Sounding queer collaborative acts: Chantal Akerman films Sonia Wieder-Atherton

ABSTRACT

The cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton has collaborated with Chantal Akerman on her feature films, shorts, documentaries and installations. However, Wieder-Atherton’s influence on Akerman’s filmmaking, and her physical presence in the films themselves, have not been examined directly by scholars. This article will address this imbalance by outlining their collaborative project, before analysing Akerman’s short film Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher (1989), in which the cellist performs the eponymous composition by Henri Dutilleux. Through the inter-filmic presence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the allusions to Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), the author argues that the cellist’s intense rendering of Dutilleux’s score, marked by his use of scordatura, catalyses Akerman’s queer mistuning of Hitchcock’s classic. In doing so, her film produces a form of ambivalent spectatorship that embraces what the author is calling the ‘musically queer’. Her analysis draws on Tania Modleski’s critical swerve away from the male gaze in her study of Rear Window, and on Lee Edelman’s conceptualisation of Rear Window’s rumbling pulse of anal eroticism. The author will demonstrate how Akerman charges the ‘rear view’ backdrop of her film with an immersive sonic erotics that decentres the phallocentric scopic regime and fashions an acoustic space for queer spectatorial pleasures.

KEYWORDS:

• Short film
• music
• gender and sexuality
• spectatorship
• lesbian desire
• Rear Window

Acknowledgments

An early version of this article was presented as a 15-minute paper entitled ‘An Image that Lasts: Akerman, the Frame, the Music’ at After Chantal: An International Conference, hosted by the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster in November 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Born in San Francisco, Wieder-Atherton grew up in New York and moved with her family to France in 1968. In Paris, she studied with the French cellist Maurice Gendron and the pianist Jean Hubeau, before moving to Moscow at the age of 19 to train with the Russian cellist Natalia Shakhovskaya.

2. In one arresting sequence in Akerman’s portrait essay film, co-produced by ARTE, entitled Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton/With Sonia Wieder-Atherton (2002), a female cellist (Sarah Iancu) is filmed from behind a gauze-like fabric as she co-performs Monteverdi’s ‘Duo Seraphim’ with Wieder-Atherton and a male cellist (Matthieu Lejeune). This atmospheric image appears to foresee the transparent tulle scrim that will appear in front of the large video projection of Akerman and her mother in the later installation Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide, on which an image of handwritten text appears, as well as a portrait of a young woman, suggestive of Akerman’s grandmother’s diary that contained her private thoughts and a watercolour portrait of a woman (Pollock 2013, 333).

3. Ioana Wieder was a Romanian Jew from Bucharest whose family left Romania and moved to Palestine, then to Lebanon, where they remained during the war. She later gained citizenship in France in 1957 before relocating to the US. She was a translator, teacher, filmmaker and militant feminist, and she founded the collective Les Insoumuses with Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig in 1975. They went on to establish the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in 1982 and Wieder became the president of the Centre after Seyrig’s death in 1990, until 1993.

4. Akerman’s Letters Home is based on Françoise Merle’s stage play Letters Home (1984), starring Seyrig and her niece Coralie Seyrig, who star in Akerman’s film version. The play revolves around letters sent from Sylvia Plath to her mother, who published the correspondence in 1975 after Plath’s suicide.

5. An extract from the ending of this short film is accessible via Sonia Wieder-Atherton’s official website: http://www.soniawiederatherton.com/en/images/ (accessed 4 November 2019).

6. As a brief aside, it should be noted that in Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton, the closing credits reveal that the film was shot in the opulent Château de Ferrières in France, which was built in the mid-nineteenth century for Baron James de Rothschild. The Château was used by the French Jewish humanitarian organisation ‘Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants’ (Children’s Aid Society), which accommodated Jewish orphans after the Second World War. The OSE Photograph Collection 1937–1962 contains a photograph of a summer camp held for Jewish orphans in 1945 in the grounds of this Château. It is accessible online at: https://digifindingaids.cjh.org/?pID=2130079#a14. These sorts of clues that Akerman drops into her films are essential to our understanding of the incorporation of the historical narrative of Jewishness into what I consider to be, in this particular film, a narrational act of love, performed by a queer Jewish director.

