A filmic research on self-portrait cinema

The Film Review

FILM REVIEW:

THE PORTRAYAL OF THE SELF AND THE SELF-PORTRAIT CINEMA OF AGNES VARDA AND CHANTAL AKERMAN

This essay sees an analysis on the number of filmic inspiration towards the creative thesis, predominantly a discussion on the works of Agnes Varda and Chantal Akerman, both female directors with a repertoire in the cinematic portrayal of the self. I became intrigued to the notion of the self as it is elaborated and utilised as one’s own film language, as it interacts with other chosen cinematic materials. This essay will hence discuss the image of the “self” as a tool itself, navigating and in dialogue with both Varda and Akerman’s own film languages in the three respective films. This is as well an exploration of the respective essence and elements in making not necessarily just a self-portrait but also in the many cinematic forms and approaches to capturing the self. Last but not least, in the interest of the amalgamation of the literatures and the very personalised nature of my own self-portrait filmmaking, this essay will be written parallel to a reflection of my own creative process.

VARDA IN MULTIPLICITY: “BEACHES OF AGNES”

“I’m playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story” - the one sentence that commands the start of French new wave filmmaker Agnes Varda’s self-portrait, succinctly summarising that the filmic self-portrait to her is in essence of performativity. The film begins at the beach comically filled with mirrors where Varda is directing her film crew - the mirror hence reflects an image of not only the filmmaker, but as well the crew that produced the movie alongside her. This is what Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez in their analysis of the Varda self portrait calls a “‘performative self-portraits’: autobiographical recreation and the artistic installation” (70). Seeing the mirror as a conventionally symbolic material to pronounce the self, the film here at the very beginning sets itself apart from a film to an extended craft of the metaphor. It wasn’t only that the mirror was symbolic, the mirror reflects the setting, the filmmaker, and the literal production of the film. With that, the film, the mirror, the beach and furthermore Varda herself all become figurative components of this filmic metaphor. Right after, an interviewee asks Varda, “are you nostalgic to your childhood?”, thus establishes the chronology of Varda retelling the story of her life - From origin to now, past to present.

Narrative Block

The above two stylised narration (the metaphorical beach installation and Varda’s direct storytelling to orient us towards an autobiographical chronology), introduces us to the stylistic narratives in which I categorise as: the aforementioned 1. “Allusive” video metaphors 2. The documentative “present” - which sees Varda in her present form, actively retracing places of origins (i.e. one of her childhood locales; of the island of Noirmoutier - the place she filmed her first feature film) and personal histories. There is as well the 3. Memory reenactments - Where Varda hires actors of different age to represent her “self” in different stories of her past and finally 4. Archival stills/videos, in which is usually accompanied by Varda’s verbal narration. Despite my structuralist approach in reading the stylistic narrative components of Beaches, all of the above elements are interwoven together to form a filmic whole, one part flowingly interlinks to another, I.e. The reenactment of Varda’s childhood would pan to reveal “present” Varda giving a commentary, which would cut to her VoiceOver over archival materials. In its actuality, the five narrative blocks are intermingled into one.

Distraction from the Chronology

Although the temporal direction of the narrative adheres to the general linearity of the fabula, as with the mosaic of the five narrative blocks that situates a version of Varda in different temporality, this chronology in narrative becomes constantly distracted. Where “present” Varda in the form of the “allusive” interlude or “documentarian” injects herself into the narratives of her past - giving “present” commentary that literally “looks back” at the past; or any spontaneous observations that comes to mind; At other times, her attempt in adhering to the sequence of the fabula is interrupted by completely unrelated objects or sentiments of consciousness - Where these arbitrary sentimental reflections often revolve around Jaques Demy, Varda’s late husband: A cut to their younger vacation to America, the friends in which they met in America that came to visit Demy’s film set, where Varda commands it with the narration “start of digression”, leading to “a second digression”, a pancake breakfast her assistant and her had during their production of this very film... The film then, is not merely a premeditated sequence of a metaphorical commentary, a documentative “present” or a reenactment of “memory”. It is further driven by subjectivity, and the notion of “chance" in the form of sentiments that disrupts an established sequence. Beaches is the simultaneous process of constructing and deconstructing the very narrative structures Varda crafts.

