I have been thinking a great deal about her and her cinema and art. I distinguish the two because in the past few years, Akerman has been involved in turning part of her cinematic works into installations for museums and special exhibitions in other venues. Her films can be translated into installations perfectly because her detailed realist compositions appeals more to the viewer’s perception than his/her understanding. I forget the exact date when I saw Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). I do remember that I came out of the theater speechless, with the urgent desire to want to view it again, from beginning to end. It changed me as a viewer of cinema. It impelled me to mature my cinematic sensibility right there as I was viewing the film for the first time. Incredible. Since then, I get irritated when people insist that cinema primarily tells a story, that it is a medium to visualize a narrative. Cinema is vision first, and then, if necessary or willed, story. The movement-image creates an accumulation of gestures that may signify something coherent or not, translatable or radically singular, but they are gestures, and as such they may not pursue a particular end. “Purposiveness without purpose,” says Agamben in Means without Ends. The notion of anything without a distinct aim or end meets so much resistance generally. People immediately interpret such means as such (or mediality) as incomplete, underdeveloped, chaotic, and perhaps even excessive. Strage. I find gestures to be rather contained, and when a cinematic scene or sequence is designed around them, it becomes the alternation of order and containment in an arresting rather than stifling way. By gestures I do not mean only corporeal and facial moves that often times are demanded to signify because verbal language has retreated. No, gestures are primarily a spatiotemporal presence, composition, phenomenon, for which meaning is not necessarily the first or only product.
Realism 