7. Hitchcock famously described Rear Window as his ‘most cinematic film’, representative of the ‘purest form of cinema’, defined by the visual logic of montage ([1968] 1972, 40).

8. ‘Imagine you come home from an evening out, you don’t get changed, you just hang up your coat and play, as though the party was still going on in your imagination’ (translation by Alan Fell).

9. Trois Strophes was made after Akerman’s documentary on the choreographer Pina Bausch, entitled Un jour Pina a demandé…/One Day Pina Asked Me (1983), hinting at further possible connections between the short and this earlier documentary.

10. A haunting background presence of past trauma has also been noted by Wieder-Atherton in relation to her own mother’s early experiences. Discussing her fascination for the singing of cantors and the spiritual power of Chasidic music, which she discovered when Akerman asked her to research Jewish liturgical music for Histoires d’Amérique, Wieder-Atherton explains that this work intensified her awareness of aspects of her mother’s unspoken traumatic past: ‘This was something that existed in the background to my life, but I knew nothing more about it.’ When working on Histoires d’Amérique, she experienced a moment of revelation, as ‘suddenly it seemed so natural, as if I knew those melodies, as if those sounds had been there for ages. It was a very strong, strange, even frightening impression – something you know so well, yet you have never met it before’ (Duchen 2011). The discoveries Wieder-Atherton made about her mother’s past, and about her maternal grandmother, caused her to add ‘Wieder’ (her grandparents’ name) to her surname, to deepen her connection with them (Percival 2019, 209).

11. This hair-brushing gesture is singled out in Sami Frey’s 69-minute documentary Autour de “Jeanne Dielman”, edited by Agnès Ravez and Chantal Akerman. This film was made during the shooting of Jeanne Dielman and features Akerman, Seyrig and the crew. In one amusingly tense exchange on set, Seyrig struggles to achieve the slow pace Akerman requires of her as she brushes her hair. In her frustration, she orders Akerman to explain the psychology behind the gesture and Akerman eventually but reluctantly complies: ‘She’s not daydreaming. It’s a moment of relaxation for herself alone.’

12. In Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick highlights some significant asymmetries between discourses of male and female anal eroticism, underlining the decisive absence of a discourse of female anality: ‘Since classical times, there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means’ (1993, 204, original emphasis). Sedgwick suggests that female anality (when presented as a pleasure and not a punishment) lacks ‘the representative relation to lesbianism that male anality has to male homosexuality’ (204). Whilst Akerman’s suggestive staging of female anal eroticism that I have identified in Trois Strophes functions non-explicitly, it paves the way for a richer critical dialogue to take place on unacknowledged sites of queer female pleasure.

13. Hitchcock specifically referred to the musicality of the cutting rhythm in Rear Window, stating that ‘each cut was written ahead of time’. He compares the process of deciding where the cuts should fall, in advance of the shoot, to composing a piece of music ([1968] 1972, 41). His comments inadvertently give form to the idea that underlying his conception of montage as ‘the purest form of cinema’ is the impurity of an inherent [-ly queer] musicality.

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Albertine Fox

Albertine Fox’s research is concerned with listening spaces in contemporary French and Francophone documentaries, with a focus on the documentary convention of the filmed interview. As part of this project, she has recently completed an interview with the Lebanese filmmaker Corine Shawi. Albertine has published the chapter ‘Vocal Landscapes: Framing Mutable Stories in De l’autre côté (2002) and Une voix dans le désert (2002)’ in Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson (eds), Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (Legenda, 2019), and her article ‘Sensory Experience, Sound and Queerness in Chantal Akerman’s Maniac Shadows (2013)’ was published in September 2019 in Moving Image Review & Art Journal 8 (1&2). Albertine’s first monograph Godard and Sound: Acoustic Innovation in the Late Films of Jean-Luc Godard was published in 2017 by I. B. Tauris.