Chantal Akerman: An Intimate Passion

This course is available for online registration.
It will also be open by Permission of Instructor
at Advising Day for additional enrollment.
When Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) committed
suicide, she left behind a prolific and singular
oeuvre. A truly independent filmmaker, she used
to write or co-write all her screenplays, and her
films outline an autobiography of sorts. She
worked in a variety of formats, exploring both
documentary, fiction and the personal essay form
- in most than 60 works: 18 features, countless
shorts and featurettes, and a dozen
multiple-screen installations that were often
variations of her single-channel films - always
mixing high art with popular culture, minimalist
rigor with physical exuberance. Through this
multiplicity of formats, though, a unique tone,
the specific quality of the gaze, an inimitable
mastery of the mise en scène constituted a style
that can be immediately spotted.

Her presence in her films was the index of a new
way of performing femininity, as well as
queerness and the anguish felt by the children of
Holocaust survivors. Hers was an unclassifiable
body willfully exploding the boundaries of sex,
race, ethnicity, genre, language, and geography -
or, at the border of the image, at the border
between documentary and fiction (to allude to the
title of one of her installations), as an
inimitable voice, talking and singing, the thinly
melodious voice of a child, later made husky by
the smoke of a thousand cigarettes.

Many of her films are about a girl/a woman whose
desires, passions, longings, and obsession with
an unspoken past are too big to be contained.
Women run away, cut classes, hitch-hike,
sleeplessly walk the streets at night, love two
people at the same time, strive to marry the
wrong person, stalk female ex-lovers, commit
murders, travel throughout Europe, go to America,
to Eastern Europe, to Asia, illegally cross
borders - in situations that go from the banal to
the surreal. The excess contained in Akerman's
signature frontal shots pours out in language, in
pleasure.

Having been a friend of Akerman's, co-curated
two major retrospectives of her work, edited a
dossier on her legacy shortly after her death,
and written a number of articles about her, I
have access to DVDs and VHS not commercially
available and will contextualize them, as well as
more "mainstream" examples of her work, within a
discussion of - gender politics - queer theory -
the ethics of representation of the Shoah and the
question of "the witness" - questions of mise en
scène and cinematic representation (composition
of shots, editing, off-screen space, relationship
between image and sound). Requirements: One 4-5
page paper mid-semester; one 10-12 page term
paper.