Week 39/2023

EN

“Why/how are the images so gorgeously luminous and cadaverously creepy at the same time, a form of possession and dispossession that seems to match perfectly Akerman’s relation to her movie, which she uses like a mirror? Is that the way that we use it, too?

Eavesdropping on Anna when she confesses her lesbian affair to her mother (‘I wouldn’t dare tell your father–’ ‘Don’t tell him–’), am I moved by identification, sympathy, or voyeurism? What does it have to do with me, in a movie that, as J. Hoberman puts it, orchestrates its shots in a way that renders a musical score superfluous? Is Rendez-vous d’Anna a Buster Keaton film for the 70s without laughs, complete with s-f gadgets, robots, and lonely self-containment, or an old-fashioned European art movie of the 80s? Is it a movie about you (to paraphrase George Landow), or about its maker? All I know is, it looks great and it sure gives me the willies.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum1

“Akerman’s aim is not to distance emotion but to re-channel it: to have it come through not the usual, weeping face of an actor (as Raúl Ruiz once put it), but through the exact shade of a colour on a wall, the precise timbre of an atmospheric soundscape, the concrete line and position of a table or chair. In Rendez-vous d’Anna, there are many remarkable moments, scenes and passages of this sort that conduct such tender and intense feeling: the views from a train, the empty hotel atmospheres, the wonderful shot where Anna walks far away from the schoolteacher into the distance, where yet another train is seen and heard passing.”

Adrian Martin2

Gary Indiana: I’m interested in things you did for money. Jobs you had while making your first films.

Chantal Akerman: With my first film I wanted to make a feature film so I decided to sell stock in the film. I made a stock book and went to Antwerp and sold certificates on the Diamond Bourse, selling the pages for $3 each. By the end I had only $200 or $300, not enough to make a feature film. I made a short film with that. It wasn’t enough to finish the film, so I worked in banks, in shops, sending telexes; Phillips Petroleum telex, American Express telex. Then, when I went to New York, first I worked in a restaurant, La Poulade, in the Fifties. I took care of coats and hats, putting glasses of water and butter on the tables [...] I worked at the New School, modeling for sculpture. I also worked in a photo lab blowing up pictures. Later I worked in a thrift shop, and then on Orchard Street. Then I worked at the 55th Street Playhouse, the porno pictures, as a cashier; and in three weeks I stole $4000, and I made Hotel Monterey and La Chambre (1972) with that. That was the end of it for stealing. I stopped. Then I made Je, Tu, II, Elle (1974); for that I worked as a typist. Then that was finished because I got some grants from my government.”

Gary Indiana3

• 1Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Les rendez-vous d’Anna. Glum is Beautiful,” Take One, nr. 8 (1979).
• 2Adrian Martin, “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna,” June/December 1997.
• 3Gary Indiana, “Getting Ready for The Golden Eighties: A Conversation with Chantal Akerman,” Artforum 21.10 (1983): 57.

EN

“[...] what drew me most to Araya was not its austere, unforgiving beauty but the dignity of its inhabitants. I hope that the love I hold for them shines through in the film. There, in the middle of that desolate, forbidding place, they managed to turn the same elements that made their existence so difficult into their very means of survival.”

Margot Benacerraf1

“[...] The intense and perfect beauty of Araya deserves to be called by name. In order to accentuate it, Margot Benacerraf has made every act, situation, and real-life character into the servant of that beauty... Araya will always be the condensation of an awesome human experience... filtered through the admirable language of film... Great photography, great editing, the inflamed quest for modulated grays amid unforgettable extremes of black and white – that is what accounts for the visual pleasure that Araya offers. A period text and period music accompany a film that knows no period, a definitive work.”

Marta Traba2

“In those days, going to Araya was like going to the moon. After an arduous journey, I caught my first glimpse of Araya one afternoon about five o’clock. I saw a gigantic colonial castle in all its immense solitude, abandoned to those terrible deserts, and illuminated by an intense, glowing light. Then came those enormous salt peaks with their fantastic dimensions. It was as if the five centuries since the arrival of the Europeans had not perceptibly altered Araya’s way of life. The residents of Araya still made ceramics without using a wheel. They still used the same millenarian methods to fish and to harvest salt. Yet, everything was also about to be violently, irremediably transformed. Within six months, the salt operation was to be taken over by machines. I decided that I wanted to tell this story.

