connected to unknowing, not to
knowing. In this scene Akerman has, for the first time, given one of
her characters am explicit speech against fusion. She has always
disliked manipulating the spectators feelings; her characters
quality of a quietly resistant autonomy is wonderfully expressed in
the countenances of Ariane in La Captive or of Anna in The Meetings
of Anna. Their opaqueness disallows identification. Just as we
cannot read these characters, neither can any of Annas
interlocutors imprison her through their desire. Ariane, similarly,
escapes Simons voracity.
Akermans filmic command of the obsessive movement in La Captive is
spectacular. She stretches the object of desire in an elastic line
that brings it now close, now far. The main, tragic line is traced
by the final car ride. The car is a mobile chamber in which Akerman
once more stages a resistance to anothers control. Many scenes
establish the centrality of the car as prison. The contrast of this
closed space with the exterior is continuously paraded. The car
becomes a makeshift bed in which sexual acts (always performed with
that feigned sleep) can take place. After their stroll through the
Bois de Boulogne, and another series of interrogations, Ariane asks
to drive; the road surrounded by trees takes on an ominous, fairy
tale quality.
After arriving at the aunts house and formally sitting for a brief
instant, Simon and Ariane decide to give their relationship a few
further weeks. They abruptly stand up to leave. The sudden reversal
of course is a recognisable trait in Akerman she alternates long
slow scenes with abrupt turns. Simon and Ariane go back to the car
in a last retracing of doubt. Uncharacteristically, the filming of
the entire drive from Paris to the aunts house and from there to
the sea alternates between different framings: a long shot of the
car, their back to us as they leave Paris, a frontal shot of Simon
and Ariane as he starts his pleas, and an extended long-shot of the
road ahead, denoting Arianes introspection. If, at first, these
variations seem random, we soon notice how the filmmaker is testing
new ground. On the way to the sea, as Ariane drives, Simon
immediately resumes his harangue. She says: Leave me be. He asks
for a kiss and she complies. Akerman expressively cuts to the car
swerving on the road. A dry cut takes us to Ariane looking at the
sea, and Simon gently nudging her to follow him. They walk together,
but by now we know that Akermans adaptation of Proust is close to
its tragic denouement.
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La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator

18. Kenneth Burke, On Tragedy, in

Tragedy: Vision and Form (San
Francisco: Chandler, 1965), p. 285.

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Tragedy as a mechanism is based upon a calamitous persistence in

one's ways. (18) This definition by Kenneth Burke is especially
applicable to Akermans treatment of the obsessives doomed attempts
to conquer uncertainty. The filmmakers complicity with Ariane is
revealed by her decision to represent Arianes unseen reaction to
Simons control indirectly, displacing it onto the image of the
swerving car. The violence of this rejection, seen from the back in
a long shot, gains an unforgettable force. Akermans embrace of one
of the most exciting conventions of melodrama, car-reaction shots,
confirms her formal courting of the new as she makes the car that
mobile room tremble with emotion.
This essay was first presented at the Images Between Images
symposium on Chantal Akerman organised by Kaira Cabanas at Princeton
University (1 December 2005). Thanks to Mark Cohen for his help.

Ivone Margulies and Rouge December 2006. Cannot be reprinted

without permission of the author and editors.

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