Existence, Witnessing, and Obsession--Chantal AKERMAN’s Sensual Cinema
Translated by Mei SU
“The spectator must remain the true Other. Cinema should not be a machine that devours its audience. This is why my shots are composed frontally, and why I restructure time so as to create an experience. The spectator should not forget time, nor be swallowed by the narrative.”
--Chantal AKERMAN
AKERMAN’s films may be understood as a restrained form of visualization. There is scarcely a trace of induction: the spectator cannot consume the plot smoothly, nor can they project themselves onto the film. The visualized distress is not meant to generate agreement but to compel the spectator to shoulder the burden of alienation, intolerance, and pain—thereby sensing the inexplicable and inevitable weight underlying in ordinary life. In other words, spectatorship here does not mean retrieving information or occupying a discourse/subject position; rather, it functions as a witnessing, as an ethical ordeal, allowing what has been repressed and kept unspoken to surface. This is evident in her early works such as Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, where the female protagonist is depicted in doing repetitive chores through static long takes. The film shifts from a narrative device to a field where the senses are reawakened. The spectator encounters the undramatic, unexplained fatigue and erosion on the edge. Without any rescue nor comfort, the spectator endures the muteness of the gaze.
In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, this feeling expands into a solitary wandering. Repeated departures from landscapes, lifeless lighting, and failed, indifferent conversations pervade the film, guiding the audience to follow Anna alongside the director, witnessing her unfulfilled encounters and unattained intimacy. Although the narrative adopts the structure of a road movie, it diverges from the genre’s typical trajectory of inner transformation and salvation. Instead, spectatorship is frustrated by futile resolutions and aborted revelations, mirroring Anna’s own isolation. In her reunion with her mother, tenderness is undercut by a silence that avoids conflict. When Anna confesses to a lesbian love story, her mother listens without response, as if enforcing boundaries through muteness. This unspeakable rift implicitly parallels the unresolvable issue between AKERMAN and her own mother—a Holocaust survivor reluctant to revisit family history. Such silence, while protecting against trauma, also isolates and estranges. It may be this tension that underlies the broken relationships and recurring absence of the mother in AKERMAN’s films, through which she constructs an interactive structure of spectating and existing.
Là-bas crystallizes this construction into a form of purity. Filmed during AKERMAN’s stay in Tel Aviv, the work avoids directly framing radical or overtly political material. Instead, AKERMAN turns her camera outward, capturing ordinary households and residents through long takes from her window. Over these images, her voiceover recounts fragments of family stories, daily routines, and phone calls. As a child, AKERMAN’s mother forbade her from playing outside, a restriction that fostered the habit of gazing through the window, which at times slipped into self-isolation. This early experience of staring and confinement becomes the prototype for the film’s visual frame, where gazing is not merely a state of looking but a weighted mode of being, suspended in a non-narrative time in which nothing happens. The interplay—and disconnection—between vision and hearing, between the indoor and the outdoor, obstructs any stable grasp of geography. “Is Israel a promised land, or just another exile?” At this uncertain juncture, whether the narrator touches upon her own history, her collective memory, her mother, and the lingering trauma remains in doubts.
The recurring motifs of unresolved emotional fractures and failed attempts at reconciliation give AKERMAN’s films their undercurrent of profound structural grief. Her literary adaptations, such as La Captive and La Folie Almayer, are not mere interpretations of Proust and Conrad’s texts; they rather convey her central concerns through the cultural and historical contexts embedded in the novels. What emerges is a portrait of obsessive emotional attachment—inescapable and impossible to withdraw from. Actor Stanislas MERHAR embodies the figure of the obsessed in both films, serving as mirrored images: in one, a middle-class man consumed by desire; in the other, a character defeated by colonial illusion. The female leads, by contrast, are endowed with greater strength than in the original novels. Their power does not stem from overt dominance, but from an impenetrable resistance against the patriarchal gaze and the disciplining force of civilized discourse, through which they push back. The openings of both films deconstruct the density of literary psychological description by employing imbalanced framings and heterogeneous elements. It is also worth noting that La Captive draws inspiration from Alfred HITCHCOCK’s Vertigo, particularly in its maneuver of confusion and symbolism.
AKERMAN’s films are dedicated to contemplating the questions of how to exist and how to restore emotion. Influenced by underground cinema, performance art, and the New Wave, her early mother-tongue works during the 1970s—Saute ma ville, La Chambre, and Je, tu, il, elle—already probe the uncertainty of existence and the dilemmas of intimacy. In the 1980s, two television commissions centered on adolesence—J’ai faim, j’ai froid and Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles—turned their attention to the wanderings of girls in the city. The former articulates a playful yearning for freedom and intimacy, while the latter, in a semi-autobiographical form, responds to the New Wave through handheld camerawork, conveying the loneliness of bodies and emotions that marked the generation of ’68. Toute une nuit, grounded in a tone of fluidity, has often been associated with the dance of Pina BAUSCH. Here, the body itself becomes the site of events, emotions, and desires—not simply represented by characters, but enacted through movement. The film’s sensory sequences, detached from conventional narrative, weave together fragments charged with emotional tension, resonating back and forth with affection.
The stillness of the body, the wandering shots, the repetitive words, and the dedicated return to themes permeate AKERMAN’s films in both content and form. The short film Le jour où… revisits the setting of La Chambre but adds an individual voiceover as an intense variation, reflexively tracing the wounds of cinema and memory. As she once admitted in her writing: “I am a dweller. I know that well. Sometimes I bore myself so badly by keeping dwelling on things. My life is just a long, long dwell.” In her films’ retellings, AKERMAN exposes the dragging hesitation of existence, rendering spectatorship unsettled. The speechless moments stretch into endless waiting, unfolding in a rhythm that verges on mourning.
Note: This section also includes a documentary centered on AKERMAN and her films, Vents Violents (Two Letters to Chantal AKERMAN). Employing an unconventional narrative form, the film revisits the sites of AKERMAN’s final work No Home Movie as well as Là-bas, presenting what has been lost. More than a homage, this commemorative film extends into a profound dialogue on contemporary politics, ethical dilemmas, and the responsibilities of the visual.
HSIEH Chwenching
HSIEH Chwenching holds a master's and a Ph.D. from Université Paris-Est, following her graduation from Tama Art University. Her expertise lies in experimental film, body theory, gender studies, and performance art. In addition to her professional work as a filmmaker, writer, and interpreter/translator, she currently teaches at Shih Hsin University.
