Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978).
“The Levites shall then proclaim in a loud voice to all the people of Israel: Cursed be anyone who makes a sculptured or molten image, abhorred by the Eternal, a craftsman’s handiwork, and sets it up in secret.”
My grandfather would have found an entry point in an observation about my height. “If only I’d been as tall as you,” he might have said from the head of the table while I helped my grandmother clear a plate. “Then I coulda had it easier.” That was a common refrain of his, one that, as my siblings and cousins and I grew older and bigger, allowed him to list with increasing starkness the atrocities he suffered but could’ve avoided—if he had not been so tiny. I probably learned about my family’s annihilation on one of these Friday nights, after the sun went down and fruit and tea were brought out.
It was never a history lesson. There was never a concerted effort to teach in the strict sense of the word. Rather, it was a conversation between grandfather and grandson that unraveled over a decade and a half. When it came time to learn about it all in school I felt the lessons were invasive, like if an economics teacher used my parents’ tax returns to illustrate bookkeeping. History hung in his voice. His words illuminated, in the first person, what those abstract school lessons obscured. My imagination was animated by this, by him, the real deal, whose accent and cadence and Yiddishisms were proof of some sort of great shattering. He brought to my mind’s eye a scrawny thirteen-year-old receiving food scraps, pissing in a bucket, shivering in the barrack.
***
By the time I was born, my grandfather, like many survivors in the middle nineties, had taken a headcount of the dwindling survivors and began to tell his story. (They had been lucky, sure, but also prudent—and remained so.) He became a remembrance activist; each May he took high school students from North America to the camps in Poland. I know many others in the “third generation” whose grandparents underwent similar metamorphoses.
Remembrance, of course, is a prerogative of the settled. For a long while—he believed it would be forever—my grandfather was still green, still precarious, still scarred. As a child, he told my mother about his childhood in Wierzbnik, and she knew from his admonishing her profligacy that he arrived here with nothing. She knew he had been in Italy, and in Palestine, and she knew she had another grandfather, her father’s biological father, who died years ago. But my mother was left to fill in the gap between innocence and reuniting. He went quiet when it came to that part of his past; she must have felt it strange when he began to define himself by it.
To tell the truth, by the time I was in high school I longed for this silence, wished that these things had been withheld from me. For the ache of history as conversation is that it is never settled. It only begets another reply.
I felt myself gaining membership in that storied tribe of the neurotic Jew. While once I thought being a Larry David or an Alex Portnoy would be funny, even enviable, the reality of loathing and dread exhausted me. Even the most basic get-in, get-out conversations were not spared by history. It was as if a projector in my head was dissolving images onto each encounter. I wanted it to skip and slow and stop all at once. I wanted a reprieve but would settle for respite, and I wanted peace.
***
Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978).
It was summer and I dreaded leaving for university. On the Facebook group for my school’s entering class, eager seventeen-year-olds, also presumably worried about experiencing even a moment’s loneliness, pitched themselves to prospective friends. People seemed to know much more about much more than I did. It was a blow, for I was still a boy, by which I mean I still thought the end of knowledge was its performance.
One member of the group, an art history major who grew up somewhere in Ontario, spoke of names I never heard: Theo Angelopoulos, Abbas Kiarostami, Sara Gómez. I watched their films and returned to her for more—returned to our chat, I mean. Despite us both living in Montreal we met only once, and it was an awkward encounter. It was the first time I legally ordered a beer, or rather five. At some point she told me to watch Chantal Akerman, her favorite filmmaker, and I dutifully, drunkenly jotted the name in my Notes app.
I know now that Akerman was at home in silence more than any other twentieth-century artist, save for maybe John Cage. I know now that she used this apparent lack as a band uses its rhythm section. I know now that the figure of the mother emerges in the silence like a motif.
Before all of that, I knew immediately that Akerman was a member of the “second generation.” Her Wikipedia page told me as much, but Les rendez-vous d'Anna (1978), the first film of hers I ever saw, captured those memories of quietude my mother had only relayed but were nevertheless felt. The movie follows a filmmaker named Anna Silver as she travels by train from West Germany through Belgium and finally to France to promote her latest work. It was deeply morose; something left unsaid had gone deeply wrong.
With every stop on Anna’s itinerary, Akerman strips another layer from the European travelog’s patina of adventure, scrapes more off of its sheen of enterprise. I felt it in the film’s sterile diners, the wallpaper peeling in Anna’s hotel rooms, the repetition of her days, the abandoned black roads reflecting streetlights back at the sky. And when Anna meets friends and family and lovers along her journey, I felt it in the silence that separates them. What few words the characters use to try to pierce this silence deadened, like the lulling timbre of her train beating against its tracks. By the end of the film, the continent emerges as a husk oozing the spirits of its victims, and traveling this haunted stretch turns into the loneliest reminder of Anna’s own transience.
