FEMINISM IN FILM /

I feel a little guilty that I have chosen what might seem to be a glum film. But there’s something in the quiet humanity of Chantal Akerman’s films that I get an uplifting feeling from—a kind of recognition in emotions that we can relate to on some level.

I first discovered Chantal Akerman when I started talking to Sarah Rodigari about my recent performance project, Bedroom. The performance is about processing an isolating experience in bedrooms in different cities. It is about the loneliness of grief and about the complexities of sexual life and encounters—and it is also about violence. Sarah and I would often talk on the phone and early on in our conversations she suggested I look at the films of Chantal Akerman.

I hadn’t seen any of Akerman’s films; and before I did I looked into who she was. Akerman was Jewish, she was queer and she was Belgian. These facts greatly informing her body of work about isolation, dislocation and social marginalisation.

Les Rendez-vous d’Anna or The meetings of Anna is thought to be her most autobiographical work: a director is travelling through Europe to introduce her film at festivals. She travels alone on trains and has encounters with people that give very little insight into her interior life or opinions.

The films narrative structure is centred around a series of meetings with Anna and five other people: strangers, lovers, colleagues and her mother. All of the encounters involve long conversations where the other person talks and Anna listens empathetically.

Nearly all the interactions leave her less connected than before and she seems to be yearning for something more. In the conversations with men she seems almost not to be there- she gives nothing away about herself. In the interactions with women she warms up a little and is more intimate, but still she seems detached. She has awkward sexual interactions that often end in her moving away or telling the other person to leave. She is reaching out; but connection and intimacy elude her.

Loneliness is an overarching theme is most of Akerman’s films and what is so compelling about them is that she doesn’t shy away from bleak experiences but rather finds a way to draw out the humanity of it—showing that loneliness is a collective issue and that silence will only exacerbate it.

Akerman says that the nomadic nature of Anna frees her to resist conservative values and relationship systems of possession. Anna’s movement gives insight into a larger cultural and historical resonance in the context of the decades leading up to 1978, when the film was made. It highlights Akerman’s sensitivity to the holocaust and forced relocation and isolation. The people Anna has conversations with talk about economic issues, disillusionment and personal confessions - placing a dialogue of the personal within the historical. Although the film is made in the context of this particular historical moment, the synapses and stylised and emotional shots create space for the viewers own resonances.

The formally measured quality to Akerman’s films - her use of symmetry and wide shots—add to the feeling of dislocation in her characters. The shots in Anna place her in relation to architecture—trains, windows, hotel rooms, staircases and waiting platforms—creating a sense of someone at a threshold.

When researching for Bedroom I was thinking about disorientation and the writing of Sara Ahmed—and I think it relates here too. Ahmed considers how is it that we find our way when we’ve become lost, focusing on subjects who deviate from a socially constructed straight line. She says: “Becoming reorientated, which involves the disorientation of encountering the world differently, made me wonder about orientation and how much “feeling at home”, or knowing which way we are facing, is about the making of worlds”.

When we become disorientated we want to find our way. Ahmed says we need “homing devices” in order to establish our place and direction. We move in spaces, arranging and establishing our place in order to determine where we are placed in relation to our environment, the people around us, our history and our direction. So then orientation is about the intimacy of our bodies and our dwelling spaces, the worlds we make in order to know which way we are facing. We are placed in the context of our memories, where we build understandings of past events, often the ramifications of which can only be felt in the body some time after. So it seems Anna is processing something or on her way to finding a new way of being—her physical journey mirroring an unresolved interior search.

Something I’m drawn to in the film is how little dialogue there is. The spare text leaves room for emotion and communication to be conveyed through body language and gesture. The quiet spaces between people create an interior, reflective tone, adding to the building pressure of the question of what Anna is really experiencing.

The erotic encounters in the film are awkward and uncomfortable. From pushing someone away to spontaneously lying naked on top of a feverish, clothed lover- to telling her mother about her sexual encounter with a woman and then lying with her naked- these moments show the contradictions within Anna and the complexity and exposure of sex.

Some of the most insightful moments are when Anna is alone—deciding whether she wants the radio on or not, opening a wardrobe door and leaving it open and stopping by the door of another hotel guests room to eat a pea from their discarded dinner plate—one of the films little moments of play or a sign of assertion or desire on Anna’s part. I love this sense of experimenting in order to figure out where one is placed.

Anna has a willowy and ghost-like quality and it might seem that she is passive but I don’t think we’re meant to feel sorry for her: she’s an artist, she’s queer, she’s wandering and self-possessed—I think she’s in a state of flux and seeking out new ways of being.

— Kate Power

Kate Power is an artist and writer living and working in Tarntanya/Adelaide. She works across media, drawing on craft, video, sculpture and performance to investigate coexistence and the enforced social constructions that can complicate the way people relate to one another. In 2020, Kate became a Samstag scholar.

FEMINISM IN FILM / LES RENDEZ-VOUS D'ANNA

Saturday 4 September
1.30pm
Mercury Cinema

FEMINISM IN FILM is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

Watch a Q&A with Margot Nash, Pat Fiske and Alex Martinis Roe here.