Les Rendez-vous d'Anna
Possibilities in the Shot
In looking at Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, we can start with two apparently unconnected questions. What is the possibility in the shot, and what is the significance of trains in cinema? In painting, the possibilities are endless but also limited by the frame. We can imagine any number of things that are happening beyond it, but we cannot do anything more than speculate. We cannot guess. In other words, there will be no evidence in the painting that can allow us to say we were right or wrong in our assumption: there is no continuation beyond the frame or counter-shot to tell us whether we were right or wrong. If cinema often allows us to second-guess the filmmaker, as the viewer assumes a long shot will be followed by a close-up, odd behaviour by a reaction shot, and an establishing shot of an exterior with a cut to the interior, other works insists this is merely a vocabulary of prediction – a sort of algorithmic logic that can play a very good guessing game.
In such instances, what we have is the probability of the shot. Akerman’s film is interested in its possibility, aware that cinema is not a painting, but can entertain aspects of its limited frame all the better to generate a different approach to ‘guessing’ than we usually expect. An example of this possibility is evident in the film’s first shot: a fixed frame image of the railway station steps that go underground, with train tracks on either side. On the soundtrack, we start to hear the sound of a train. The sound gets louder, and a train pulls in on the right-hand side of the frame. At this point already a few guesses may have been made. The first is whether someone will come up the steps: the most likely assumption given the camera placement. That guess may change when we hear the sound of the train, as we wonder whether it will arrive screen left or screen right and, when it does arrive screen right, whether people might come from the underground, walk up the steps and move towards getting on the train. We might make this claim based on the camera’s position. It remains fixed on the steps and doesn’t tilt or cut to the train’s arrival. What happens is that the people enter screen left and start going down the stairs. All except one, who moves screen right and goes into a phone box that we can see in the medium distance. She enters the booth, shortly afterwards exits it, and then goes down the stairs just as another train arrives screen right, after the other one has left.
The camera hasn’t moved at all, nor has Akerman altered the lens’ focal length. Everything is contained within the one shot. A train arrives, people get off. A woman makes a phone call. The train leaves, another arrives, and she descends the stairs as a train once again comes into the station. That is potentially a lot of information in one image, and yet watching, the viewer might believe nothing is happening at all. This will depend on whether one wants a probable or possible image. A probable image would show us the stairs for several seconds and we would expect people to come up them. A train would arrive and the film would show them getting onto it. The expectation will be there because if the camera focused on the platform and the tracks, we would suppose that a train will arrive, and people will get off. A film’s shot often dictates our expectations; Akerman asks a shot if not quite to defy them, to at least complicate that claim.
A second example happens a little later in the film, after we’ve established the figure in the phone booth, Anna (Aurore Clement), is a filmmaker, has screened her film in Germany, and gone off with a man from the screening for the night. Though she doesn’t want a relationship, the next afternoon she agrees to go over to the house he shares with his daughter and his mother (his wife left him for another man). As they stand outside the house ready to enter, the most likely shot would be to cut to the mother answering the door (since he oddly rings the bell), or to an interior of the home. Instead, Akerman shows the mother and daughter coming out to greet Anna, while the camera remains at its original distance. When they enter the house, the film doesn’t cut to them inside, but remains an onlooker. When the film does cut, it offers an ellipsis. Anna and her lover are back outside, and he tells her she ate so quickly. In the two sequences we have discussed, Akerman makes her shots possible, not probable. Some might see boredom, with Akerman holding her shots too long and for no apparent purpose. This will be so if we think only in temporally narrative terms: each image is a unit of efficient information for telling stories. But if we happen to see films as a manifold thing of which telling stories is only one of its purposes, these apparently slow and empty shots take on a different purpose.
Akerman spent time in the States before returning to Europe, where she made Je tu il Elle, and Jeanne Dielman 23 commerce quay 1080 Brussels before Les Rendezvous d’Anna. It is as if, watching films by Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas and others, Akerman saw the capacity to elicit boredom and the importance of the form. Warhol thought nothing of making films so dull even he wouldn’t watch them, no matter if he sometimes failed and made works of great interest, like Chelsea Girls. In the American avant-garde, form could be deemed more important than content, even obliterate it as the form completely dictated what the content could reveal – evident in the zoom lens moving in on an event that it all but ignores in Snow’s Wavelength. It was as though Akerman’s project was how to contain boredom and push the form, and in Les Rendezvous d’Anna, she does so partly by assuming the viewer will accept the shots aren’t there to generate ennui but to elicit curiosity. When the camera refuses to move, this needn’t be because it wants to test the viewer’s patience. It is also and more especially to propose there are various options in the shot and beyond it, and we might choose to ‘guess’ what will happen next in a way quite different from a film whose shots are so clearly directed by the story.
