I misspelled Chantal Akerman’s name in the graphic above. Kill me.
There are bad ideas and then there is this: my dueling film-by-film look at the entire careers of B-movie legend Albert Pyun and feminist/avant-garde master Chantal Akerman. I had been meaning to do a DIRECTOR FOCUS on both of these individuals when I noticed that each filmmaker had an even 50 directorial credits listed on IMDb, AKA synergy, a spark.
Pyun was born in Hawaii, three years after the Belgian Akerman, in 1953. He passed away in Las Vegas from complications of multiple sclerosis and dementia in 2022, seven years after she took her own life in Paris. Here are two bodies of work — even in number, parallel in time — that could not be any more different. One sought to entertain while the other looked to enlighten. On the landscape of cinema they operated in spaces a million miles apart, but — perhaps — somewhere in this great divide, this contrast + continuum, there’s a connection? Is Albert the yin to Akerman’s yang? I’m not sure I’ll even be able to find all 50 of the works to critique, let alone answer that question. But I've never let that stop me before.
Watching movies is a waste of time: the ultimate passive medium is designed to suck away your minutes (be that 12, 87 or 201). They add up and you can’t get them back. However, the great Jeffrey Lewis once sang, “Time is gonna take so much away, but there's a way that time can offer you a trade.” And so with that I present, "Albert & Akerman"…
Ed. Note: I recommend reading the individual film reviews first, Akerman then Pyun (or, from left to right, e.g. Blow Up My Town then The Sword and the Sorcerer for Movie #1) and then the content below each graphic...
February 15, 2024 I haven't seen a speck of either of these artists' work, even in passing, which was another major impetus for unleashing this exercise that nobody asked for onto the world. I didn't even realize Pyun was an American and was certain that Chantal was from France. When we speak of cinematic blindspots, this was a black hole for me, albeit one on the radar for a long time: a blinking red light, some kind of beacon. This'll be the thing that makes things make sense. Where is my shoehorn?
Ah, yes. This is what it feels like now...
But in the end it will look like this...
This was a successful beginning to the project, as I enjoyed both films. Sure, The Sword runs a little long and could have easily been cut down to an even 90 minutes or less, but that's a minor complaint. Speaking of run-time, one hurdle that I initially considered was the wide disparity in lengths over these continuums. About half of Ackerman’s output are either short films, TV movies, episodic work or anthology segments. Whereas Pyun worked almost exclusively in the world of features. I wasn’t sure this would be ripe for a 1:1 comparison at each stop on the journey. And while I still have a long way to go, I feel confident that this won’t be an issue. These are the 50 things that each auteur left us with before departing this mortal coil. There’s probably been 100x more written about Ackerman’s debut despite it being nearly an hour and a half shorter than Pyun’s. The body of work will stand for itself in the end.
VERDICT: TIE (0-0-1)
March 14, 2024 Radioactive Dreams paints the portrait of a motherless world. It’s no wonder everything has gone to shit. Even in the pre-nukes prologue, Philip and Marlowe are the products of male supervision. And while you can’t ask for better dads or dad-like figures (or role models in general) in the form of George Kennedy and Don Murray, this absence is felt on both the personal and collective levels. Pyun will never be the first name you hear rattled off when listing “auteurs who set out to dismantle the patriarchy” but he makes a case, however subtle, for that here. When the boys are unleashed onto the hellish landscape, they exclaim, “real life babes, real life mutants!” This satirical dig at the two genders (the female as the ideal, the male as the monster) is the first of many indicators that this film has a lot more to say than what’s on the surface.
While the film is a multifaceted affair that seems to (however unintentionally) comment on a number of ideas, including “the end of history,” The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman seems to be mainly about the end of personhood for women who enter into domesticity, a theme she would of course expand upon with the ultimate film on the matter: Jeanne Dielman (not to get ahead of myself). Chantal never speaks in the picture, existing solely as a sounding board for her friend Claire. There is a great, almost cosmic conflict at play: the need for mothers — we see how in a motherless world, society is leveled, reduced to a chaos — vs. the push against that, the desire to abandon one’s ‘biological duty’ and the unavoidable baggage it foists upon the woman in society. This crushing lack of identity is paralleled in Radioactive Dreams’ quest for familial closure. These are two vastly different films that nevertheless land on the same answer for the question of the family unit: it’s mysterious, opaque and, possibly, forever broken.
