It is astonishing how many people assume identification is the fundamental problem for cinema and by implication for feminist film criticism. Granted it is better to have images of women who are more like real women doing their everyday activities than have images that are so distant from the real woman, yet alone such images of "empowered" women can do little. What feminist film criticism has grown to realize in the 1970s is that the whole politics of seeing—the power of the camera to direct the gaze—the forms for seeing afforded to the spectator, the film aesthetic in broader terms has to be re-envisioned for the true emancipation of women in film. Claire Johnston, a prominent film critic, wrote in "Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema" (1973):
If women's cinema is going to emerge, it should not only concern itself with substituting positive female protagonists, focusing on women's problems, etc.; it has to go further than this if it is to impinge on consciousness. It requires a revolutionary strategy which can only be based on an analysis of how film operates as a medium within a specific cultural system.
I would like to supplement this quotation with one from Chantal Akerman. She was talking in an interview with Camera Obscura in 1977 about Jeanne Dielman:
[t]he content is the most simple and obvious thing. They[the filmmakers] deal with that and forget to look for formal ways to express what they are and what they want, their own rhythms, their own way of looking at things…[it's not] just what it says but what is shown and how it's shown.
The focus on the forms of seeing in addition to the content shown has allowed filmmakers like Akerman to introduce not only new images, but also new rhythms, a new temporal consciousness, and a new spacial consciousness into cinema. Jeanne Dielman might be a powerful example of this new type of narrative, but it is not the only example--News From Home is another one.
This post is in fact about News From Home, an Akerman film produced in the 1976 when Akerman was in NYC. It is usually categorized as an avant-garde film, and understandably so. The camera shows shots of New York as Chantal Akerman's voice-over reads letters which her mom had sent to her from Belgium. There is no real plot line, no characters, etc. It is a visual portrait of NYC as seen by Akerman whose consciousness has been influenced by letters from home. Arguably, News From Home creates, as opposed to assumes, a female spectator position as it portrays the unique tempo-spacial consciousness of Akerman—a female! The spectator is not offered any character with whom to identify, supporting the claim that cinema is not only about identification. Unfortunately Hollywood, because it focuses mostly on narrative cinema, had to propose that cinema is about identification only, yet as News From Home, the feminist avant-gardist films, and the structuralist movement have all, arguably, shown, cinema is not only about identification.Now, if cinema is not only about identification, where does that leave us?
I personally tend to think of a film as a space, that is really nowhere in particular, where a consciousness reveals itself. Sometimes it's multiple consciousness-es. However in News From Home it is only that of Chantal Akerman. She directs the camera towards what interests her, what is meaningful to her in the present, as a result of her past experience. She uses perspective in such a way that the image becomes wholly hers once she has chosen her frames. If Akerman is communicating her own consciousness as she navigates the streets of the foreign city of New York, then I agree with the claim that the voiceover—with the definitiveness of language—shows the attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Of course the words which are read out loud are not descriptions of the images, or frames. They are words which do not aim to capture, define, or restrict the visual plentitude of the images. However they are aimed to capture something and that is Akerman's consciousness as she walks around New York in the 1970s.
The juxtaposition between the voice over and the elusive images of New York is hypnotizing. For me at least, precisely because it shows an attempt to make concrete what cannot be made so. How would one make sorrow concrete, or nostalgia, or just the fact of missing one's family? How can ambition be made concrete, freedom or the like? A part of the film that I like a lot is the very last scene. While listening to the sound of the Hudson river the camera shows a seagull flying up and down. There is a sense of exhilaration in that composition, it shows an ambitious Akerman, one that ran away from home (without telling anyone as the letters reveal) for a reason. Why else would she see meaning, and focus her camera, on a flying seagull?
A film like News From Home changes the spectator in ways that are solely hers. How one reacts to this film is essentially a result of who one is. As such its language is so different from words, though it uses words, since meaning is yet to be created for each spectator as (s)he watches the film. I have always found this amazing to think about. After watching the film one person might find herself crying another might feel a determination to go out into the world. The meaning (for each person) lies in the act of negotiation between "me" and the film such that the spectatorial position is assumed (from the beginning of the film's production), yet is not part of the film. Akerman's consciousness expressing itself in images does not need a viewer to be a meaningful act—contrast this with a film that is for entertainment only (No Strings Attached for example) where the act of consumption is precisely where the meaning and function of the film lies. Such type of film is only a commodity to be consumed. In News From Home, the spectatorial position though assumed is not sutured into the film. This latter type of film is the one that can be deemed feminist.
(I will write about Meshes of the Afternoon in my next post since I ran out of space here!)
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