This leads us to our second query. Akerman wasn’t unusual in 70s European cinema in slowing the image down, and she shared with a number of other filmmakers (Herzog, Wenders, Blier, Tanner) movement through motion that would come from the events unfolding, over shots creating narrative movement. This would often take the form of car journeys (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities, Stroszek, Messidor, Les Valseuses) but sometimes trains, and Les Rendezvous d’Anna would make a fascinating double bill with Wenders’ The American Friend, released a year earlier. A plane cannot serve this function; it becomes an enclosed space without a sense of movement, while a car can give a great sense of movement within an enclosed space. The train has the advantage of conveying movement and remaining an open space. It allows for awkward moments and contingent encounters, while also creating the movement a film might deny narratively. Some films hardly move at all through geographic space, and could be marked off in a minimal square. These would include Rope, Rear Window and Dial M for Murder, as well as Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant – films by directors (Hitchcock and Polanski) who know how to generate immense movement out of confined locales. Akerman has, of course, made her own masterful closed-space film with Jeanne Dielman..., but we should remember the leading character does at least wander around Brussels, going into shops and cafes. Les Rendezvous d’Anna covers three countries (Germany, Belgium and France) as she travels by train across Europe. It is as though the train (which Hitchcock of course mastered in his own way in Strangers on a Train and North by Northwest) lurches into a movement the film needn’t take for granted, and maybe nobody has pushed this further than Akerman - perhaps with an ideological purpose that might be ostensibly contrary to Jeanne Dielman... but in some ways consistent with it.
Throughout the film, we might feel that Anna is a character who is pressed upon by others. During the trip, she sleeps with the man from the cinema, who talks about himself, meets a man on the train from Germany to Belgium, who also talks about himself. In between, she meets her mother’s friend, who tells her how terrible her son feels that Anna twice broke their engagement and, when she meets with her mother, as they part, her mother (Anna Massari) asks Anna to tell her that she loves her. When she arrives in Paris, her lover Daniel (Jean Pierre-Cassel) seems only to want sex, until he doesn’t after he starts feeling unwell, and then she crosses Paris trying to find a pharmacy. At the end of the film, she is back in her own bed, and listening to the answering machine, various messages piling up while she was away. She is clearly a woman in demand, but also one who might believe she isn’t quite in control of her life as she travels around the continent promoting her work, yet without quite asserting herself. No doubt there are autobiographical aspects to the film, and Akerman would have been, in the mid 70s, one of only a handful of female filmmakers in Europe: Agnes Varda, Margarethe von Trotta, Liliana Cavani, Lina Wertmuller, Vera Chytilova and Marta Meszaros. Not quite a novelty act, but exceptional enough for her to be a curiosity. Films were frequently edited by women, including Jaws, Bonnie and Clyde, Raging Bull and Star Wars, but the editors were rarely feted or invited, and Les Rendezvous d’Anna proposes that as a director, the central character is both. The messages on the answering machine reveal she has a busy schedule as she arrives back late Wednesday night and will have to travel again on Saturday, and friends expect to meet her in between.
The film achieves a mixture of movement and stasis, a slowness in the shots, and yet manages to convey the pace of a life perhaps not quite being lived at its ideal rhythm. We sense that Anna hasn’t escaped loneliness despite the hectic schedule and the intensity of her social life. When she speaks to her mother about all this travelling, she says she finds herself alone back in her hotel room. Sometimes she takes people there, but it is ‘always sad and a bit silly.’ Yet when she talks to her mother about having met a woman from Italy, and they talked and talked, and ended up in her room after no longer finding a bar that would stay open, she seems to have escaped that solitude. It is as though when they talked, Anna found the essential, and potentially a sense of calm. Yet the film doesn’t impress upon us in form the pressures the film reveals: whether it is the ex-fiance who still wishes to take her back, the father who wants grandchildren, the friend who is disappointed she missed his birthday, the constant travelling as she presents her work; none of this is given formal pace. The shots are almost always static or movement comes from the outside: from the camera following the train’s journey, or later the car’s when she picks up medicine for Daniel, and perhaps manages to convey the difference between stress and anxiety. Stress is active and can be reflected more readily in the camera moving to capture the pace of a character’s life, and many a contemporary Hollywood film will show a character grabbing a coffee on the go after dropping the kids off on the school run and arriving at the office just as the clock hits 9 am. However, an anxious life is mainly interior and harder to film. When we list the various pressures in Anna’s, it might suggest the frenetic, yet the film is glacial as Akerman uses the train journeys and later the car journeys to register feelings that can’t quite be put into words because feelings refuse to coagulate into actions. They are too inchoate for that. When, for example, Anna gets into the taxi that takes her to the pharmacy (a taxi we never see her get into, and with a driver we never witness), she has tears in her eyes; of anger, frustration, irritation, sadness, we cannot quite say. We see the world passing by quickly outside the window while she remains still, with the camera passive to her experience expressively, but actively using other means to register the active within the passive. It is partly why we have proposed it as a common element in European cinema of the period, one able to register anxiety over stress.