I’m not here to argue that Dreams is some kind of feminist text, and especially not one on the level of The Beloved Child or any of Akerman’s work. But there are multiple allusions beyond the broad framing of the post-nukes motherless world, both practically (the soundtrack is made up of fourteen poppy tracks in the soft hair metal vein, all by female-fronted bands) and metaphorically. The two central female leads are both villains (on opposite ends of the evil spectrum) with stereotypically male names, Rusty and Miles. They are the polar opposites of your standard 80s action ‘eye candy' who often lack any agency whatsoever. They're badass and layered characters who are also allowed to be wicked in atypical ways for this genre and era.
It’s turning into spring here right now. I saw my first mosquito and the reemergence of turtle life at the lake. Change is in the air. We are in the infancy of this project (film 2 of 50), but I’m already seeing a huge difference in how things are working out. I thought this would be, above all else, a funny concept (see: the previous shoehorn metaphor) that I could expand into a meandering book-length odyssey. But what I’m finding already is how effortless it’s been to locate common ground, and how truthful and serious (and plainly unfunny) this space really is. The plan is for this to take two years or more to fully realize and, like with the changes of the seasons, I am ready to let it happen, to wash over me: to see threads reveal themselves and then disappear completely.
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (1-0-1)
March 28, 2024 If Albert Pyun’s third film, Dangerously Close, is his showcase for being able to play it straight, then Chantal Akerman’s silent third is her boisterous cry that she will be doing anything but. Here we see one artist willing to do whatever it takes to appeal to the mainstream, and another eschewing all of those conventions in pursuit of Art. Narrative? Forget it. SOUND? Don’t even need it.
I shouldn’t even attempt to make a side-by-side comparison here, but I’m gonna (because that’s the gimmick, folks!). Carey Lowell as Julie is such an unknowable character as the female lead in Dangerously Close that she's practically a non-entity even by the era and the genre’s standards. But in a way she’s more mysterious because of this rendering. Like Chantal herself in The Room, she’s essentially a foreign object, just part of the scenery. Le chambre is often described via the oxymoron “a moving still life” which is both apt, thematically, and inaccurate in practice. The camera actually never STOPS moving. But like the bowl of fruit sitting idly on the table, our brain makes these connections.
In Pyun’s film we see an undoing of connections, or our preconceived notions therein. Lowell is not your typical actress for this role. She’s pretty but not the stereotypical blonde bombshell. She wears mom jeans for crying out loud…
The setup for Dangerously Close vaguely suggests a question that is never really answered (or answered well). Whereas in The Room, we’re presented with a solution for a question we either don’t want answered or wouldn’t dare ask. Both films are stepping stones for greater work, but also emblematic of each auteur’s process and approach on the whole. I also like the simple reading that this Akerman is literally eating a man's balls?
(Sorry.)
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (1-1-1)
April 11, 2024 In Justin Decloux's essential text, Radioactive Dreams: The Cinema of Albert Pyun, he writes, "I hated Vicious Lips the first time I saw it, but on this viewing, it revealed itself as an Antonioni-esque tale of stasis." This is true to a degree: the entire middle of the movie (and most of the end) is such a big, mindless nothing that there's almost something interesting in the void. And this directly parallels the central focus of Akerman's work during this time of her filmography. Vicious Lips is as far from the world of experimental film as you can get, but you're probably better off squinting like mad and trying to see at such (it was the only way my eyes wouldn't glaze over from boredom). But The Room and Hotel Monterey are clearly entries in the genre and both films didn't get a proper release until many years later.
While this was clearly a detour — from the milestone 100th issue of Camera Obscura ("On Chantal Akerman"): "She didn't want to keep on making films like Hotel Monterey or be the next Michael Snow. She definitely wanted to go back to narrative film." — there's something beautifully synchronous with this period aligning with what might be Pyun's most meandering movie. Both films are really about the spark of an idea and little else: Akerman obsessed with living spaces and passage of time, and then literally trying to capture that sparse feeling in a soundless vacuum, and then Pyun inadvertently rendering that notion on-screen when his impetus (all-female future-space new-wave band can't get their spaceship to the gig on time) falls plainly flat.
Vicious Lips ends even more jarringly than Dangerously Close...
We are so comically far-removed from the wonderful and creative miniatures and spacey atmosphere that it's mind-boggling. By contrast, in Akerman's polar opposite affair, she has only one place to go: up (or out)...