In my favorite scene in the movie, Anna meets her mother at a Brussels train station. Since Anna moved out, the mother says, “I have no one to talk to.” “But you never talked to me,” Anna replies. Later, they sleep in a hotel room together, talking of Anna then and her loves and lives now. This reticence is central to the way they relate to each other and to their history. In the pauses between their confessions, their past spills across the present and future.
In some senses, this passage is the key not just to Les rendez-vous d'Anna but to Akerman’s body of work. For Nellie Akerman, Chantal Akerman’s mother and muse, is present, physically or not, in every frame of her oeuvre. She was a survivor, though in her last film, No Home Movie (2015), Akerman says that her mother “never wanted to speak about Auschwitz. Once I asked her once to tell me more, and she said, ‘No, I will get crazy.’ So we could speak around, or after, or before, but the real moment, never. Not directly.” Nellie died after filming wrapped; Chantal committed suicide a month and a half after the movie premiered.
***
Anna is characterized by a challenging formal rigor, as are the rest of Akerman’s films. She rarely cuts or moves her camera. She shoots her actors from a considerable distance. She uses precise frontal framing and typically refrains from using non-diegetic sound. Most striking is her command of repetition and banality.
Akerman is not the kind of filmmaker who tails her subjects like a private investigator, seeking patterns that might explain their motivations. She is uninterested in those sorts of revelations. In contrast to more loquacious forms of cinema, Akerman’s work, like her mother, withholds. This is not just a biographical reading, or an example of something I took from Akerman’s films, but the cinematic translation of the experience of the “second generation.” Her refusal to shoot coverage or use a hyperactive handheld camera means more than aesthetics—it is evidence of Akerman’s historically informed approach to narrative.
When I saw Anna, I traced the contours of its every stationary frame and I listened intently to its silence. I became enveloped in a world that appeared to resemble my own. I could tell from their faces. Anna had the pout of someone haunted by the stench of burnt flesh. It was in Europe’s train stations and its metropolises and its countryside and everywhere along the way, too.
“My own story is full of missing links, full of blanks,” Akerman declares in voiceover at the beginning of Histoires d’Amérique (1989), a collection of monologues on Jewish immigrant life inspired by Yiddish theater. She instantiates this in her films, with her camera and characters leaving so much unsaid. The audience is asked to draw connections to join these links, to ask in the absence of information what caused such profound melancholy, or what scattered Anna’s family across Europe. It is not correct to say that the reticence and reserve of Akerman’s style is a form of repression. Rather, her style is born of what is missing.
Akerman’s approach became my guide. Defying this third-generation consensus, I would choose silence. Of course, only years after I failed to arrive did I understand the hideousness of my idealized destination, and the hideousness of my motivations for wanting to go there. What I wanted, I now realize, was a kind of surgery for the senses. I wanted to make it harder for them to pass through. We both despaired, Anna and I, but at least her silence kept it at bay. I was eighteen the night I watched my first Akerman film, the night I decided I could not sustain the weariness of the previous decade and a half or however long it had been, the night I came to believe that silence could keep history’s Visigoths banging, however stridently, at the gate.
A few months into university, the girl who offered the promise of transfiguration said she was dropping out. We spoke less frequently and then not at all. Months later, I tried to message her to say I finally watched News from Home, her favorite, but her Facebook account had been deactivated. I never got a number or email address.
***
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
Mimesis is a peculiar and common phenomenon when you watch an Akerman. Her deliberate camera invites it, paring all elements down to their essence in what Ivone Margulies calls Akerman’s “hyperrealist restructuring” of the everyday. You become attuned to the stiltedness of movement, the dance of stillness. Watch Jeanne Dielman (1975), her three-and-a-half-hour magnum opus. Observe the titular character doing dishes, cleaning around her apartment, and taking care of her son. Go home, having, for example, just seen five full minutes of her peeling potatoes. Try to cook, or clean the dishes, or make your bed. You’ll notice your movements have slowed, your apartment has become more creaky, your body more taut. You have become Jeanne Dielman. To explain this phenomenon, Margulies offers Roger Caillois’s belief that mimicry is “the temptation of an organism to assimilate to its surroundings.”
Similarly, the silence essential to Anna invited reenactment. I began to want only to be inside, inside myself, inside doors. I resented the winter, which begs for defiant gathering. I made myself lie in my small dorm room, and I canceled on friends. (At a party years later, a guy asked what dorm hall I had been in. I sheepishly told him the same one he was in. He apologized. I did not want to further embarrass him or myself, so I did not tell him we lived on the same floor.) I called my grandparents often, whom I so incorrectly believed would understand what was happening. It makes me laugh, now, this neurotic attempt to flee from neurosis.
