The series A posteriori le cinéma is intended to be an opportunity to celebrate the 7the art by revisiting flagship titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
For any filmmaker, for any artist in fact, achieving big success with a work can be a curse in disguise. In this way, critics and the public will expect, the next time, a work that is not only superior, but which is also a continuation of the much appreciated previous one. It’s human, but it’s incompatible with artistic expression, which is allergic to shackles. Take Chantal Akerman: after the 1975 triumph of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels, his following films suffered from the comparison. This is particularly true for Anna’s appointmentsreleased 45 years ago, in November 1978. The backlash effect at the time was all the more regrettable as the filmmaker, who took her own life in 2015, revealed herself like never before.
In the film, Chantal Akerman’s alter ego is called Anna Silver (Aurore Clément in the first of six collaborations). She is a director and travels by train to different European cities to promote her new film. During her journey, she meets various people who open up to her: a German teacher, the mother of her ex-fiancé, her own mother…
In 2021, Marilyn Watelet, former assistant director and then producer of Chantal Akerman, confided to the Belgian film site Cinergie: “ [Les rendez-vous d’Anna] features a filmmaker who accompanies her film from city to city, a bit like a sales representative… This story was clearly inspired by what Chantal had done with Jeanne Dielmanwhom she had accompanied everywhere […] More generally, I also think that the film is of its time because it shows a Northern Europe in crisis and collects the stories of characters who become real metaphors, that of the figure of the German, the French… It What she did there is very strong! And then, there are the themes of his cinema: exile, questions about happiness, love, filiation, etc. For her, it was about telling the end of something. It was almost prescient in a sense…”
During the American release, Janet Maslin thus defines Anna in the New York Times : “The heroine is both so fearless and joyless that she is almost a ghost […] She is presumably meant to have the absolute independence and receptiveness of a true artist. »
In the press kit from the time, Chantal Akerman speaks in these terms of her protagonist and her wanderings: “It is the journey of an exile, of a nomad who owns nothing of the space that ‘she crosses. Who has no power relationship either with the space or with the people she meets. It’s her job that makes her travel, but we could say that Anna has a vocation for exile. […] She seems outside of everything, outside of all references, outside of all categories, outside of our system of thought…”
After the alienating confinement that defines Jeanne Dielman’s daily life, it’s time for the wanderings marked by detachment that characterize that of Anna Silver.
After the housewife, mother and occasional prostitute who suffocates in her apartment, it’s time for the single, bisexual and childless professional who explores nomadism.
In many respects, Chantal Akerman proposed the antithesis of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels with Anna’s appointments. Hence, certainly in part, the mixed reception reserved for the second, which is moreover more narrative.
A painful legacy
However, without it being strictly speaking alienation as in his previous film, there is a real unease at the heart of the Anna’s date ; like a vain expectation…
“It is difficult to live in the “oscillation”, in the in-between, between yes and no,” said the filmmaker in 1978.
In retrospect, this allusion to a “difficulty of living” gives the film, hastily described as cerebral, a poignant dimension.
In 2018, James Hoberman returns in the New York Times : “ The appointmentsou d’Anna reappears as an illumination of the filmmaker’s inner life, all the more touching in view of her suicide three years ago, at age 65 […] Anna haunts a gray and ephemeral landscape, itself haunted by memories of the Second World War. Over all, [le film] evokes the feelings of a Jewish woman traveling alone in post-war Germany. »
It should be noted that Chantal Akerman’s grandparents and mother were deported to Auschwitz. The first died there, the second survived.
On the subject of his mother’s internment, Akerman recounted in 2012 on the show FREE ENTRANCE : “In this prison, she was a slave. And she passed that on to me, without ever saying a word about it, because she doesn’t talk about that. But she passed it on. And so, I’ve been fighting against this my whole life. I think what I do has a lot to do with it. Most of my films are linked to how we imprison ourselves, and how sometimes we try to escape. »
Here again, Jeanne Dielman and Anna Silver stand out as contrary (or complementary?) figures; Jeanne in her domestic confinement, Anna in her perpetual movement. Was Anna the filmmaker who was “trying to get by”?
Hoberman continued: “More personal than one could have imagined in 1978, Anna’s appointments brings to the forefront the concerns Akerman expressed throughout his career. »
Fascinating odyssey
When including the film in its prestigious catalog in 2010, the Criterion Collection maintained, using a now familiar lexical field, that it is a “penetrating portrait of a woman’s visceral unease, and a fascinating odyssey through a haunted Europe.”
“A series of brief, strange and exquisitely filmed encounters […] which little by little reveals emotional and physical detachment [d’Anna]. Like the restless wanderings of the nomad Akerman, this quasi-self-portrait journeys through a succession of liminal spaces – hotel rooms, train stations, railway carriages – towards an indelible encounter with the specter of History. »
In his 2018 reassessment, Hoberman concludes: “Both introspective and observational, Anna’s appointments is a road movie about an unresolved inner journey; its real subject is the mental state of its creator. The strongest shots are the close-ups of Anna on the train, adrift in Europe and lost in thought. This isn’t the first film to make dramatic use of a telephone answering machine, but it was probably the first to give the answering machine the last word. While Anna listens to her messages, on the penultimate one she is simply asked: “Anna, where are you?”. »
Perhaps we should have asked: “Chantal, where are you?” »
Post Scriptum
With this question in mind, it will soon be a year since Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels dethroned Citizen Kaneby Orson Welles, and Vertigo (Cold sweat), by Alfred Hitchcock, at the head of the influential Sight and Sound list of the best films of all time. After the initial commotion (the conspiracy theory woke that the 1439 experts consulted would have hatched has been abandoned, at least we can hope), this breakthrough of an important glass ceiling had the merit of putting Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece back into the spotlight.
However, it would be a shame if this were done, again, to the detriment of the rest of his rich filmography. Eminently personal, Anna’s appointments is the ideal film to discover or rediscover it.
The film Anna’s appointments is available on The Criterion Channel platform and will be released in January 2024 in a Blu-ray box set that Criterion Collection dedicated to Chantal Akerman.