When the film was screened no one believed that we had only been a two-person crew. “What about the crane shots?” they asked. We had simply taken advantage of a construction crane that had been left on a building site. We would go up in it together, fighting against the wind. It was as heroic as it was fortuitous. Passion, I think, makes many things possible. We often filmed all day and then went out at night to collect sounds. Each of the families has a theme song. We would record this local music at night, in people’s huts. Or the sound of the sea, because I wanted the sea to have its echo throughout the film so the viewer feels its intensity, which is ever-changing.

There we were, Truffaut, Resnais and I in competition in Cannes with The 400 Blows, Hiroshima mon amour and Araya. The giants were also there: Buñuel with Nazarín and Rossellini with India. Glauber Rocha wrote a beautiful interview and years later told me that while Araya had no real consequence in Venezuelan cinema, in Brazil, it really did influence the Cinema Novo and him in particular. On 15 May of 1959, Cannes festival awarded me, and Venezuelan cinema, the coveted International Critics Award, which I had the honour of sharing with Hiroshima mon amour. Even today, the recollection of those days of anxiety and happiness moves me deeply.”

Margot Benacerraf3

• 1Karen Schwartzman, Harel Calderón and Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Interview with Margot Benacerraf,” Journal of Film and Video, Winter 1993.
• 2Marta Traba, cited in Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Araya Across Time and Space,” Nuevo Texto Crítico, December 1998.
• 3Margot Benacerraf, “Araya”.

EN

“There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.”

Jean-Luc Godard

“Just as with very big things, you do not explain Johnny Guitar. You tell it (see it) again, again and again, like stories are told to children, until everything is known by heart and you learn that everything in them is right. It is The Imitation of Christ of cinephiles. You can open it anywhere and you’ll find the right sentence. You can watch it for the sixty-eighth time and you’ll find the right answer to what you are living.”

João Bénard da Costa1

“This baroque and deliriously stylised Western, along with Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious and Raoul Walsh’s Pursued, proves it is possible to lift the genre into the realms of Freudian analysis, political polemic and even Greek tragedy. (...)

On the political level, which was more important then than now, the film is a brave indictment of the McCarthyite bigotry that swept America during the fifties - ‘an impression of the present,’ one American critic wrote at the time, ‘filmed through the myths of the past’.

No movie is unrelated to the time in which it was made and every film changes when viewed from a different time. So perhaps the most affecting feature of the film now is it’s deep romanticism. Johnny, who no longer carries a gun, is still in love with Vienna. But she is now an independent woman in control of her own destiny. If he wants her back, he’s going to have to take her on her own terms. Even as he saves her from her rabid, almost pathological enemies, he knows that.”

Derek Malcolm2

François Truffaut once wrote that Johnny Guitar “is the Beauty and the Beast of westerns, a western dream,” but I prefer to think of it as a few degrees closer to Orpheus: still a dream, but at heart more myth than fairy tale. You may recall that Orpheus was an ancient Greek musician who attempted to liberate his wife, Eurydice, from eternal damnation, armed only with a lyre and a keen ear for melody, and who was welcome to return from the underworld, wife in tow, on the condition that he never look at her again (spoiler: he snuck a peek and failed). And you may recall, too, that a crucial early sequence in Johnny Guitar finds the titular musician (Sterling Hayden) interrupting a showdown between former flame Vienna (Joan Crawford) and a posse of seething lawmen and townspeople with nothing more than his six-string namesake and an Orphic tune. The twist here is that nobody can look at anybody: Desire destroys everyone and everything, each glance shared a chance for death. Not even Hades was so cruel.

Calum Marsh3

Johnny: How many men have you forgotten?

Vienna: As many women as you’ve remembered.

Don’t go away.

I haven’t moved. 

Tell me something nice.

Sure. What do you want to hear?

Lie to me. Tell me all these years you’ve waited...

All these years I’ve waited.

Tell me you’d have died if I hadn’t come back.

I would have died if you hadn’t come back.

Tell me you still love me like I love you.

I still love you like you love me.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

• 1João Bénard da Costa, “Johnny Guitar,” À pala de Walsh, 14 June 2014.
• 2Derek Malcolm, “Nicholas Ray: Johnny Guitar,” (The Guardian, 1999).
• 3Calum Marsh, “Johnny Guitar,” (Slant Magazine, 2015).