Abstract: Suzanna Chan
Aesthetics of Hospitality and Sexual Difference: Chantal Akerman’s De L’Autre Côté/From the Other Side.
I will propose that in Chantal Akerman’s film, De L’Autre Côté/From the Other Side(2002) which is about the US/Mexico border, time is a medium for encountering the other, and which might open up passages for unconditional forms of hospitality. I’ll also briefly consider other films by Akerman, to help think about how unconditional hospitality, as a utopian possibility, can be linked to the realm of sexual difference.[1]By sexual difference, I don’t mean differences as they now stand between the sexes because they are contained by phallocentrism, which prescribes feminine identities: mother, wife, and for the purposes of this paper, self and other, host and guest. Sexual difference, as Elisabeth Grosz writes, means thinking otherwise, whether one is a man or a woman, for possible forms of identity and being that have been precluded, for what has not had its time before. It has yet to take place and exists only in virtuality (Grosz, 2005, p. 175–176).
A similar conception of sexual difference as an open question of possibilities is at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s idealof unconditional hospitality. He separates hospitality into two forms, the unconditional and conditional. Conditional hospitality is what a host offers, or withholds from an other who arrives at the threshold of the state, depending on whether they are invited or uninvited. This conditional model requires that the host knows not only who the other is, but also who she is and accounts for herself as host through an identity secured in social terms of the patriarchal home, as microcosm of the state, and an exclusionary national identity.
In contrast, unconditional hospitality requires an unconditional affirmation of ‘who or what’ arrives, animal, human, male or female. This acceptance has to precede their determination and identification, it has to be offered before we even ask their name. It is the antithesis to the models of conditional hospitality that prevail in the state’s treatment of citizens of other states and the stateless. The unconditional hospitality Derrida evokes is offered to an other who is affirmed without prior subjection to identification, an absolute other. Unconditional hospitality requires re-conceiving of the self at the level of sexual difference. It calls for thinking at a level of non-identity, in terms of difference without identification where what the female is or could be, or the male, are open questions addressed through a transformation of phallocentric structures of representation and knowledge.
There is a journey propelled by propositions about sexual difference in film Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle, which features the 25 year old artist. She stays in herroom for 28 days, the temporality of a menstrual cycle, writing and living on a bag of sugar. Then, she puts on a child’s plastic raincoat and hits the road. She is picked up by a trucker, they hang out, she masturbates him in a scene which shows only his face as describes the sex actlike he’s enacting a script. Then, she arrives at the door of a young woman, who reluctantly agrees to let Akerman stay the night. She’s fed a child’s snack of bread and Nutella. Then they are in bed having sex, their bodies entwined, rolling and embracing. The following morning Akerman gathers her clothes and slips away, the happy ending is that her journey continues…. These are possibilities. The child-like subjectivity she enacts on the road suspends her passage into predetermined versions of femininity. This strange ‘I’ or self, encountering you, him and her, is not a secure identity and she does things otherwise. She can be known as her possibilities, of queer becoming outside of the identities and the temporality of the phallocentric family.
Many years and movies later, Akerman set off on a journey from Mexico to the US in 2002, to interview people and follow their south/north passage for her film De L’Autre Côté/From the Other Side. It begins in Mexico, has its middle at the US/Mexico border, and ends in the US, but it is a road movie without a plot and its linearity is tenuous because it is stretched and warped by long-takes. These are such a defining characteristic of the film that while critics have argued that its focus is on issues of territory and space (Ranciere 2010, Scott MacDonald 2005), I suggest that the spatial cannot override the film’s structure, which is time.[2]
In the Mexican town of Agua Prieta, Akerman interviewed people who have risked their lives trying to cross the border, or lost loved ones to the crossing. A young boy, uncertain of his own age, describes his escape from a juvenile prison across the border in Tuscon. We hear harrowing accounts and see the effects of devastating loss on bereaved parents and relatives. An old woman mourns the death of her son, as Akerman is seen reflected in the small TV set next to her. All of the interviewees sit next to doorways or openings to other spaces. People are shot frontally, and when we are face to face with an image framed in this way, and cannot look up and down or to the side, Akerman tells us, it cannot be voyeurism. We sense ourselves and that we are on the outside of the other, she says, who has a different perspective of time (Akerman and Rosen). The interviews are unhurried and sometimes people just sit silently with a steady and open look at the camera. They take their time and in these encounters, it is as if Akerman wanted to dwell with them. These aesthetics of care for the subject connect the film to Akerman’s astonishing Jeanne Dielman (1975), 3 hours and 20 minutes long, which in an interview she characterises as feminist as much in form as content, for the way it shows the woman’s gestures so precisely, which is out of her love for them.[3]
If From the Other Side dwells with the border-crossers, it also dwells in the spaces around and of the border. Mexico is seen as expansive landscapes under big skies in panning long takes. Or in stationary long-takes, we see vistas where children play in the distance, while cars drive along dusty roads to the sounds of everyday life. We wait for people who walk steadily towards us. [4]We are also returned, again and again, to the border wall itself filmed in slow panning long-takes. At night, we slowly follow the thin wires and posts of the border to a spotlight, under which a border patrol jeep sits in an eerie nocturnal landscape. Whether it gleams at dawn, or looms in its own shadow under the mid day sun, the border wall is an unending barrier. Akerman’s longtakes are not merely informative about the imposing concrete presence of the border. They also present the experience of the border as a matter of time. It is rendered through a leadentemporality that makes the time that the border sucks away palpable. We can feel the time that the border steals from those it immobilises, from those it halts in one place and excludes from another.