My doctor proposed medicinal solutions, but the few weeks I spent on pills turned me angry and sad on top of the despair. An outlet was needed, I determined. It came when I received permission to enroll in a creative seminar, the only one at my university, taught by the person who would become my mentor and closest confidant. It was called Image/Sound/Text. We were to create and present works using two of those three elements. Akerman’s work was on the syllabus as inspiration.
I cannot recall the details of the first video I made. It would make me embarrassed to try now, and if I succeeded I would become forlorn about the disconsolate freshman too scared to speak his own words. What I remember is that I did not move the camera for long stretches and filled the audio track with silence and sadness. That is to say I clad myself in Akerman’s voice, and I approximated the precision of her grammar and syntax.
The work failed entirely. My professor (and everyone in the seminar) saw through the bullshit, saw how hard I strained. An abstract painter, she reminded me that the viewer feels nothing when an artist puts nothing of themselves on their canvas. She said I reacted so strongly to Akerman because she was Anna, she was Jeanne Dielman. She, I learned, was the unnamed character in Saute ma ville (1968), her first short film, who, after cooking dinner and pantomime-cleaning her kitchen, turns on the stove and kills herself.
Is that what I wanted to make? No, nor could I. I wanted to create but was actively destroying, destroying myself, my friendships, my ambition. Probably I knew that all along. These thoughts were the first rung of the ladder I couldn’t help but graze as I descended into the black bowels of my history. It was the knowledge that I had effaced myself. I wanted to move my camera, to be open with strangers, and to recognize the holiness in the world but instead I denied, denied, denied. For I am not the child of survivors; I am the grandchild of survivors. The difference in these generations can be summed up in my grandfather’s ability to kid that my summer camp was nothing compared to the camps he was sent to. That would have been unthinkable to say a few decades earlier, when my mother and Akerman were growing up. Time had passed. A new life had been built. That joke held an entire shift in historical imagination.
I do not mean that Akerman or those in the second generation denied their true selves, or were deprived of these things. My torment was not a fault of their upbringing. Instead, the anguish I encountered while feigning the experience of a previous generation was the anguish of the ahistorical. Silence is not absence, nor is it a stylistic pose. It is not something that can be affected, or evidence of what is withheld. It is a state one is born into, a historical circumstance.
***
I returned to my voice gradually, though with occasional free-falls, like an airplane landing. My grandfather was diagnosed with dementia around that time. He slept most hours of the day and woke up muttering Yiddish. When I saw him I had so much to ask about loneliness and abandonment—having gone through my first terrible breakup—but I was left to mull it over myself. I did not ask despite him sitting across from me. It would have only caused him pain to sputter an intelligible answer, and the last thing I wanted was to embarrass him.
I made a short documentary about him a few years ago, around the time I was coming back into myself. My work continues to bear Akerman’s influence, but this seemed to be overwhelmed by it. The short documentary had all of the Akerman hallmarks, like the motionless camera and the sparing dialogue, but lacked profundity. I went back recently to edit it. I decided this film would be my way to live the questions, a way to once again converse with history when my lifelong interlocutor was unable to. But it seemed in those months that when I held his hand and we sat wordless, our exchange was equally as potent. Words were not always necessary, as Akerman showed.
The short is based on a series of hours-long recordings I made while sitting around my grandparents’ apartment talking to them, with TCM or Jeopardy! playing softly in the background. There was something uncanny about returning to those recordings. Even a few years ago he spoke so lucidly, with such vigor and sharpness. “How’s it going, Bran?” he’d say. Strange now, remembering he had a nickname for me.
I felt that sense of unfamiliarity when I saw an interview the USC Shoah Foundation conducted with my grandfather in the nineties, a few years before my birth. His voice was higher and he spoke more quickly. He enunciated his every word, making his accent much more prominent. I knew it was him, but it seemed like a different version of the man who taught me so much. I could not watch it in full.
It was easier to listen to my own audio recordings. There he was not A Survivor prompted by an interviewer, nor did he go through his story of survival chronologically. We just spoke, as we always did. I felt that thicker voice, the one I knew so well, to be within reach. Of course it was further away than ever. Gaps like that, between what is or can be said and unsaid, are what I found so powerful in Akerman’s work, and what used to keep me ruminating on my grandfather’s story. My filmmaking is born of that man and of the lessons he taught me, whether with words or silences: the task is to express through words and images that the past is not even past.
The last recording I made before I went back to school, before he died at the beginning of 2023, was not about the Holocaust. It was about traveling and his love for his grandchildren. We spoke of my aspirations and his own when he settled in Toronto. He told me about the night he met my grandmother at a dance for new immigrants. He told me about his father-in-law, whom diabetes deprived of a leg. “Eh,” he said as I got ready to leave. “Those are all just stories now.”
Courtesy of the author.