Hotel Monterey (1972), the earliest of the three films included in a recent exhibition of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s films at the Camden Arts Centre, reflects the influence of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and especially Andy Warhol, American avant-garde filmmakers with whom Akerman became acquainted during a brief relocation to New York in the early 1970s. Shot in color with camerawoman Babette Mangolte, who would become a frequent collaborator, Hotel Monterey, like Warhol’s early “stillies,” such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), is degree zero filmmaking, offering a bare bones minimalist tour from lobby to rooftop of a fairly banal architectural space. Pausing along the way for almost-unbearably long takes of the hotel’s mostly depopulated corridors, elevators, and corners, the film’s heavily protracted pacing generates a strange kind of suspense, eeriness, and, at times, even humor out of what would otherwise be rather ordinary moments, such as the unexpected opening of an elevator door. (Interestingly, those few moments in the film that contain human presence tend to elicit nervous laughter from the audience.) The excessively long takes have the affect of appearing to arrest cinematic movement, opening the film to another reality. At times, the stillness of the images begins to evoke the mystery and melancholy of a de Chirico painting or the surreal emptiness of an Atget photograph. 

More than thirty years separates Hotel Monterey from the other two works included in the Camden Arts Centre exhibit. In the time between the earlier and later pieces, Akerman has worked in a variety of cinematic forms and contexts: feature films (A Couch in New York [1996], The Captive, [2000]), experimental cinema (I’m Hungry, I’m Cold [1984]), documentary (South of Europe [1998/9]), and video. In the mid-1990s, beginning with D’est: a bord de la fiction, a multi-monitor video installation about the Eastern European diaspora after the fall of the USSR, Akerman brought her work into the space of the art gallery. It is to this latter project that the other two works exhibited at the Camden Arts Centre bear the closest resemblance, while retaining the earlier work’s interest in pushing cinema in the direction of stillness. 

More of an installation than a film, To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004) takes as its subject the discovery of the diary of Akerman’s maternal grandmother, Sidonie Ehrenburg, who perished in Auschwitz in 1942. Divided between two rooms, the first room contains a large ribbon or spiral of semi-transparent white tulle, probably 8 feet tall, upon which is projected words from Akerman’s grandmother’s diary. While some have dismissed this part of the installation as “lightweight Richard Serra,” such criticisms ignore how this spiral of words interacts with the images in the second part of the installation. The adjoining room contains a rectangular scrim with pages from the diary projected onto it. Beyond this, running on a loop, is the double screen, semi-transparent projection of a 22 minute interview by Akerman of her mother Nelly Akerman, who discovered her mother’s diary. The various media involved here—sculpture, written text, still photos, and film—work together to raise important questions about media and the representation of history and temporality. The absurdist ring of the project’s title might even invite comparisons to Dadaist strategies of jumbling visual and textual codes, the projection of the diary’s pages onto the spiraling scrim specifically evoking Apollinaire’s curious description of cinema as “a book of pictures.”