Documenting the Domestic: Chantal Akerman's Experimental Autobiography as Archive

ABSTRACT

Chantal Akerman’s films provide meticulous observations of the everyday, depicting in obsessive detail the activities that weave across daily life. Experimental and often on the border of fiction and non-fiction, Akerman’s films have created a rich archive, both personal and collective, of domestic life. Many of Akerman’s films have a range of autobiographical registers. In this article, I position the experimental autobiographical film as archive. Drawing on feminist critiques which challenge the distinction between autobiography and archive and which shift assumptions about what constitutes an archive, I examine the autobiographical tendencies of Akerman across several of her films. In particular, I discuss Saute ma ville, Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, News From Home and No Home Movie. These four films variously document domestic spaces, everyday habits, personal memory and family relationships. I argue that Akerman’s films can be read together as a dynamic archive of gestures, habits and repetitions of domestic life. Positioning Akerman’s experimental autobiography as archive contributes to the work of feminist scholars of history who continue to challenge what an archive is, and question what ‘counts’ as evidence.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jean-Paul Dorchain at the Belgian Royal Film Archive, Marilyn Watelet at Paradise Films and Loreena Paulet at Zeugma Films for their assistance with providing film stills. The author is also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jane Simon is Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She researches and teaches in visual cultural studies, feminist cultural theory, film and photography. Before taking up her position at Macquarie University she was a Visiting Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow in the European Centre for Photographic Research at the University of Wales, UK. Jane has published articles on amateur and experimental film, photography, artist’s books and modes of writing about visual culture.

Notes

1. In Dever’s example she considers the intense speculation around a series of letters written by Great Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta. The letters, which were under embargo until 10 years after Garbo’s death, were assumed to include revelations about Garbo and Acosta’s rumoured romantic relationship, but when the letters were eventually opened the popular media declared that they revealed ‘nothing’ about their relationship. Dever goes on to examine this ‘nothingness’ and questions how intimacy and materiality are connected in de Acosta’s preserving of Garbo’s letters.

2. The documentaries discussed by Cvetkovich include Girl Power (Benning 1992), Greetings from Out Here (Spiro 1993), Not Just Passing Through (Carlomusto et al. 1994) and Forbidden Love (Weissman and Fernie 1992). Of interest is Cvetkovich’s claiming of Benning’s work as documentary. Her reasoning for positioning it as documentary rather than its typical classification as autobiographical or as experimental video is ‘to promote its value as an innovative archive of lesbian life, one that includes the material spaces of intimacy, such as bedrooms, and intimacy’s imaginary spaces, such as fantasies’ (Cvetkovich 2002, 130). In light of my argument here about experimental autobiography as archive, I question the assumption that the label of documentary (rather than the label of autobiography) makes the film more suited to discuss it as an example of an archive.

3. An example of this productive intersection is seen in Luce Giard’s chapter ‘Doing Cooking’ in Michel de Certeau, Pierre Mayol and Giard’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume II: Living Cooking. Giard’s ‘Doing Cooking’ is an archive of the gestures, tastes and moods of women in the kitchen. Giard’s emphasis on the domestic rituals of women was inspired by Chantal Akerman’s careful attention to the gestures of a woman cooking, cleaning and living her daily life in Jeanne Dielman. After seeing Jeanne Dielman, Giard was motivated to produce a descriptive sociology of cooking.

4. Molesworth refers, for example, back to Carol Pateman’s claim that ‘the public sphere is always assumed to throw light onto the private sphere, rather than vice versa’ (as quoted in Molesworth 2000, 83).

5. I am indebted here to Meaghan Morris’ argument in relation to Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries. Morris suggests that Moffat’s film places ‘domesticity, rather than great events, at the core of national history’ (2006, 113)

6. Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman is an autobiography which consists of a collage of scenes from Akerman’s own films edited together. As Lebow writes, Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman is ‘autobiography that substitutes the work for the life, or rather, allows the filmic work to speak of its creator’s life more efficiently and effectively than she could manage with words’ (2016, 57).

7. Akerman herself makes a link between Jeanne Dielman and Saute ma ville in Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman: where a scene from Jeanne Dielman where Jeanne is about to polish Silvain (her son’s) shoes is edited together with a scene of Akerman in Saute ma ville frenetically polishing her own shoes and then her own legs. For a discussion of this connection see Lebow (2016, 57).

8. For a discussion of the role of this landscape imagery in the film, see Margulies’ essay, ‘Elemental Akerman: Inside and Outside No Home Movie’ (2016).

9. For a discussion of Akerman’s use of rooms in her films, see Margulies (2007).

10. Meah and Jackson’s work on the kitchen and memory in the field of cultural geography holds value for thinking about domestic archives. They make the case, for example that ‘a collection of hand written recipes might constitute an archive, and the owner takes on the role of curator in preserving the collection’ (2016, 521).

11. Verne Harris also borrows from Cvetkovich when he describes Patricio Guzmán’s documentary film Nostalgia for the Light (2010) as a ‘record of pain’ and an ‘archive of feeling’ (2014, 224).

12. With Akerman’s suicide shortly after the release of No Home Movie, it is difficult not to also experience Akerman’s impending death when we watch the film.