Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook

This is a handbook about time...This book records the monumental body of films that was shown then, in chronological order. It includes the detailed hand-outs given to the audience on the day, and also features critical contributions from Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, Richard Brody, Ivone Margulies, Marion Schmid and Ginette Vincendeau. The final section contains the blog posts published by Roberts as illuminating companions to the screenings.The handbook gives some idea of what a demanding and complex labour of love the Akerman retrospective was, requiring as it did the excavation of screening copies and rights that were widely scattered and fiendishly difficult to obtain. More challenges were raised by conservation issues and by the subtitling of untranslated films, which in some cases had to be done on the hoof during the screenings. Few films are more elusive than Akerman’s – something of a mystery given her importance as an auteur – and cinema’s ability to preserve the presence of its ghostly figures long after their death is especially precious in her case. Akerman, who was personally involved in the programme, died in October 2015, just as the retrospective was about to end, suddenly making it a posthumous tribute.Emblematic of the whole enterprise was the unearthing of Dis-moi, a short feature commissioned for French television in which Akerman, “listening like only a psychoanalyst can listen”, Roberts writes, interviews elderly female Holocaust survivors. (Akerman’s own mother, a central presence in her work, was an Auschwitz survivor.) Other rediscoveries included Golden Eighties, Akerman’s subversive homage to Jacques Demy’s musicals, and the screwball romantic comedy Un divan à New York, starring William Hurt and Juliette Binoche. A remarkable testimony to the retrospective, this is also a fascinating cinematic memoir that weaves together all the strands of Akerman’s cinema with perceptive sympathy. Comparing Akerman’s travelling shots in D’Est (a documentary shot during her travels in the Soviet Union as it was about to collapse) to the way dolly grips were used in Top Hat to follow Fred Astaire’s dancing, Roberts writes: “Akerman structures the world and that is her dance”.