Cinematic Reflectivity

Varda’s contradiction in embracing and rejection of linearity in autobiographical content hence shows the filmmaker’s intrinsic belief behind the notion of memory, as she declared in Beaches, that “memory is in bits and pieces. Stories we tell of ourselves are always fragmented”. This thematic conception in memory is as well carried onto the reflexive components of the film. On one layer, reflexivity is obvious in the filmmaker’s periodic reflection on her past works: Repositioning her old films into this one, Varda borrows and reclaims dialogues she’s written to reinstate, I.e. On a commentary towards Jane B. for Agnès V., Varda pastes a dialogue written for Jane Birkin: “I dump everything out, only to find a little is revealed.” In letting her old works speak through the currents of this film as a commentary of herself as a filmmaker, Varda imposes onto her portrait a double reflexivity, in both her past films as well the making of this film.

On another layer in addition to a journalistic reflection to her own cinema, Varda’s reflexivity extends to the interplay of the constituent tools of cinema. The filmmaker is deliberate in showing images of the camera at work in the very present of the making of Beaches whenever possible: Where there are mirrors, she would be sure to reflect the camera in shot; Where the crew was rolling to film her, a shot/reverse shot is made to reveal them. Not only then is she looking back at how she made films, she is also looking at how she is presently making one - Revealing and reflecting the process of the making of this film (unlike how her past works are dissected and categorized in linearity through the timeline of her life), this movie thus uncovers its own “making of” whilst uncovering its narrative. The prominent reflexivity is also underlaid in its comedic subtleties, in her numerous commentaries at her own shooting techniques for instance, which in turn distinguishes the video-camera-holding-Varda, versus the post-production-voice-over-recording-Varda. This juxtaposition is further emphasised, as narrator-Varda refers to the filmic events with time-signifiers - “yesterday”; “a week ago”… The nuances of temporalities that earmarks segments of the film as well characterises the multiplicity of Varda we experience - Be it documentative Varda, past Varda, “actors” Varda, Camera-in-hand-Present Varda, or post-production-voice-over Varda… Perhaps then could we understand the symbolism of the multiplicity of mirrors placed on the beach. 

There is an documentative unfiltered-ness Varda embraces towards her stream of consciousness as a filmmaker. This is what makes Beaches of Agnes a filmmaker’s self-portrait, not just a self-portrait that so happens to be caught in video. An element also prominently present in Chantal Akerman’s filmic portraits.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CINEMATIC SELF - CHANTAL AKERMAN

Blow Up My Town (1968), The Room (1972) and Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1997) are three short films by the Belgian-Jewish filmmaker Chantal Akerman, screened consecutively in the series “Inside(s)” at the Broadway cinematheque at its 2021 “Chantal Akerman Retrospective” festival.

All three films feature Akerman herself as the sole actor. The Room and Blow up My Town being the two earlier works of Akerman whilst Chantal her later feature, more apparent as an “auto-portrait” of the filmmaker (as she has herself named it so within the film). Watching the films in succession, I find it pertinent to write of the evolution of Akerman’s portrayal of the self throughout her cinematic timeline (albeit the former two not necessarily intentional to be designated as a “self portrait”.

BLOW UP MY TOWN (1968)

Before anything, the a capella soundtrack (and the only soundtrack used throughout the short) to Blow up my Town enters where even the visuals are yet to be introduced. It is a girl’s humming of a piece that later develops into a climax, with leitmotif, development and all. Afterwards, we are introduced to the urban environment surrounding the girl’s apartment. The camera glances through it excitedly, panning and tilting to explore its setting. Foreshadowing perhaps to the identical energy that would then entail Akerman’s character. Akerman hurriedly enters, then throughout the rest of the film continually occupied by domestic tasks that are carried out in eccentricity. The Broadway Cinematheque festival bulletin succinctly summarises: 

“Set mostly within the small confines of a kitchen, Blow Up My Town sees Akerman playing an erratic teenager who cooks, eats, cleans in a manner that undermines the social norms dictating what a housewife should do” (11).

