A lingering look at the world

Akerman's videos give the mind space to roam

Coming out of the hypnotic exhibition of Chantal Akerman videos at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, you may find your eyes gliding perpetually to the left. So fond is Akerman of the steady sideways scan that returning to normal vision takes time. The world feels different - abruptly so, as it does when stepping off a trampoline.

That said, Akerman's vision of the world is anything but jumpy. In defiance of the frenetic, fast-cut pace of MTV (which has leaked into almost every other form of popular moving imagery today) Akerman clings to a style of shooting that is unapologetically glacial. She favors long lateral takes from moving vehicles and extended frontal takes from a static camera. Her approach takes some getting used to, but the rewards are great.

Born in Belgium in 1950, Akerman has been making bold, chewy experimental films since 1968. Her back catalog includes an almost wordless film tracing the movements of two dozen unconnected people through the small hours of a hot night in Brussels ("Toute Une Nuit," 1982), a documentary about Pina Bausch's dance-theater company ("On Tour With Pina Bausch," 1983), and a recent adaptation from one book of Marcel Proust's "A La Recherche du Temps Perdu" ("La Captive," 2000).

Since 1995, Akerman has taken advantage of a video-friendly environment in the contemporary art world. She has carved out a niche combining a sensual cinematic sensibility with some of the formal tics of video installation: multiple screens, combinations of small monitors and large-scale projections, and dissociated audio.

Five of these post-1995 works have been chosen for the List show. "Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space" follows last month's program of Akerman's more "conventional" films (it's all relative!) at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Two of the List show's films, "Sud (South)," 1999, and "La-Bas (Down There)," 2006, are one hour long and projected on a single screen. The others, each displayed on multiple screens, can be viewed in whatever manner you choose: There is no clear beginning or end, no plot, and the imagery is linked by staggered repetitions and loose associations.

"Sud" began as an exploration of landscape and memory in America's Deep South. Akerman was under the spell of William Faulkner and James Baldwin at the time (she was in the midst of a teaching stint at Harvard University). But while she was filming, a horrendous racially motivated murder took place in the east Texas town of Jasper.

James Byrd Jr. was beaten by three white supremacists, tied to a pickup truck, and dragged 3 miles along a road. He lost body parts, including his head, along the way.

Akerman responded by interviewing various members of the community about the incident, including a local policeman, and filming the church service memorializing Byrd.

But the most ominous takes from the film are Akerman's series of long, slow shots from the back of a vehicle (a pickup truck?). At the beginning of the film (presumably before the murder took place), the camera is directed away from the road toward the ravishing, semi-rural landscape, all humid and lush. But for the film's final, long shot, the camera points back at the road, as the vehicle drives slowly down the same 3 miles Byrd was dragged along.

One sees nothing but the road and snatches of landscape off to either side. But one's imagination runs wild. There is so much violence latent in the scene that it becomes harder and harder to watch.

Akerman's defiance of cinematic conventions - not just the faster takes but the intrusive soundtracks, the constant visual fidgeting, the tendentious editing - has something liberating about it. Her approach, characterized by extreme restraint, makes you aware of just how manipulative, even bullying these conventions can be, though we rarely give them a second thought.

Her own slow style discourages the suspension of disbelief, allowing the mind time and space to roam, to contemplate, to question. Of course, her style can also frustrate. Akerman toys deliberately with our desire to know more, to see more, to glean a plot or grasp what is going on. Her strategy can make you resentful, but it also creates tension - never more so than in "La-Bas," a film she made on a working trip to Tel Aviv in 2005.

"Las-Bas" is extraordinary in Akerman's oeuvre largely because of what it is not. Unlike many of her films, which suggest a cosmopolitan, curious, peripatetic sensibility, "La-Bas" is about being stuck. Stuck, specifically, in a temporary apartment in Tel Aviv.

The film is a sort of perverse homage to Hitchcock's "Rear Window." Almost all we see for an entire hour are views though the windows of Akerman's apartment toward the windows and balconies of her neighbors. These views are obscured - and made aesthetically interesting - by the matchstick blinds that keep out the worst of the Israeli sun but also evoke Akerman's psychologically thwarted and imprisoned state.

We learn from the director's voice-over (Akerman's deep and raspy French-accented voice can be heard throughout the show) that she is in a nervous, confused state and experiencing something akin to writer's block. "I just feel disconnected from almost everything," she says. "Basically, I don't know how to live."

A brief trip to the beach only accentuates her fraught state when she finds out about a recent suicide bombing, extinguishing her desire to leave the apartment again. Jewish herself, she is terrified that she will suddenly succumb to a feeling that she belongs in Israel.

That never happens - given her circumstances, how could it? Instead, she takes calls from friends and family back in Belgium and kills time by reading complicated books about Israel ("It's complicated," she keeps repeating, though in different contexts).

At times soporific, at other times nerve-wracking, "La-Bas" is a film unlike any I've seen.

The rest of the exhibition showcases Akerman's experiments with multiple-screen works. One of them, the 2002 "De L'Autre Côté (From the Other Side)," which was seen in the Institute of Contemporary Art's 2006 "Super Vision" show, looks at the plight of Mexican immigrants trying to enter the United States illegally. It includes aerial footage of pursuit and surveillance, images of the long border fence, and interviews with individual Mexicans. I found it visually exciting but strangely uninvolving - a case of Akerman's technical audacity sabotaging her efforts to engage us.

More impressive - in fact, for me the highlight of the show - was an earlier work dispersing moving imagery across 24 monitors in one room, followed by one screen in a second room. Called "D'est: Au Bord de la Fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction)," 1995, it uses footage Akerman took on a trip across Eastern Europe in 1993. It's the most purely visual film in the show: There is no voice-over or dialogue in this room, and the only sound is ambient noise from the streets.

Again, she favors very slow tracking shots filmed from moving vehicles. Most of the images show city crowds from various distances. The people all seem to be waiting - on the street, in train stations - but it's never clear what for.

The imagery is unforgettable. One long tracking shot, in particular, shows an urban street in the midst of a heavy snowfall. It is indescribably beautiful and elicits feelings of crushing loneliness. Something mechanical about the movements of the camera - always steady, always moving to the left - accentuates the great distance between us and the people drifting in and out of the frame. But the beauty of the imagery, its sweet reticence, somehow charges that gap, creating a great ache in our hearts.

The ache is clearly in Akerman's heart, too, for in the second room, we see a single image - a Moscow street at night, slowly fading to black - and hear her voice talking about the faces she has filmed. She finds that they express something in opposition to the uniformity that so often characterizes crowds, and feels that - despite their apparent indifference - they "offer themselves."

Then her thoughts turn dark, and - delicately - she relates these faces to the Holocaust ("It is obsessive," she admits of this mental leap. "I am obsessed"). She notices the way they flicker between robust life and arbitrary death. It is only when she had finished the film, she claims, that she said to herself: "So, that's what it was. That again."

You need half a day to see this show in its entirety. But if you can't spare that kind of time, at least see this one work. It will stay with you.