It would be too simple to say that Akerman is a feminist who wants to show us the difficulty of a woman’s experience, the demands made upon women, and the inability to put this into words, and finds a correlative form. Many films about men during this period used a similar form, and were no more voluble. Indeed, the man she meets on the train who can’t keep quiet is played by Hanns Zischler, who earlier played the talkative person the central male character in Kings of the Road picks up, with the main character remaining chiefly silent. But it does prove a very good form for illustrating anxiety that doesn’t quite have a name, and there is enough in the film to propose that some of these anxieties wouldn’t be felt by a heterosexual man as opposed to a woman who recognises a burgeoning attraction to her own sex. Is this why she twice broke off with her mother’s friend’s son, why she can’t feel love towards the lover she picks up after the screening, or Daniel, whom she seems more to mother than love? These are not problems of the human condition but of a woman’s predicament.
Yet how to convey this, what will register a person’s potentially profound unease, and the reserve that combines personal psychology with film aesthetics? Speaking of the difference between literature and cinema, Akerman notes, ‘’How much time should we take to show this street so that what’s happening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we can go from the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete—or move forward in another way. I’m the one who decides.’’ (Art Forum) Like some other Akerman works, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna started as a text she turned into a film. The process made her aware of the differences. One might claim that film can be viewed like a book is read, with the viewer able to rewind and fast-forward as they wish. A simple answer contradicting this claim is that Akerman’s early films were made just before video recorders were becoming familiar in people’s homes in the mid-to-late seventies. Nobody could remark as David Bordwell did in the early 2000s that filmmakers and viewers had absorbed the techniques of playback. ‘‘Now home video allows our consumption to be highly nonlinear….the DVD made a movie more like a book.’’ (Minding Movies) However, a historical/ technological explanation seems inadequate: that interrupting a film isn’t quite the same as interrupting a book. Our eyes may look up from a novel and, when we look down again, the words are still where we left them. Look up and away in a film; the images have moved on. We will then have to rewind to find our place again. A book has no running time; it is at the pace you choose to read it, unless it is an audiobook, which is a different thing and closer to a radio play or rendition. Films and novels may usually have a narrative, but one is temporally dictatorial; the other temporally relaxed.
It is out of this temporal authoritarianism that Akerman finds the image’s possibilities. She notes when filming a documentary about the South in the US, Sud, that, ‘’a tree evokes a black man who might have been hanged. If you show a tree for two seconds, this layer won’t be there—there will just be a tree. It’s time that establishes that, too, I think.’’ (ArtForum) This indicates not only the possibilities we opened with, as we may wonder where a character will enter the frame or whether we will be shown a character inside a house. We can call these the perceptual possibilities of the medium. But alongside them sit the psychological possibilities that lead us to wonder what might be going on behind the image, what we might dwell upon when seeing someone’s face, for example, without knowing what is on their mind. Akerman says, ‘‘We are always on the outside when it comes to the other. Proust, when he speaks of kissing his grandmother, says, “But I was only kissing the exterior!” That really struck me. It’s this exteriority that is under examination in my films. (Artforum) Critic Darren Hughes claims: ‘‘My enthusiasm for this film [Les Rendez-vous d’Anna] began with the realisation that I was so emotionally involved with it because of Akerman's formal control. I occasionally have exactly the opposite response with narrative filmmakers who so precisely stage each frame (Roy Andersson comes to mind; Kubrick can also leave me cold). ‘’ (Mubi) The formal control Akerman offers can be seen as a fraught enquiry, an awareness that we cannot get inside people’s heads, but the film can offer images that propose we might try.
When we see Anna on the train or in the car looking out of the window or looking on, we are inclined to speculate on what these thoughts me be, especially if accompanied by tears. The director seems to seek an aloof empathy within a formal insistence and while we can discover in time what the next shot will be or what will enter the shot, the mystery of a person’s thoughts may remain an enigma. This doesn’t mean film cannot convey what somebody is thinking, but perhaps this isn’t thought – it is motivation. It is where cause and effect can meet the workings of the mind as the character looks offscreen with their eyes up and we cut to a wall. They then climb over it. We will infer this was their intention when we saw them looking up moments earlier. And of course films sometimes go beyond this type of rudimentary thought and invoke memory - Eternity and a Day, Time Regained, and Hiroshima mon Amour all invoke the past in the present to explore a character’s earlier moments. The latter offer some of the most complex of cinematic images, just as a person in an escape drama may offer some of the most brilliantly basic. But maybe Akerman sees that, whether the most complex or the most straightforward, they reveal too much and the enigma is removed. What Akerman learned from the American avant-garde was how one could switch a camera on and film anything, knowing it would be something, however mundane or irrelevant. Yet she also discovered in Jeanne Dielman... that filming domestic chores could have sitting behind them the most complicated of thoughts and feelings, as we might surmise when we get to the end of her 1975 film. Les Rendezvous D’Anna ends far less troublesomely, and yet no less enigmatically as we muse over this woman with plenty friends, parents who care, and assignations aplenty. Is she lonely; is she bored, is she lusting after her Italian lover, or just keen to see and talk to her again? All these are part of the possibilities of the work, and we have followed the movement of Anna’s actions as she journeys in trains and cars, but can only surmise the movements of her mind.
© Tony McKibbin