The beginning sees Akerman rushing through the layout of an apartment building, up and down elevators, through hallways before she finally reaches her kitchen. It was accompanied by the girl’s singing, its motif in loop and in rubato: sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down, organically matching to the character’s act and the environment’s response to it. With its lalala’s, hums, spontaneous slurs of lyrics and imitation of grandiose orchestral instrumentations, these musical materials or techniques are utilised according to the development in mood and rhythm of the narrative. At times the musical narration attempts to imitate sounds of the domestic artefacts Akerman interacts with - i.e. a mouth-percussion foretelling the lighting of the match to the stove, just a split second before the image shows the anticipated movement. As this goes together with the dubbed sonic space that variably matches in and out of sync from its corresponding images, Akerman paints a degree of subjectivity that entails the arrangement of sound in this cinema, perhaps one that pertains to a sung, internal monologue of the subject’s - In its unsynchronized sound to image as if responding to the visuals instead of going with it; the vocalisation of object-sounds - this soundtrack is almost comedic, ironically juxtaposed with the quotidian visual narrative that ends with its uncanny, suicidal note. The tension between the two - the comical soundscape against the eerie visual narrative - is furthermore culminated as we were brought to the end, where Akerman literally blows up the town, carried out as though it was one of her domestic routines - An ending that resolves, without knowing we needed the resolution at all, the initial enigma to the seemingly unconnected title.

As the Akerman character challenges routine and conventions in its eccentric acts, the soundscape parallels this - in its disruption to previously-unchallenged conventions in routine and continuity, by way of sonic “spoilers” before the visual sequence, or its parodies of unquestioned, dubbed foleys. By imposing subjectivity in its disruption to established filmic structures, Akerman claims the sonic space as her own, deeming it as an unreliable source of storytelling. That is how the self in Blow Up My Town permeates in its soundscape.

THE ROOM (1972)

To, again, (very economically in my part) quote Broadway Cinematheque’s summary for The Room:

“Having experienced an artistic epiphany in New York watching Michael Snow’s minimalist, structuralist films, Chantal Akerman teamed up with the equally rebellious French cinematographer Babette Mangolte for The Room, a 11-minute short comprising nothing but circular pans of a cramped apartment complete with all sorts of domestic detritus - and, at its centre, Akerman slouched on her bed, eating an apple and looking at the camera in a piercing gaze at once determined but also blasè…The Room is a captivating and complex piece which far outweighs its length and simple premise” (12).

A piece in which the Criterion Collection names “a moving still life”, The Room is once again a work that sets itself in a household environment. Narrative-less, the cinematic rotation goes around the house a handful of times. In these loops, Akerman becomes progressively rendered as yet another “object” to the setting amidst all other household artefacts. The Room is thus an environmental portrait of an intimate, domestic space. This household, however, was in “detritus”. Akerman has decided to maintain the apartment in its rawness and disorganisation, seeming as if it was not staged, as if it was somewhere that was based in a lived reality, not a filmed location in performativity. The content of the short becomes indiscernible in the supposed binary of documentary versus fiction. What was staged? What wasn’t? That was the question I asked whilst waiting for each frame to reveal something unexpected or unprecedented. But it never does - the tension builds into a spectatorial craving for even the subtlest of chance. The speed of the pan would vary: Sometimes lingering on the coffee table, speeding through the closet…. Nonetheless our gaze is confined into the circular motion of the pan, a tension culminated as we navigate each area of each frame only ever so transiently, sometimes stealing a gaze to see the slightest possibility to an elsewhere beyond what is pictured - In the windows, a doorway to another room; a mirror obscurely reflecting an un-pictured part of the flat… All whilst the voyeur is locked in position.

