Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the '60s in Brussels

1994 · Chantal Akerman · Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the '60s in Brussels on Sightlines

A fifteen-year-old tears up her school papers. It takes about as long as tearing paper takes. Then the day is empty, the film still has an hour to run, and nothing in the tearing tells her, or us, what comes next.

That is the problem Chantal Akerman set herself. Most films run on a circuit so familiar we stop seeing it: someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and he meant an entire industrial grammar, not a genre. Michèle's one decisive act in April 1968 is to destroy her own schedule. It changes nothing except how much time she now has to fill. From there the film cannot run on action. She has none available.

What it runs on instead has a name, and the name is useful. Deleuze took the French word balade — a stroll, an outing with no errand at the end of it — for a postwar form in which someone crosses a city and the trip transforms nothing. Michèle walks Brussels. She sits through a matinee in the middle of the afternoon. She meets a young French deserter, a boy who has walked away from an army, and they talk about death and desire, which is what you talk about at fifteen when you cannot yet talk about what you actually feel. In another film each of these is a turning point. Here they are stops on a walk. The balade makes a different claim about what a day contains.

Sitting in the dark at that matinee, she is doing what the film asks of us. Deleuze's word for the figure is the voyant, the seer: a character given more to look at than to do, who therefore looks. This is the hinge his two Cinema books turn on. When action stops resolving situations, something else becomes visible — time itself, no longer the measure of how long an action takes, but the thing you are sitting inside. Michèle registers. She endures her own afternoon.

Akerman had already built the grammar for that, and it is hers to name. In 'Jeanne Dielman' she filmed a woman's household gestures at the length those gestures actually take, in fixed shots, with no underlining, until the dead time — the stretches where nothing advances — became the content rather than the gap between content. That is an argument about editing. Cutting to the end of a task tells you the task did not matter; holding on it says the opposite. Bazin had made a related case for the long take a generation earlier: a held shot keeps the world's ambiguity intact where montage decides on your behalf. Akerman pushed it past realism into something nearer to ethics. 'Portrait' takes the grammar off the kitchen floor and puts it on a pavement. The takes walk. Two people talk while walking and the camera stays with them at close range for the length of the walk, including the parts where neither says anything worth quoting.

Which is where the body comes in. Late in the second Cinema book Deleuze describes films that do their thinking in posture and attitude instead of plot, a cinema of the body, where what a person does with their weight and their hands carries what the dialogue will not. Akerman was among the filmmakers he had in view. Watch Michèle's hands. A fifteen-year-old who does not know where to put them is information no line of dialogue can deliver.

And 1968 is out there the whole time, rumbling, never arriving. The film is set in the month of the barricades and shows you none of them. Deleuze's late formula for political cinema explains why that is a position and not an evasion: the people are missing. The collective subject older revolutionary cinema could simply address does not exist to be addressed, so a film has to work through its absence. The deserter is the figure of it, a boy defined by the army he is not in. There is a second missing people, closer in. Michèle's feelings for her best friend Danielle have no public story available in Brussels in 1968, no script, no word she would use for herself. So she talks about death instead, and about desire in general. Deleuze called this fabulation: not lying, but the story-making by which someone with no available story invents one out loud. The talk here is construction, in real time, with the mistakes left in.

There is one more layer. Akerman made this for a French television series that asked directors to return to their own adolescence, and she answered with her most openly autobiographical fiction. Michèle has her own name and an actress to play her, and everyone watching knows whose afternoon this was. Deleuze, borrowing from Pasolini, called this free indirect discourse: a camera neither reporting on a character from outside nor pretending to be her, but speaking alongside her, so that the woman holding the shot cannot be separated from the girl inside it. The close range measures the distance between a person and her own memory.

The commission also required a party scene and period songs. Akerman delivers both and quietly removes their job. The film ends with two girls dancing to Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne.' Nothing is declared. The narrative stops and the song carries them, which is Deleuze's movement of world: the dancer stops being the one who moves and becomes the one the world moves. The posture does the telling — the gest, an attitude that exposes a whole relation without stating it. Godard invented this interruption in 'Bande à part,' stopping his film cold for a café dance. Akerman keeps the stop and takes the cool out. What is left is two people, a slow song, and everything neither of them can say.

The debts behind her are legible. 'Je, tu, il, elle' gave her the self-portrait grammar, her own body and her own desire filmed without hurry or apology. 'Les Rendez-vous d'Anna' gave her the solitary woman crossing Europe in static takes, broken open by confessions from strangers. From 'The 400 Blows' she took truancy, the city on foot, the patience to hold a teenager's face until intimacy replaces incident; from 'Masculin Féminin,' a late-sixties youth whose politics stay offscreen while the jukebox plays. Forward is harder to trace, and honestly so: the film was nearly impossible to see for years and travelled as a rumour among people who had caught it once. Its sibling from the same commission, Assayas's 'Cold Water,' took the mandatory party the opposite way. What 'Portrait' seeded reached us through Akerman's larger reputation, in the now-ordinary conviction that one hour of someone's life, given its actual length, is enough to build a film from.

That is the argument it settles. Dead time is not a style reserved for suffering. The same grammar built for a housewife's ritual works on a girl's afternoon off, and gives that afternoon the weight of history without once raising its voice. Watch it for Michèle. Watch it again for what the takes decline to cut away from, and ask whether she knows what she wants. The film will not tell you, and that refusal is the most respectful thing in it.

Concepts in play

voyage-balade-form — Michèle tears up her school papers, skips class and drifts through Brussels on foot for a single April 1968 day — matinee, chance meeting with the deserter, long talks — and the trip resolves nothing.
the-seer (voyant) — She sits through a matinee in the middle of her day off; across the hour she watches, listens and endures rather than acting on anything.
dead-time (temps mort) — Walking-and-talking long takes that hold the whole walk, including the stretches where nothing advances — the durational grammar inherited from Jeanne Dielman's real-time gestures.
cinema-of-the-body — A camera following at close range in sustained takes, so a fifteen-year-old's posture, walk and hands carry the adolescent duration the dialogue withholds.
people-are-missing — Revolution rumbles offscreen and never arrives; the young French deserter is defined by the army he has left; Michèle's feelings for Danielle have no public story in 1968 Brussels.
fabulation (legending) — The hour consists of Michèle discussing life with old and new friends — death, desire, her place in the world, her sexuality — inventing a self out loud rather than reporting one.
free-indirect-discourse-political — Made on a commission asking directors to revisit their adolescence, it is Akerman's most openly autobiographical fiction: her vision and Michèle's are inseparable in the close-range takes.
the-gest — The closing party: two girls dancing to Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne,' a posture that exposes the whole unspoken relation without a word of declaration.
movement of world — The mandated party scene and period song stop the narrative outright — the dance interlude descended from Bande à part, where the song moves the dancers instead of the dancers advancing the plot.

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