From the Other Side’smontage of long takes and measured interviews with others, recalls the temporality of Akerman’s silent film of her former home,Hotel Monterey (1972), a long-gone hotel for people with little money. If the interior of the hotel is the physical structure recorded in the film, its material structure is time. The camera moves slowly through the hotel’s passages in shots that take far longer than it would to walk these spaces. These shots almost blend into scenes of people seated in rooms, smiling softly into the cameraor facing away. Time is the medium for the subject’s encounters with the world and with others. This aesthetics of time contrasts with philosophy’s association of the feminine with space, containment, and the domestic dwelling place which curtails its becomings and transformations in time (Grosz 2005, 177).[5]
Hotel Monterey, as an experience of time, invites us to think of time as a matrix of sexual difference and hospitality. That film’s passages towards others contrast starkly with barriers to the other in From the Other Side. But if the border is also a temporal experience, this evokes the question of how can, or how will time act on the border wall? Time is the medium of the future, and of the revolutionary which is the aim of radical political movements.
Towards the middle of the film, we begin to see archival Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) footage included in the montage. In 1994 the INS launched Operation Gatekeeper with increased militarization and border patrols. This pushed migrants away from urban crossing points and forced them to take ever more remote and life-endangering routes through the brutal Sonoran desert. Hundreds of people die attempting to cross the deserts each year. They are also at mortal risk from both state and anti-state agents, that is, the border patrol agents and racist nativist vigilante groups, like the Minutemen. Negative, bleached out imagery of INS night patrols is legibly produced through the technology of surveillance, shot in infrared which reduces the human object of a mecanical gaze to a heat-trace. We can hear US border agents whooping triumphantly as a line of moving figures is illuminated against the darkness.
This is soon followed by a scene shot in Mexico, where a group of men and women is seated around a restaurant table. Akerman and her crew had brought them there, having met them close to the border, where Mexican police had robbed them.[6] Though she is a ‘guest’ in Mexico, such is her relative power that she can act as host to these women and men. We sit at one end of the table, where she once did and spend time with them. A man seated opposite us at the head of the table introduces the group as ‘illegal migrants’ and reads a collective statement[7]detailing the injustices they have endured, and the death and dangers they face.
Sign such as this one, slowly regarded, announce our arrival on the US side of the border: ‘Stop the crime wave! Our property and environment is being trashed by invaders! Article IV Section 4’ [sic]. We meet people who are compassionate, as well as xenophobeslike the white fundamentalist couple in their back yard. The man considers himself protector of his wife and their property from the migrants, while she is fretful for the safety of the young ‘uns, she says, with the threat of disease coming from the other side. In this couple, we meet circumscribed sexual difference intertwined with conditional hospitality. They are the hosts of conditional hospitality and answer as master of the house for a home, a hearth and an identity bound up with it. Their refusal of hospitality to the uninvited guest is one side of the coin of conditional hospitality; the flip side is the limited welcome offered an invited guest.
Hospitality is also addressed through the film’s montage of formal elements, the interviews and the archival INS footage. How do these different elements activate or effect one other? Rather than weave tightly together like a carpet or corrode each other, the INS archival footage and Akerman’s long takes each insist on their distinct image.The film shows the INS footage hospitality, allowing it time, so that the violence it documents appears before our eyes. By including this footage, I don’t think that Akerman simply reminds us that the military technological innovation which engendered it, also produced the video she uses, or that we are compromised as its consumers. Or if it suggests that we are implicated in the violence that the state commits against the other, in our name, art and politics are not conflated. The border between the film’s aesthetic forms also suggests the border between an artwork and a political movement or campaign. From the Other Side does not propose do the work of politics for us, or absolve us, as its viewers, from having to mobilise in a political campaign to oppose the border.