This is a fairly average shot of the streets of New York City streets, but it implies something so much larger. There is another world outside of the walls of this hotel, countless buildings and people with their own stories to tell. Perhaps they're incredibly similar — perhaps, like this very project, we'd have to strain to find the comparisons — but there's no way of knowing. We only have our own tales and most of the time, there's not much there.
VERDICT: AKERMAN WINS (2-1-1)
April 25, 2024 On this, the fifth installment of fifty, we have reached the point where I couldn’t possibly begin to stretch myself to make a connection between these two films. 26 minutes of an unfinished documentary about teenage recovering addicts in 70s NYC that's missing sound and a sorta action, sorta crime-thriller, mostly lowkey effort that had to be padded with close to 15 minutes of fluff and credits to stretch out to an already meager 88 minute run-time. Nope. Not happening. Some would look at this as a failing: proof that this project is nonsensical and/or unworthy. But not me.
I choose to see this as a mulligan in the early rounds of a more-competitive-than-you-think round of miniature golf. I might WANT to do this again — hell, I might want to do it right around the corner: how am I gonna connect Jeanne Dielman with Journey to the Center of the Earth, a film not even credited to Pyun but rather the pseudonym-sounding Rusty Lemorande. Pyun was brought onto finish the film and would go uncredited because…
The Kathy Ireland vehicle Alien from L.A. would actually be released theatrically before Journey, and for that we have the lovely Akerman pairing of I, You, He, She, which features the first graphic lesbian sex scene in mainstream cinema, and one of the longest lesbian sex scenes in film history. Now that should be a fun one!
But for now, please except this mulligan, not with a wink or any caveat but as a plea for mercy from one human being to another. Mea culpa, mi amor: we’re in this together?
VERDICT: ALBERT WINS (2-2-1)
May 9, 2024 The number six is significant. From the religious blog “Steppes of Faith”...
The number six refers to many things in the Bible, but it’s first mentioned in Genesis 1:31 when God created man on the sixth day. According to Bible scholars, just as the number 7 typically signifies completion or perfection especially of God, the number 6 is one shy of that, which means it signifies imperfection. More specifically, it refers to the imperfection of man and the sin and weakness he has.So we’ve reached the sixth installment of this journey and it’s clear that the best work yet by Albert & Akerman is still riddled with imperfections. But it’s in these imperfections — their inclinations and whims — where so much beauty is to be found, what makes them who they are as auteurs. And as a study of contrast, their vast divide between the minimalist and the maximalist has never been wider. With I, You, He, She’s unadorned monochrome set against Alien from L.A.’s absurdist, hazy technicolor, this makes for the most delightful, if unorthodox double feature.
Both films explore isolation, but in different ways. I, You, He, She is a slow-burning character study that depicts the emotional isolation and pain of romantic relationships. Akerman uses long, fixed shots and with almost no dialogue to convey a sense of ennui and detachment: how one might feel like an ALIEN in the aftermath of a broken relationship. In Alien from L.A., isolation is a plot device. The protagonist is a stilted, infantilized beauty with no self-confidence stranded in a dystopian land. The film emphasizes literal physical isolation in a hostile world: Wanda is an actual ALIEN, a foreigner among humanoid inhabitants of Atlantis who nevertheless don’t seem to share the same DNA.
It’s easy to feel isolated in this modern world and sometimes it’s inevitable. But it’s how we deal with these feelings that count: we can lounge on the floor and only eat powdered sugar out of a paper bag for an entire month straight or we can fly to Africa and jump down a bottomless pit in search of a missing family member. It’s locked into the genre stipulations to a point, but Pyun is interested in what can be done with action whereas Akerman is solely focused on the byproducts of inaction. Inertia vs. stasis. Akerman’s Julie ultimately finds her way out of this depression, but the resulting behaviors aren’t necessarily better: give a trucker a handjob and briefly rekindle the spark (or try to) with your ex.
The focus on sex and complete lack thereof is also a fascinating contrast. Kathy Ireland’s Wanda is stunted and babyish to a comedic degree. Despite being one of the most famous pin-up models of all-time, she’s reduced to little more than a child, completely void of any sexual agency or urgency other than a firmly PG desire to be loved/have a boyfriend who loves her. But this works in the sense of it being a Wizard of Oz homage (pure fantasy/fairytale), just like Akerman’s version of herself is extension of her own persona if not soul (reality/autofiction personified): we have never been on more opposites sides of the spectrum and the view across the divide is spectacular.
VERDICT: TIE (2-2-2)