The Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1983)

Chantal Akerman's The Eighties, first released in 1983, is an experimental film that ostensibly offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Belgian director's 1986 musical Golden Eighties.  The film is an idiosyncratic blend of documentary and musical, and for the first of its two distinct halves it focuses on the casting and rehearsal processes involved in staging this elaborate production.  Shot on video, this footage is presented with neither context nor commentary, but it nonetheless highlights the gruelling efforts of the cast and crew as they make incremental progress.  As with Golden Eighties, the first thing glimpsed in The Eighties is a succession of purposefully scurrying women, shot from the knees down.

Given that it was purportedly a tin-rattling dry run for Golden Eighties, The Eighties manages to be a markedly different beast from the later, glossier film, which stands as arguably Akerman's most accessible feature (although a film she made in the same year as The Eighties, the sublime The Man with a Suitcase, is also a good entry point for those unfamiliar with the director's work).  Clearly, there is much that connects the two films, but where Golden Eighties is fluid and straightforward, The Eighties is choppy and fragmented; while Golden Eighties has received a lavish 4K restoration, it seems oddly apt that The Eighties has only recently made it past VHS, the rickety format du jour of its title decade.

After an hour has passed, the raw, freewheeling rehearsal videos give way to several fully-realised 35mm sequences; if indeed Akerman hoped this film would attract financers for Golden Eighties, these slick, polished numbers seem the most likely way to achieve such a goal—so it seems strange that this dazzling footage is relegated to the film's back half.  While the songs and general mise en scène are recognisable to anyone who's seen Golden Eighties, most of the actors are different: Aurore Clément and Magali Noël, both so prominent here, are nowhere to be found in the 1986 film, although Lio appears in both titles.  As such, Golden Eighties is a palimpsest in which faint traces of this phantom film are still visible.

Clément and Noël, who both starred in Akerman's The Meetings of Anna, give full-blooded performances that provide a tantalising glimpse of a production that went unfinished—or did it?  Such is The Eighties' slippery relationship to its near-namesake.  Certainly, it's a truly baffling experience for anyone who hasn't seen Golden Eighties—which would be everyone who saw The Eighties on its initial run in 1983.  This poignant, life-affirming film finds Chantal Akerman at her most mischievous, and she's also a notable presence in front of the camera: witness her joyful, enthusiastic conducting of professional singer Noël's performance in the recording studio, before she herself gamely steps up to the microphone.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

De Afspraken van Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

First released in 1975, Chantal Akerman's jaw-dropping masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has since been voted the greatest film of all time; she followed it up with an avant-garde documentary, News from Home, before returning to narrative film with 1978's De Afspraken van Anna.  Variously known as Les Rendez-vous d'Anna and The Meetings of Anna, this introspective and contemplative film wasn't well received upon its initial release, but the decade since her death has seen much, if not all, of Akerman's work reappraised—hence Jeanne Dielman's meteoric rise in critical popularity—and De Afspraken van Anna has recently been restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek.

De Afspraken van Anna is an exploration of loneliness, disconnection and the search for meaning in a transient world.  The film focuses on, yep, Anna (Aurore Clément), a Belgian filmmaker and proxy for Akerman, as she treks across Europe to promote her latest movie.  The narrative structure is episodic, with Anna meeting various people over the course of her endless train journeys, including friends, strangers, lovers and relatives; each encounter reveals a different facet of Anna's interior life, but her sense of isolation remains constant.  These lengthy conversations are often marked by a lack of emotional connection—at least on Anna's part—reflecting the title character's own detachment from the world around her.

The film's pacing is glacial, which does allow the viewer to immerse themselves in Anna's world and experience her ennui.  A real strength of the movie—one it shares with Jeanne Dielman—is its ability to capture the quotidian and transform it into something profound and meaningful.  Anna's existence is one of rootlessness and impermanence—quite the opposite of that of Jeanne Dielman, who is more or less confined to her Brussels apartment.  But despite the itinerant Anna's ostensibly glamourous jaunts on the film festival circuit, which are far removed from Jeanne's stultifyingly repetitive domestic chores, Anna has somehow reduced her own life to a level of mundanity that sits on a par with Jeanne's.

Yet De Afspraken van Anna contains nothing in the vein of Jeanne Dielman's shocking dénouement, and the film ends much like it begins.  Akerman's direction is characterised by long, static takes and a minimalist style, which create a sense of stillness, and the film's mise-en-scène is both beautiful and disciplined—qualities which are much more apparent in this newly restored print.  Clément has to carry the entirety of the film, and her Anna is something of a blank canvas, a cipher who seems as interchangeable as the hotels and train stations she pinballs around.  By turns fascinating and exhausting, this austere semi-autobiographical work has taken on an added poignancy since its maker's untimely death.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI