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