Dis-Moi: First Impressions of New and Expanded Interests by Keifer Taylor

Dis-Moi: First Impressions of New and Expanded Interests

Slipping into 1980, Chantal Akerman widened and polished her scope of interests with Dis-moi (aka, Aujour’dui dis-moi). While Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) hauntingly alluded to the Holocaust, this short performative documentary engages with its harsh remnants. Commissioned for French television, focusing on grandmothers, the 30-year-old Belgian filmmaker decided to interview numerous survivors. Including her mother, whose hushed voice is spread across the film’s narrative, the four testimonials tend to dwell on their family lives before the Ashkenazi Jews’ insufferable avalanche of systematic murders.

The performative qualities can be discerned by the director’s own presence. By constructing sequences with reverse angle shots, presenting her and the speakers, there lies a clear wish for personalisation. After the first two visits, a camera peers up onto the elderly women’s balconies. Cutting down to ground level, outside the apartments, a solemn Akerman stares up with fascination and respect for her subjects. Being the daughter of a lady sent to Auschwitz as a child, its ceremonial nature is unsurprising. As an unspoken fifth member of this story, she comes from a disparate generation of European children who will never truly understand the Nazis Final Solution, but lug its solidly traumatic load.

Jeanne Dielman: A Soundtrack of the Everyday by Keifer Taylor

Jeanne Dielman: A Soundtrack of the Everyday

When referring to her 1993 film From The East in a lengthy interview for The A.V. Club, Chantal Akerman notes, “you feel as a viewer, when you face the film and experience the film, you feel an implosion” Reaching beyond this particular film, the quotation befits the filmmaker’s recently screened work. In all of its unyielding simplicity, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is no exception. With each assured cut, Akerman’s second feature length narrative becomes a precarious game of jenga, casually building pressure until its eventual collapse. The result is a quietly painful, tense and nauseating ordeal that doesn’t seep out of the mind for days after the viewing.

Akerman and Space-Time by Ella Harris, Eve Marguerite and Keifer Taylor

An ongoing collaborative research project on space and time in Chantal Akerman's films between Ella Harris, Eve Marguerite Allen and Keifer Taylor.

Spaces of Refraction - Ella Harris

Three Geographical Encounters

Premises:

1.       “The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements”

2.       “one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest—the house, the bedroom, the bed, et cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”

(Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias and Utopias)   

The mirror is a semi-real/semi-unreal site. It is real because it takes up a literal portion of spacetime, it occupies an actual site in a given room. However, the mirror is also virtual because it has the potential to take on countless images, and unreal because it shows things where they are not. In ostensibly displaying you in your own real site the mirror actually transports your image over there – reframing it in a curious elsewhere, where it is given a new site and takes on a whole new set of relations and therefore characteristics, changing your image before you have a chance to catch it. The mirror is therefore a not a space of reflection: its surface is one which refracts, bends and distorts what it shows by a process of theft and motion, taking what is and transfiguring it into something else, in its passage via the virtual.

For Foucault, there are certain spaces, which he names ‘heterotopias’, that function like mirrors, in that their relations with other sites have a transformative effect. The relational connections that heterotopias have with other sites are not relations of affirmation or propping up, a neighbourly proximity that secures each’s place – they are relations of questioning and destabilisation; relations which cast a critical light upon all spaces and their relations.  As Foucault suggests, even the most seemingly circumscribed of sites, ‘the house, the bedroom, the bed’ can have this transformative power.

Akerman’s early work demonstrates a fixation on the interiority of precisely these places, the bed, the bedroom and the apartment. This is spelled out in La Chambre but more acutely explored in Je Tu Il Elle and Saute Ma Ville and 15/8.

La Chambre - Eve Marguerite Allen

Akerman 2 by Keifer Taylor

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Hotel Monterey: New Forms by Keifer Taylor

Hotel Monterey: New Forms

The initial screening of A Nos Amours’ Chantal Akerman retrospective marked my first venture into the prolific Belgian film director’s work. Having only seen La Chambre (1972) and caught glimpses of the venerated 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles I have remained a novice with only vague ideas of her aesthetic and thematic concerns.

My preconceptions were affirmed by the freewheeling shorts on the female psyche, Saute Ma Ville (1968) and - the less compelling - L’enfant aimé ou je joue á être une femme mariée (1971). The third was the austere Hotel Monterey (1972).

