Reverberations for Realism: or, Feminist Documentary Strategies in British Film and Video Art, 1979-1992

On Absence and Saturation in Chantal Akerman's De l'autre côté (From the Other Side)A group of men and women sit around the restaurant table.All but one avoid the camera's gaze.(Fig. 1).The camera, set to include the group within the frame, records the central figure as he steadily unfolds a piece of paper and reads a statement on behalf of the group.The reading is marked by a steely resilience, a sense of the unjust and a plea for fairness.Incongruously, over the reader's right shoulder stands an artificial tree, dressed in tired-looking Christmas decorations.Its presence fixes us in a moment, a specific time of year, but as the film unfolds we realise that this particular occurrence is not unusual.The experience of migration is as old as it is new, as unique as it is general.Chantal Akerman has stated that finding this group of people -abandoned by the smugglers they had paid for their safe crossing -happened by chance, and that only when she (and her film crew) were asked by the people themselves, did they set the camera rolling. 1From the Other Side, 2000, focuses on the Mexico-USA borderlands, primarily the people in the towns of Agua Prieta, Mexico and Douglas, Arizona.The use of 'from' and 'other' in the title of the work marks an imbalance in power, a master geography and subject.The film forms part of a cycle of 'nonfiction' films: From the East (D'Est), 1993; South (Sud), 1999; and Over there (La-Bas), 2006; all singular directives preoccupied with displacement and borders, not solely at the geopolitical but also psychic and cultural levels.Even within this tetralogy, From the Other Side 1 Marion Schmid, Chantal Akerman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 117.has been one of Akerman's lesser-known and discussed works. 2 The sequence of images and narrative is largely synchronous; a platform is provided from which the interviewees speak, accounts are gathered from both sides of the border, and the musical score works affectively, as we might expect, to cue emotional response from the viewer.The recognition of the camera as a tool to communicate and bear witness -or as Ariella Azoulay might have it: the camera's latent 'civil contract' -is expanded by Akerman, in part, through her inclusion of the epistolary form.3 The letter (with which I opened) is read aloud by the 'illegals' and intended to be heard beyond the frame, and beyond the locale.We, as viewer, are presented with a document that registers a demand on the spectator.While this notion of demand complicates the assumption that the filmed subject is forever cast as object by the filmic lens, as we shall see, such a notion has been problematized as yet another burden carried by those filmed.2 One could cite a number of reasons for this, such as its relation to reportage.The lack of an in-depth analysis might also be the result of the film's release after two significant booklength studies on Akerman, Margulies (1996) and Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman (ed.) Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (1999).However, since her death in 2015, conferences such as 'After Chantal: an international conference' held at the University of Westminster in 2016 and, for example, journal special issues, such as Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Volume 70, Number 1, have begun to widen the scope to a certain degree.3 Azoulay's argument is formulated on an understanding of the photograph as being constructed through a tripartite (and fundamentally equal) relation between the subject, photographer and viewer.For example, if the photographed subject solicits the attention of the photographer (and thus viewer) his or her gaze deserves to be met.