Every earmarked location holds the power of being renewed, as if seeing the looped artefacts/scenes anew and refreshed. As we return after one cycle, this power is held in our anticipation for progression beyond the subject and objects’ constancy, we are very much captivated into the play of visual and narrational anticipation. Hence, the film is notional in its conception of the present, every inconstant that is primarily centred on Akerman: Us awaiting for her nuanced movements and perhaps the possibility of even the most micro of progression in narrative events. Even as this expectation is underwhelmingly met (for instance, when the camera returns to see Akerman eating an apple instead of merely lying in bed, then the camera loops, and sees Akerman finishing up a second apple), it revolves around more or less, the same premise of event - This slightest inconstancy in the character that became what we were hyperconscious of is in reality, a micro-narrative so micro that, once removed out of the microscopic gaze imposed to us through this film, is a slow witness to the very present of one more or less constant moment captured. There are no different temporalities written in the film - No differentiation of past, present or future: The start of eating an apple could very much precede the eating of the second apple, or Akerman lying on bed, every event in its specified temporal marker could well be traded between each other. Hence, The Room is a captivation of audiences into a mere filmic present, a temporal experience that is unexampled in cinema. This is an experiment to the filmic formality where the self so happens to be there: to use the self as a subject in a filmic display of a present, and then to treat the self as if the inanimate objects in the intimacy of a domestic space.

CHANTAL AKERMAN BY CHANTAL AKERMAN (1997)

Chantal begins and ends in one stylised fashion, with Akerman in her bare form, (apparently) outside of a cinematic characterisation, plainly present as the filmmaker she is. She is sitting in her New York apartment looking directly into a camera and discussing the process of making this film — A mere conversation from the filmmaker directly to the audience, reminding one more or less of the popular DIY video-form “vlogs”, that which has risen invariably with popular culture and the birth of social media (more predominantly in this case, YouTube). She speaks of the origin of the film, that producers of the French TV series Cinema of our Times (where filmmakers are invited to make documentaries of their fellows) approached her to be featured on, and so she has suggested she will make one on herself instead. Initially only planning to do so with snippets of her works collaged together, then was she suggested by the producers to also include filming herself - thus the birth of this “vlog” beginning and ending that enwraps the Akerman “auto-portrait”. This transforms the film into an explicit reflection of her creative process and of the identity that entails such. Comprised only of static shots, and in that a few variety of medium shots and close-ups, this minimal of specified film languages and semiotics pronounces that what is to be understood at this part was not coded through tools and symbols of her cinema - Not as we interpret the circular motions of The Room and ponder what could it be reflexive to the nature of film? No longer just what Clarence Tsui, director of the Broadway Cinematheque Hong Kong in their foreword to “Chantal Akerman Retrospective” calls "her austere, formalist experiments''; or a sonic exploration of self-consciousness as experimented in Blow Up My Town. Directly into the camera then to the audience is what she means, given in the monologue she utters. The script was written, even shown as Akerman holds it up for a word-to-word utterance of the script - this is “a self-analysis of her own filmmaking through, among other things, Godard’s JLG/JLG, a joke about a Jewish merchant and his cow, and her mother’s views on art” (13). A self portrait of a filmmaker as we find her at the intimacy of her home, with her dog, speaking truthfully of her process, her concerns, and her ideas. Announcing aloud her diaristic contemplation and questions as she was confronted with the project of making a self portrait, this was what enticed me as I sat at the Broadway Cinematheque, myself struggling to find a satisfactory plan for my capstone video project, below the contemplation she dictated along her script:

“Judging your own work leads to questions, about acting, documentary, fiction, time truth and other cinema. Someone else would have done it better. As if it’s true what a filmmaker says about his own work. As if that shows you why he started filming and why he continues. As if the face, silence, body and smile of a director says more about his work. I can’t do that, I did try something else. It was a lot of work.”

“First attempt to a self portrait: I appeal to your willingness to accept that I’m an unreliable story tellier. I also come to the discouraging realisation that honesty is artificial.”