Speaking of the mixture of media in From the Other Side, Akerman describes the film as ‘less pure’ than her other films. This is funny, she says, because it’s also a film about the Other, who is “impure” and she doesn't usually mix media.[8]She describes her use of the archival footage in these terms,
‘I took some images, I put them in my film, but without giving them the status of archival footage. That’s just a part of my movie’.[9]
Akerman puts the INS footage amongst her own in an array that lacks hierarchy.[10] While not the same as political equality, aesthetic equality does however raise questions about how subjectivity and representation might relate to ethics. Asked about how her own films become archival material in her installations, Akerman explains, ‘When I recycle my own footage, I’m doing it to myself. I get rid of the sanctification and respect’.[11] By making aesthetic decisions in order to defy self-exaltation she wants to refuse authority. She crosses her own boundaries in a non-violent relation to otherness.[12]
The kind of hospitality that is offered to the INS footage, as its name and status are known, is conditional. But this hospitality also turns towards a principle of unconditional hospitality which can only be offered by someone who is estranged from self-identity. [13] Derrida provides only a starting point for addressing hospitality as a matter of sexual difference, and limits his consideration of women to the oblique figure of the ‘foreign woman,’ raised through Antigone. In theOedipal myth, Antigone is limited to choosing between two patriarchal formations– the state or the family. Derrida elaborates the tears she sheds, and says that the question of the ‘foreign woman’ is wept through them. ‘Who has seen them?’ he asks, suggesting that they are without means of representation.
From the Other Sideends with a search for a foreign woman. We hear Akerman narrating a fictional account about the search for a missing Mexican woman, in a scene that contrasts with the voiceless longtakes of the roads and border [returning us within the borders of an ‘I’]. This is the ‘coda’ for her film. We are looking through the windscreen driving down a highway at night….
‘David doesn’t know how, but his mother survived, or how she wound up in L.A. […].’ […]’She never stole’, a former employer says, and she was missed, especially by the kids…The missing woman’s former landlady says that she used to hear her iron with the radio on… ‘she’s not dead’, the landlady says…’she’s in Mexico or somewhere else…I never saw her again. Well once I thought I did…when I got closer there was no one there…it must’ve been a mirage.’
In an interview, Akerman says that neither the landlady nor the woman understood each other. Under conditional hospitality, this is the fate of both ‘hostess’ and guest, the self and the ‘foreign’ woman.[14]
But maybe the Mexican woman wasn’t a mirage. Maybe she just didn’t want her landlady or her employers to know her, because it would’ve been on their terms.[15] Domestic servants, ‘helpers’, a multitude of southern migrants, live in intimate proximity with their employers and if the latter don’t ever really know the former, the domestic has to be very clued into the boss’s likes, dislikes, peccadilloes. She cleans the boss’s dirty laundry, after all.
Or maybe the foreign woman was indeed a mirage…a spectral premonition of what has not yet had its time: unconditional hospitality, and the becoming of sexual difference.
1
[1] [But before elaborating on these matters of the border between the sexes or between the self and other through the artwork, I want to look at writing about art which crosses borders.
In ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet’, only the kinds of truths that are false must be exalted by the work of art, Jean Genet advises, just as everything that he writes about art is false. [One of the truths told about art is that it is spatial while literature is temporal. In Genet’s essay writing takes art’s spatiality, distributed on each side of a border, to operate through two spaces and two temporalities simultaneously.] In his forked-tongued essay, Genet writes about a Rembrandt painting on the right hand side of the blank border, and on the left, about a devastating realisation. He is worth as much as the disagreeably ugly man sitting opposite him in a third class train carriage. Each individual no longer appears in magnificent, absolute individuality (for which the erect cock is his metaphor), but ‘a fragmentary appearance of one single being’ Genet, 2003, p. 101). This nauseating realisation is revealed in parallel to his thoughts about Rembrandt, though the latter are not to be mistaken for the truth. ]
The sexual difference that I have in mind [also has no truth, and] is bound up with the matter of borders and, therefore, of hospitality.
[2] This paper is divided into two overlapping parts, Time is for the other and Time is of Sexual Difference. To get from one to the other, I need the (spatial) border crossings towards sexual difference that are enacted and shown by our mysterious heroine in Je, Tu, Il , Elle in a temporality that evokes both sexual difference and unconditional hospitality.