Feminist Media Studies

ISSN: 1468-0777 (Print) 1471-5902 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20

Willful voices: a/synchronic sound in Chantal

Akerman’s self-portrait films

Manuel Garin & Amanda Villavieja

To cite this article: Manuel Garin & Amanda Villavieja (2016): Willful voices: a/
synchronic sound in Chantal Akerman’s self-portrait films, Feminist Media Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14680777.2016.1234236

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1234236

Published online: 29 Sep 2016.

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FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1234236

COMMENTARY AND CRITICISM

Willful voices: a/synchronic sound in Chantal Akerman’s

self-portrait films
Manuel Garin and Amanda Villavieja
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

In her passionate review of Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Susan Sontag identified the dissociation of
words and images as a key path of modern cinema, a powerful tool that would allow film-
makers to question dominant narratives by contrasting “two discrete types of material, the
seen and the heard” (1964, 9). Within the context of sound design, dissociation is commonly
referred to as a/synchrony, one of the most controversial and fruitful dimensions of movie
making since the standardization of film sound. In a joint manifesto from 1928, the soviet
directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov claimed that the connection between sounds
and the bodies they—allegedly—belong to would always be a political one (Elizabeth Weis
and John Belton 1985). Assumptions of naturalism, power structures, and gendered hierar-
chies tend to be reinforced when voices come out of characters in a synchronic, unques-
tioned way.
Therefore, feminist sound strategies must necessarily deal with such hierarchies and prob-
lematize the synchronicity of dominant media discourses. How do women filmmakers con-
test the long history of misogynistic liaisons between female voices and bodies? Can we talk
of a specifically feminist approach to a/synchrony? The recent death of Chantal Akerman in
October 2015 puts all those questions into perspective, given her unique approach to sounds
as markers of gender, race, and social difference, deeply connected with contemporary fem-
inist challenges. Bridging Sontag’s claim with Sara Ahmed’s theories on the willful feminist
gesture (2014, 20), this article explores the use of a/synchronic sound and voice-over in
Akerman’s self-portrait films, in order to raise critical questions and encourage further
research on the representations of gender and performance (Aristotelis Nikolaidis 2011)
through sound.
Akerman, who in the summer of 1975 attended the UNESCO Women in Cinema interna-
tional symposium in St. Vincent, Italy, along with other female creators like Agnès Varda,
Valerie Export, and Sontag herself (Vivian Ostrovsky 2015), was always reluctant to embrace
feminist or queer labels to define her work, even more so after Jeanne Dielman was called
the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of cinema by The New York Times. Tired
of maximalisms, she preferred to talk about a feminism of mise en scène (instead of a feminism
of subject matter) based on two key aspects that Janet Bergstrom links with Deleuze and
Guattari’s minor literature: “first, her ‘voice’ or her position of enunciation, which is repre-
sented to the audience as if it were split; and second, her unusual way—partly conscious
and partly unconscious—of focusing her films on her personal experiences” (1999, 277).

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 COMMENTARY AND CRITICISM

Although Bergstrom does not mention asynchrony per se, her analysis of Akerman’s
oeuvre as psychoanalytic splitting (between self and world, mother and daughter, queer and
Jewish identity) is in fact rooted in the dissociation of the filmmaker’s words and images,
best exemplified in her “delight in slurring words into sound” (Ivone Margulies 1996, 168).
From her first to her last film, Akerman obsessively filmed and recorded herself out-of-sync,
in a carefully mediated distance that constitutes a feminist gesture in itself. If, according to
Sara Ahmed, the willful gesture is one that challenges the traditional gendered categories
of power and identity, a gesture that keeps coming back, suspended, like the arm of a—
repressed—dead girl rising from her grave (2014, 47), a willful voice must be one that remains
dissociated from the body that produces it, one that denies synchronicity and remains
untamable, radical, sync-free.
Throughout her career, Akerman never ceased to explore a variety of a/synchronic strat-
egies to achieve such willfulness: humming and whispering foley sounds (post-produced
sound effects) over her own images (Saute Ma Ville); commenting on her on-screen actions
with a detached off-screen narration (Je, tu, il, elle); reading letters and personal diaries over
observational documentary shots (News from Home); and recording her voice and the loca-
tion sounds behind the camera without showing herself (Là bas). Instead of accepting the
traditional role of female voice-over as a tool to naturalize the narrative (Sarah Kozloff 1988,
41) or a source of uncanny off-screen powers (Michel Chion 1999, 140), Akerman split her
voice and her image in a feminist asynchrony, so that words evoke images by themselves:
telling becomes a critical way of showing.
The uniqueness of her sound design lies in the combination of willful voices and a back-
ground of ambient sound (room tones, noises, foley effects) rooted in, but still distant from,
the visual-track. In a 1976 review of Jeanne Dielman, Manny Farber pointed out how Akerman
treated the sounds of the kitchen as music to expose the emptiness and alienation of the
housewife’s daily routines, in a gesture of radical feminism (Manny Farber and Patricia
Patterson 2016, 765). But it is in her self-portraits, especially in Là bas (which deals with her
isolation in a Tel Aviv apartment after a terrorist attack), where that combination of on-screen
and off-screen sound becomes more powerful: the filmmaker splits herself between the
seen and the heard “to shift the viewer’s attention from image to sound by increasing the
opaqueness of the sound imposed against an image that shows a situation we already know
and in which nothing happens except the weight of stillness” (Babette Mangolte 2015). That
weight, the passage of time expressed in fixed images and quotidian sounds, constitutes
Akerman’s most cherished tool to interrogate narrative as well as feminism itself (B. Ruby
Rich 1998, 170). What better way to question the hierarchy of gender than questioning the
hierarchy between sounds and images, female voices and female bodies?
Because gender is something that needs doing (Judith Butler 1990, 34), the dissociation
of words and images is a perfect strategy to keep things undone, open, forcing the audience
to figure out why certain voices remain deterritorialized and repressed, unable to attain full
synchrony. As a Jewish woman filmmaker, Akerman kept tracing things back to her own
female genealogy:
My grandmother was already a feminist; she wanted to become a painter and get married on
her own. She didn’t get the life she wanted—no more than my mother, who admitted as much
the day after my father died … Am I the repository of all that? (Akerman in Nicole Brenez 2011)
Her unique way of transforming personal struggles into timeless cinematic achievements
will continue to inspire new generations of feminist scholars and creators. Between presence
 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3

and absence, the seen and the heard, her films will always remind us that out-of-sync voices
are, perhaps, the only willful ones.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the students of the Sound Design Workshop we teach at Universitat Pompeu
Fabra: their comments after watching Akerman’s work in class have been a powerful stimulus to write
this text.

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