Interiors: Notes on Pedro Costa and Chantal Akerman

1. Both Pedro Costa and Chantal Akerman deal with political issues without becoming political filmmakers, even if some label Akerman as a feminist director or Costa, as a lefty. Not that such designations are ungrounded - Akerman is, indeed, a feminist, Costa is hardly an Ayne Rand's proponent - but classifying these directors into ghettoes of niche cinema is an unfair and narrow view of their work. Defining mode of a political movie would be either meditation (why things are this way), or action (what should we do about it); films of Akerman and Costa employ neither - they focus on contemplation. Consequently, they either abandon the Aristotlean cause-and-effect, conflict-driven dramaturgy altogether, or relegate it to the second place, in what seems a compromise with more traditional narrative filmmaking (Akerman does that in Jeanne Dielman, Costa, in Bones). Politics, of course, is all about causes and effects, and conflicts - it's always a drama.

Jeanne drops a spoon (Jeanne Dielman)

2. If an event is crossing a boundary of one's semantic field (as defined by Russian semiologist Yuri Lotman), then lack of events means the boundaries are too solid to overcome. At the same time they are very narrow: Jeanne Dielman offers what is perhaps the subtlest story development in cinema's history - Jeanne's life is so monotonous and ritualized that when she drops a spoon, this minor deviation from the regular routine is an event, if not a turning point of the narrative. The lives of Costa's and Akerman's characters are determined by a certain coordinate system, one that's not to be reconsidered or shifted. In the work of both directors, these coordinates are metaphorically signified by the basic determinators of the material world, time and space.

3. The characteristic long, static shots of routine activities in real time emphasize the temporal aspect. This is especially true with Jeanne Dielman and Costa's In Vanda's Room - the monotoneity of Jeanne's and Duarte sisters' everyday experiences sets the impaired rhythm of these two pictures, allowing critics to categorize them as "slow cinema". But, however slow-paced these films are, they are neatly organized in a progression of intervals, which accounts for their peculiar hypnotic rhythm. Akerman reportedly directed Jeanne Dielman with a timer in her hand to achieve a balanced composition - indeed, the film is remarkably easy to watch for a 200 minutes long picture where few things happen. The excessive running time of this film, as well as 180 min of In Vanda's Room and 155 min of Colossal Youth, is, of course, another device of making the time palpable. (Not a compulsory one: Akerman's Hotel Monterey and Je tu il elle are much shorter - roughly an hour each - but as slow.)

Streets of Fontainhas (Colossal Youth)

4. The characters are determined by the space, up to the point that their place of habitat becomes a part of their identity. Costa's characters are all residents of Fontainhas, the Lisbon's poorest slum, and the demolition of this deteriorated neighborhood (showcased in Vanda's Room) is a tragedy for them; their new sterile apartments in a social housing project look uninhabitable in Colossal Youth. In Bones, Nuno Vaz's character feels like an alien in unfamiliar environments, the hospital and the apartment of Isabelle Ruth's Eduarda. For Jeanne Dielman her place of residence is an extention of her name - the full title is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles.

5. Of four Akerman's pictures before Jeanne Dielman, two feature their setting in their titles - La Chambre and Hotel Monterey. Indeed, both consist of shots of respective environments and nothing more, but even the other two, even if they do have a plot, carry the sense of claustrophobia much in the same fashion as does Jeanne Dielman. Saute ma ville is a short sketch antecendant to Jeanne Dielman, and is set entirely in a kitchen. Je tu il elle is divided into three parts, each taking place in a locked space - the studio where Julie the protagonist lives, a car, the apartment of Julie's ex-girlfriend. Of Costa's Fontainhas films, the most conspicuous example is In Vanda's Room - again, a telling title - three hours of two sisters sitting in a dark chamber with occasional forays outside - and outside isn't any different: other rooms, or narrow, cramped streets of the slum.

Zita Duarte caught into imaginary boundaries (Bones)

6. The word cramped is perhaps the best description of Costa's world. These rundown houses are cluttered up with furniture and all sorts of lumber and clobber, the walls of Fontainhas seemingly try to squeeze people padding over the streets. "It's too small" are the first words of Colossal Youth's Ventura when he enters his new welfare apartment (even though it's empty and clean, unlike the messy and littered Fontainhas rooms). When he visits Vanda, she tells him about her claustrophobic experience in a maternity ward, where she was put into a room with no windows, and her baby, into a glass incubator. Costa narrows the space at almost every shot - he constantly employs double framing, placing his characters into doorways, windows, mirrors, or otherwise confining them into visible boundaries through the use of vertical lines that dissect shots. In a typical dialogue sequence two persons engaged in conversation will sit in a corner that splits the frame, leaving each character only a half of it. In a scene from Bones, the character of Zita Duarte paces nervously up and down the street, waiting for her friend. The shot is composed in such a way that she, in her seemingly chaotic motion, never steps beyond two limits, marked by two corners of a house. After Bones, there're no closeups, and aspect ratio is the obsolete 4:3, the narrowest possible. Other technique is overshadowing the background using the natural light coming from a window, and a reflector, making a shot look like a Rembrandt's painting. This is how Costa shoots the scenes in Vanda's room in the eponymous film, as well as several sequences of Colossal Youth.

Narrowing the space in Bones

Two examples of virtuoso framing (In Vanda's Room, Bones)

Colossal Youth: Ventura in the welfare apartment (left);
Vanda tells Ventura how she first saw her newborn daughter

Jeanne Dielman in the hallway

7. Akerman's mise en scène, in turn, evokes Vermeer's genre paintings. Interiors are not merely a background, quite the opposite - Babette Mangolte's camera makes Jeanne Dielman an extension of her kitchen, and vice versa (remember the title). As for claustrophobia, Akerman's characters don't speak of it, yet the sensation of being confined is maintained throughout her films. Three of them feature an elevator - an epitome of claustrophobic space - specifically, Delphine Seyrig's character in a recurring scene from Jeanne Dielman is seen entering a hallway, passing a door, then getting into an elevator, locking another two gates behind her; three doors in a one continuous shot. In the first twenty minutes of Je tu il elle, Akerman's Julie is shown spending some time (twenty eight days, according to the unreliable voiceover, although it may very well be 24 hours) in a small ground-floor apartment without stepping outside. She is obsessed with reorganizing this tiny space by continually and pointlessly moving the scarce futniture. A floor-to-ceiling window makes the studio sort of a glass cage, especially when Julie exposes her naked body to a passer-by; at some other moment she blocks the window with a mat, creating a perfect confinement.

Double framing in Jeanne Dielman

Julie and the window (Je tu il elle)

8. Stories they tell are different - Akerman examines detachment of her stand-alone characters, whereas Costa focuses his attention on a community, including stories of several people into each film. And yet there's something else that connects the two: with all that preoccupation with interiors, both directors in their masterworks create portraits of human beings who are much bigger than these interiors. Jeanne Dielman - a housewife, a most untypical hero of whose existence cinema is usually unaware - is a character of an epic caliber; same with Ventura, the self-proclaimed father of Fontainhas' dwellers, the rhapsode of the poor. They may be living in isolation, restriction and wretchedness - but among the isolated, restricted and wretched, they are the heroes. That is, indeed, something bigger than politics.