Screenplays, director's notes, stories, interviews… For the first time, all of Chantal Akerman's written works are brought together in a large, richly illustrated boxed set comprising three volumes. An essential collection for gaining a deeper understanding of one of the great artists of the 20th century.
In 2022, in a poll of over 1,600 experts, the prestigious British film magazine Sight and Sound named Chantal Akerman's masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, "the greatest film of all time." For a long time, the Belgian filmmaker's work was known only to cinephiles. But behind the monumental Jeanne Dielman lie more than thirty films, shot between 1968 and 2015, the year of the director's untimely death. Among these is Histoires d'Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989), a story of exodus filmed in New York, where she lived, and which was presented in a restored version at the last Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight. But there is also his "written and spoken" work, recently collected in a large two-volume box set published by L'Arachnéen, under the direction of film critic Cyril Béghin.
Of course, one could argue that every film, constructed from a screenplay and director's notes, is also a written work. This is particularly true for Chantal Akerman. All of her screenplays are included in these volumes: some of this preparatory material was never actually produced. It is fascinating to discover the richness of Akerman's prolific body of work, too often reduced to the image of Delphine Seyrig peeling potatoes in her kitchen in Jeanne Dielman. One naturally discovers recurring themes, some linked to her family experience—as the daughter of deportees, the question of Judaism runs through several of her works—as well as a highly masterful literary style. As Cyril Béghin points out, her writing is more akin to the New Novel than to technical documents. And while Chantal Akerman belongs to the generation following Marguerite Duras, the novelist began directing films around the same time as Akerman. We thus discover a certain stylistic research in these scenarios, rare in the screenwriting exercise, as evidenced by the beginning of the script for Elle vogue vers l'Amérique, an unfinished film which precedes and foreshadows Jeanne Dielman:
« The kitchen… A long, narrow kitchen with a tiled floor. The steady hum of a refrigerator […]. Modern, functional furniture […]. A perfectly tidy kitchen. It opens onto a glass-enclosed terrace from which you can see vacant lots dotted with modern buildings, some of the windows lit. A stretch of road, trucks with their headlights on, a huge, brightly lit supermarket. In the distance, the Atomium twinkles… »
While reading a screenplay, even for the most avid film buff, can be tedious, reading Chantal Akerman's films is a pleasure. Like a Georges Perec novel, with brevity and precision, she doesn't simply describe a setting; she establishes an atmosphere. As if the mise-en-scène were already present in the author's words.
Influenced as much by Jean-Luc Godard as by New York experimental cinema, Chantal Akerman's work also engages with a broader formal reflection, considering cinema as a modern art form—as evidenced by her numerous video installations, presented at the Venice Biennale and in museums worldwide. Chantal Akerman, Written and Spoken Work is not an analytical work (apart from Cyril Béghin's insightful introduction), but the reader is nonetheless invited to reflect on Chantal Akerman's unique approach to filmmaking through the many interviews compiled by L'Arachnéen. Finally, this generous boxed set also includes all of the filmmaker's published works, including My Mother Laughs, originally published by Mercure de France in 2013. Written two years before her death, My Mother Laughs is a kind of autobiography of the filmmaker, confronting her mother's aging and illness. Written in the love and violence of spontaneity, this poignant story can be read as a mirror image with Annie Ernaux's Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit, published a few years earlier.
« I have always had the desire to write "This is what we can read, by way of introduction, on the back cover of one of these volumes published by L'Arachnéen." Simply, I was afraid of doing only that. […] I knew that by writing films, I would get out of my room.” While she hasn't always taken up writing, if she is “literary” "Is not the first adjective that comes to mind when thinking about Chantal Akerman's films, but this collection from L'Arachnéen editions proves that the artist's work, more contemporary than ever, can be seen, heard and read.
CHANTAL AKERMAN, WRITTEN AND SPOKEN WORK,
EDITION ESTABLISHED BY CYRIL BÉGHIN
THE ARACHENIAN, APRIL 2024 – €69
EDITIONS-ARACNEEN.FR
