Projection: On Chantal Akerman's Screens

A landscape expresses a mood. Such “expression” says exactly what we intend by the term “empathy.”

[The way] I would like to film…corresponds…to the idea that the land one possesses is always a sign of barbarism and blood, while the land one traverses without taking it reminds us of a book.

Chantal Akerman travels across a landscape of images as she moves freely between fiction and documentary film and also exhibits work in the art gallery. Since the early 1990s, the celebrated director and writer, who pioneered a new form of cinema in the 1970s, has engaged in expanded ways of screening, in advance of the cultural movement that propels today's filmmakers and artists to exchange roles and work increasingly in between media.

The hybrid screen space that Akerman constructs is a landscape that comprises images of places, perceptively and empathetically explored from the inside and the outside. Cities, lands, and homes are portrayed in long takes that enhance duration, capturing the unfolding of everyday life, especially the life of women, and the flow of temporality and memory. Forms of passage take place on her screens as, held by the steadiness of the long takes, we are led to explore sites of transit and separation and instances of cultural movement. In this durational way, we are given the opportunity to reflect in particular on the inner workings of displacement, migrancy, and diaspora (see Chantal Akerman, 2004; Sultan, 2008).

This style of durational filming dotted with minimal or even casual action, which is Akerman's long-standing signature practice, has transferred well from the film theater to the art gallery, where the work has found a new dwelling place. It is interesting to note that the way Akerman has always liked to film fits perfectly well into the meandering itineraries of our current forms of viewership. It accords closely with the digital era's nonlinear streaming and