Over There : documenting contemplation

2nd post for the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon at Unspoken Cinema.

Continuation from Là-bas (2006/Chantal Akerman/Belgium/France)

In February 2005, Chantal Akerman is asked to make a documentary on Israel. Taking position, shaping a vision is complicated. She's afraid to picture this difficult nation too lightly, to give an uneducated judgment of the conflict, to oversimplify politics at work. Not belonging to Israel is also a worry. She doesn't feel at home and she can't identify her peers either. These are the dilemmas Akerman contemplates hampered by the inhibition of her neurotic denial. Although reluctant to confront a caricatural banality of long-lived clichés, she installs a camera in her rented appartment nonetheless and lets it capture life through the windows.

The reflexion about the conception thus becomes part of the documentary itself, like a very personal meta-film, which turns out to be a creative justification on the impossibility to produce satisfying images. The limitations of cinema, as a regard, in descriptive explanations. What Akerman can't bring herself to say, the strict formality of her montage reveals it. This contemplative aesthetic takes a long pause to ponder, through the physicality of wait and silences (in place of intellectualized polemics), over the state of being in Israel, the resentment of exil, the uprooting of dispora. The ambivalent Jewish fate.

The cinematic space and the auteur's scope, in a symbiotic analogy, are both divided in four constructs layered in depth: Inside, Frontier, Outside, Away.

Her spontaneous, neurotic seclusion, takes a political dimension in the context of her own double exil. She's first exiled from motherland, Israel, because her family lives in Europe, and she's exiled again, as a foreigner, once in Tel Aviv because she can't pretend to be Israeli. A feeling of being elsewhere, always out of place.

She's a child of the second generation. Her mother bears the wounds of the death camps in her flesh, Chantal does in her subconscious. She says if she had been raised in Israel she would have ran around with the other kids in the street, but in Bruxelles, going out was forbidden and she watched the kids from her window. In this film, again, she assumes the childhood conditioning and watches from behind closed windows.

INSIDE (Exil) : Bunker-appartment, safe hideout, passive observation, centrality, immobility. She is in Tel Aviv, but the closed doors make her appartment an alien territory, away from Israel, which only shows out of the windows. A microcosm in truncated details, out of context. All screens pulled down on the windows create a camera obscura, the reality from outside filters in through the gaps. We're in Plato's myth of the cave : the silhouettes at the windows are the only reality she knows of Israel.

FRONTIER (Curtain) : Initial distanciation from her environment, ambiguity conceal/reveal, overframing. The large bay-window filling the screen, replaces the cinema screen, stands for a TV screen to display movies or the News. Relating her experience to the theatre audience.

OUTSIDE (Street) : Homeland, heartland, motherland, Tel Aviv, Israel. The first layer is the invisible street down below that emits a muffled ambient noise (sound without visual). The second layer across the void, is the facade of the building, replicating/mirroring her "inside", only as seen from outside, behind their walls and curtains (partial visual without sound). Each window is a TV screen to contemplate, with its own "soap opera" with recurrant characters.

AWAY (The world) : Ideal hope. Immense, global, invisible macrocosm, out of reach, impossible to grasp. Represented by 3 elements. The planes in the sky, going to another exil. The sea, open on all sides, the polar opposite of her cealed bunker. The phone line connecting to friendly voices, breaking the exil, folding space, canceling the distances.

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Sous le ciel lumineux de son pays natal (2001/Franssou Prenant/France)
A companion film to Akerman's documentary would be a similar work by Franssou Prenant who tells her return to Beyrout in Lebbanon (on the other side of the Israeli border). She interviews her friends, off-screen, who stayed there and recall her memories from before the war, her impressions of the changes, against a handheld reportage through the streets.