“I’m not afraid of making this film, but my mind is completely blank, it's worse than being in between two films and wondering how I was able to make my previous films. They were made by someone else. ‘I don’t know what I want. Leave me be’, and they left me be. Plus I have signed a contract. It has a starting fate and a deadline…. “I wonder what I want to show and what would interest other people. And who are those other people? I don’t know what I want them to say, and I don’t want them to see me as I am. Which is what I used to do in my films, on the contrary. I wanted to challenge the whole world, but the world doesn’t care. I don’t want anything and I can’t decide anything. Everyday, I get up early to think about how I’m going to do this. I need a shape, a concept. Then I can easily fill in the rest. Then I can appeal to my subconscious. That’s easy too. I make sure there’s no distractions. From my computer, I look across the street. A woman is doing Tai Chi on her balcony. If I had done that too, I’d be less tense and I’d have thought of something by now.”

What was one to film about when filming a narrative on the self? Who should I imagine the audience to be and how would that change what would be told? If I were to be the expected audience, what is it that I would want to show, that I didn’t already know of myself? If there is an “other” audience, what would interest them in my “self”? In a more truthfully narcissistic matter of fact, nobody cares about me as much I do. But knowing in reality I wouldn’t be the only one watching this, it wouldn’t be a “me” that only has to be portrayed to myself as the spectator, not a “personal cinema”, it would be a “me” conditioned to other viewerships - At the very least, of my supervisor. Nevertheless, I came to the epiphany to my own project as I watched Chantal, that if Akerman could make films where she speaks directly of the message she wants to deliver, ridding herself of the need to structuring and embedding myriads of filmic semiotics… A self-portrait film could really, then, be anything one wants it to be. Just as Claire Atherton, Akerman’s editor remembers, “[Akerman] had more of a physical than cerebral rapport with image, with colours, with sound, with rhythm” (3); and with Akerman herself reflecting on her process, “it’s been years now that I have started to film all over the place, as soon as I sensed a shot. without purpose really, but with the feeling that one day these images would make a film or an installation.” (4). The filmic image did not have to be structurally elaborate, or intricately crafted. Above all, what Roland Barthe coins Punctum to the philosophies of photography is perhaps also true to moving images: the process of filmmaking could start with that simplest of sentiment. In feeling an inapt-to-be-verbalized compulsion to shoot a scene that happens to stand in front of you.

CONCLUSION

The self portraits by both Varda and Akerman are intentional in reflecting the process of making. To curate a filmic self to an audience, and into a cinematic whole is then to reflect what it means, to be in reflexivity of making a film. The filmic self-portrait is in itself a body of work but concurrently a process in picture. Now, looking back at the narration that started Beaches: “I’m playing the role of a little old lady, pleasantly plump and talkative, telling her life story.” We realise the curatedness in the process of self-portrait filmmaking in Varda’s case is entailed with an inherent performativity following this filmic story when one decides to portray themselves cinematically. This is a statement that says: To present oneself in cinema is a different experience of oneself in reality. Just as Derrida reflected in his acting role in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983): “Since I’m being asked to play myself… I feel as if I’m letting a ghost speak for me. Curiously, instead of playing myself, without knowing it… I let a ghost ventriloquize my words. Or play my role… which is even more amusing. The cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms.” To make a filmic self-portrait then, is to acknowledge what will be captured is the cinematic self, not the self in reality. The filmic self-portrait captures not a self in its actuality, but a self in a filmic heterotopia.

WORKS CITED

Chantal Akerman, director. Blow Up My Town. 1968.

Chantal Akerman, director. The Room. 1972.

Chantal Akerman, director. Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman. 1997.

Ken McMullen, director. Ghost Dance. 1983.

Monterrubio Ibáñez, Lourdes. "Identity self-portraits of a filmic gaze. From absence to (multi)presence: Duras, Akerman, Varda" in: Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, n.8, 2016, pp. 64-74

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage: 1993).

Varda Agnés, director. The Beaches of Agnès. 2008.

Varda Agnés, director. Jane B. for Agnès V.. 1988.