Persona: Time & Proximity by Keifer Taylor

Persona: Time & Proximity

To this day the close-up remains a unique aspect of the cinematic experience. On the big screen its nuanced details and poetic properties widen our anthropological understanding and breathe life into inanimate objects. In abstract terms the close-up holds a strong affinity to time. In her intriguing (though maddening) article ‘The Close-up: Scale & Detail’, Mary Ann Doane believes the close-up is “always at some level an autonomous entity” operating “synchronically rather than diachronically.” As a synchronic element, which hinders narrative progression, this intimate component creates a “temporality of contemplation,” allowing the audience to examine the subject in frame. Ingmar Bergman’s volatile 1966 feature Persona contains a plethora of close-ups of its voiceless protagonist Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann). Two scenes in particular relate to, and contradict, Doane’s argument of the close-up as a separate, synchronic entity.

From the eerie vacuity of Ullmann’s face in the psychiatric ward to the climactic sequence of dual-sided revelations Persona denies clear explanations. Having watched the film innumerable times I have managed to untangle threads of its complex web of enigmas whilst revelling in its opacity. If the typical dose of hyperbole demonstrated by many actors was present then the meaning behind  Ullman’s spiritless visage could be easily deciphered. Doane highlights the inherent opposition between “exteriority and interiority” suggesting that there is always something beyond our visual understanding. When confronted with an indefinable stare in close-up, the spectator is encouraged to contemplate its presence on screen and “dismantle it as a pathway to the soul.” Thus the face itself becomes a sight of subjectivity, granting viewers a bottomless supply of interpretations.

Analogous to Doane’s statement, Bergman himself exalts film as the only art form that “goes beyond ordinary consciousness” into “the twilight room of the soul.” With the taciturn Elisabet, including the unhinged nurse Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson), Bergman employs the camera as a tool that transcends the exterior limits in order to reveal the characters’ hidden imperfections.

Solaris: A Pilgrimage of Self-Examination by Kiefer Taylor

Kiefer Taylor sees Solaris as an invitation to confront and examine the fragility and complexity of the human spirit. He argues that Tarkovsky’s declared lack of interest in science fiction allowed him to make a film cracking open the fantastical edifice of the genre, leading audiences to nothing less than a spiritual reawakening.

Upon its release in 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky’s meditative science fiction feature Solaris was greeted well amongst critics and general audiences. Not only did it receive the Special Jury Prize at Cannes (back then considered the second most prestigious award of the festival) but it also ran for more than fifteen years without breaks in the Soviet Union. Due to Tarkovsky’s vehement rejection of genre, however, the director himself was left underwhelmed.

In his insightful (at times baffling) book Sculpting In Time Tarkovsky states, “Unfortunately the science fiction element of Solaris was nonetheless too prominent and became a distraction.” When viewing Solaris one may be puzzled by the director’s severe self-assessment. Even with the visual tropes of science fiction – from high-tech spaceships to rockets - the film retains the mystical charms of Tarkovsky’s world with the core themes of longing and the sullied souls of man being ever-present. In doing so, the film asks us to look beyond futuristic sensations of outer space and technological advancements and into the interior feelings of its distraught protagonist.

An Undefined Space: Reflections on Frost by Keifer Taylor

Fred Keleman’s obscure 1997 feature Frost is a gruelling yet thoroughly engrossing experience. A nihilistic world of domestic violence, sexual degradation and ruptured innocence channelled through muted colours and meditative long-takes. Whilst watching the film I felt that this simple, though intricately layered tale of a mother and son’s listless journey across a wintry German landscape cleverly plays with ones notion of the real and the unreal. In doing so, Keleman delves into the undefined space where reality and fiction collide.

When referring to cinema Hitchcock famously said, “drama is life with the dull bits cut out”. 

Like his Hungarian acolyte, Bela Tarr (The Man From London and The Turin Horse), Keleman displays a radical rejection of this dictum. The reality of Frost resides in Keleman’s observation of quotidian lives wrapped in the fictitious foil of the plot. This emphasis on the mundane everyday seems to regard plot as having secondary importance. For example, after arriving at the hotel, greeted by a sombre, bearded receptionist, Micha and his mother, Marianne, move out of the frame. Without warning, our focus is shifted to the taciturn receptionist as we observe him lying down to smoke a cigarette. In a way, this inexplicable scene may mirror the main characters’ search for relief, being compared to that of the respite granted by the musky taste of tobacco. On the flipside, it may merely be read as a moment removed from the narrative, leaving the spectator to ponder the deep-seated problems of anonymous characters.