a letter that denies its own significance
by
Douglas Messerli
Chantal
Akerman (writer and director) Saute ma ville / 1968
What
is amazing about Chantal Akerman’s first film from 1968, Saute ma ville (which
I’ll translate as Burn Down My Town), is that she was only 18 at the
time of its creation. And yet the statement she makes in this short work is so
profound that you might think she had an entire career behind it.
A young woman (Akerman) arrives home to
her apartment building, flowers in hand, quickly checking the mail before she
pushes the elevator. Immediately determining to outrun it by tripping up the
stairs for several levels, she inexplicably checks on the progress of the
elevator as she moves upward, all the time humming a sharp pitched noise as if
she were almost attempting to irritate the viewer—which, in fact, she may well
be attempting to accomplish.
As critic Felicity Chaplin describes
these opening sequences:
Saute
ma ville
is supported by images constructed like a burlesque and the performance of an
actress that seems to come straight out of a slapstick comedy. This exuberant
character is played by the filmmaker herself, who literally bursts in front of
a large building (the sounds of the city being omnipresent there), flowers in
hand, to get back to her apartment. Akerman’s humming adds an enthusiastic and
light touch to this jaunty entrance.
Finally reaching her door, she enters,
throwing most of her purchases upon the kitchen counter before tacking the now-opened
letter she has received to the cabinet, soon after cooking up a meal of pasta
which she will chow down with a rapidity that is spell-binding before leaping
up, seemingly driven by an inner voice repeating the word “Scotch.”
Even prior are awareness, she has pulled
out a role of thick scotch tape and begun to thoroughly seal up the door of her
kitchen, stopping only briefly to pick up her cat, pet it for a moment, open a
nearby window, and send the poor beast, presumably, on its way through a long
fall unto the street to die.
While munching on an apple, she quickly
dons a raincoat and a scarf while picking up a sponge mop and tossing all the
contents of a lower cabinet to the floor. Showering some water upon the mess,
she shoves the various mixers, blenders, and whatever else she has kept there,
with the mop toward to door.
A moment later she has decided to shine
her shoes, leaving a heavy later of the black she paste on her legs and hands. She
reaches for a copy of the newspaper Le Soir and, as if speed-reading way
through its pages, sets it aside to continue taping up a nearby window.
Had she performed these same tasks in a
more normative pattern, we realize, she might have reminded us of the actions
of any housewife or single woman caught up in doing her daily chores. But this
18-year old is more like Raymond Queneau’s Zazie (of Zazie dans le Métro)
rather than an adult setting out to accomplish the routine requirements of
keeping a good house.
If there had been any question, at
first, of what this young apartment- dweller was up to, we now know that in her
chaotic accomplishment of these meaningless tasks she is decentering and revolting
against any of the so-called necessities of good home-making.
From one of her cabinets she takes us a
white substance which may be anything from a mix of flour to mayonnaise and
applies it to her face as if were a beauty lotion, appealing to her mirror for
approval of her attempts to properly take care of her body.
Denying even the rationality of these
acts, this seemingly crazed teenager is a bit like a robotized version of “the
good housewife,” undoing the very methodical patterns demanded by a hegemonic
society, particularly a patriarchal one.
Having focused explicitly on the domain
of the woman, the kitchen and all it represents, the girl somewhat madly
giggles and laughs, repeating the words “Bang, Bang!” while lighting the stove.
We hear the hiss the gas only as we watch her through the mirror, one hand over
head, the other holding the flowers she has brought with her before the final
explosion results in the screen going black.
The only narrative explanation of her
acts might have existed in the letter upon which the camera has focused several
times and to which Akerman herself has given a special credence of place. But to
create any imaginary narrative from that letter’s contents—a statement of love
abandoned or lost, a diaristic explanation of what has led her to destroy her
artificed world, or even a simple list of instructions of how to “blow her city
up”—would only make her revolutionary denial of all societal definitions of
what it means to be female meaningless. The letter itself, I would argue,
denies any narrational logic.
Unlike Scheherazade desperately trying to
appease her master with just one more nightly story, Akerman has openly refused
to allow any more attempts of explanation or myth-making. She has shattered all
conventions, including the actions represented in her film. She has blown up
not just the town, but her own recreation of a self.
Los
Angeles, August 31, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).