“I think the word career is inappropriate to my life,” says the late Chantal Akerman at the start of the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman. “Because,” she explains, “when you have a career, you have a plan. I always did what I liked and what interested me.”
One of the elite group of filmmakers whose formal/aesthetic innovations have impacted global cinema at its cellular level, Akerman’s career is testimony to her formidable innate talent, and to pure happenstance. From funding her early films by working a scam as a ticket-taker at a gay porn theater, to absconding with old boxes of black & white film she stumbled over in a film processing lab and then using it for her own creative means, the woman whose experiments with time, composition and audience expectation is an artist deserving of far more than her status as a darling of film theorists and hardcore cinephiles. The hour-long documentary, directed by Marianne Lambert, Akerman’s former production manager, effectively fulfills two roles toward giving the filmmaker her full due.
Chantal Akerman. Photo courtesy Icarus Films.
It’s an excellent primer for the novice to Akerman’s work, easing you into her rigorous, demanding modus operandi by serving up generous film clips that illustrate her approach while she and various talking heads (the actress Aurore Clement; director Gus Van Sant) explain everything from her method of directing actors, to setting up her camera, to being so exacting in putting together wardrobe for her characters that she exhaustively searched for shoes with heels of specific height and width because she wanted a specific sound as the actress walked across the floor. Anywhere also pulls the curtain back for longtime fans, illustrating the spark and evolution of her style, the politics that girded her work – from groundbreaking films like the lesbian love story Je Tu Ill Elle (1976) to Sud (1999), her documentary on the gruesome murder of African American James Byrd at the hands of three white supremacists – and her unflinchingly candid insights on herself, her films, and the world around her.
Je Tu Ill Elle
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, and extremely close to her mother – whose imprint is all over Akerman’s best known work Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles – she was aggressively anti-sentimental in her work, but still wanted the viewer to be emotionally engaged. “I hope the viewer feels free to feel the film and not just understand it. I want them to do both,” she tells Lambert as the two watch rushes of her last film, No Home Movie, and walk the viewer through their painstaking editing process.
Akerman, who committed suicide last year at the age of 65, is tough-minded but achingly vulnerable in I Don’t Belong Anywhere, a title that speaks to her nomadic lifestyle, the existential isolation that engulfed her, and the way her work exists outside any easy categorization.
BAMcinématek’s retrospective “Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images” begins Friday, April 1. A restored version of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles will screen at New York’s Film Forum from April 1-7.
In Los Angeles, the multiple-theater, month-long career retrospective “Chantal Akerman: Against Oblivion/CONTRE L’OUBL” will take place at Los Angeles Filmforum at the Spielberg Theatre (www.lafilmforum.org); REDCAT (http://www.redcat.org/ ); Cinefamily (www.cinefamily.org); Human Resources Los Angeles (http://humanresourcesla.com); and Laemmle Theaters (http://www.laemmle.com/films/40376). Click the links for more info.
Top photo from Jeanne Dielman. Courtesy Icarus Films.
