Euphoria of Acting a Part

CORINA COPP

Modified from a lecture given at, and variously since: James Gallery, Cuny Graduate Center, New York May 4, 2017

SEXUAL LIFE

Let us not forget that it's said that Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that she had conceived of a sequel to A Room of One's Own while having a bath, and that it be "an entire new book … about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps" <my italics>.

The code for her original "Speech Before the London / National Society for Women's Service, January 21, 1931," if you want to read it as it stood within the much-reduced version that became "Professions for Women," is thus:

[word] = a reading editorially supplied. [word] = a deletion editorially restored.

<word> = an insertion made by Virginia Woolf.

<[word]> = an insertion deleted but editorially restored.

As the editor writes in his explanation:

"For example, in 'being wanting to be alone' [I 83], the context makes clear that 'being' was replaced in the act of composition by the longer phrase; no deletion is indicated but we infer it thus: '[being] wanting to be alone.'"

"When Vanessa Bell paints a picture it is as often as not a picture of red apples on a plate. Thats all right, says the Angel. It may be a pity to waste your time painting; but if you must paint [paint apples] <there is no harm in apples.>"

FRANCES STARK'S PERFORMANCE DRESS OR, THE DESOLATION OF ACTING A PART

I did have one; it was nice, fulfilling, even, but there came a time to realize that my sexual life—in that it existed—was due partly to the social pressure to have a "nice sexual life," unless you are an artist, <so I stopped being nice and started getting Real.> I had a dream about giving a presentation at the CUNY Graduate Center's James Gallery; it was years and years ago, the dream I mean—but I might have just seen an artist perform here, leaving an imprint. In my dream, I wore a full-length, black, 19th-century bell-shaped dress of the sort from which seamstresses [which seamstresses/whose labor] drew their hoops … unfurling from its silk backside was a coiled umbilical cord, coated in a type of rubber and connecting nowhere, and the whole shape rather resembled that of a handset cradled atop a rotary telephone. I had rescued the shape of the dress from the office workers

gazing out the window, then moving the candle to the bedroom…

"But she must not stand [at the window] in her nightgown, even with only one candle—anybody might see in—& if somebody saw in—she had [been] got into … dreadful hot water with her mother already for doing that … with all those young men about

… she [no] removed the candle to her bedside, & because nobody could 'see in' if she lay in bed with a candle beside her"

I had, in wearing the dress, included them in a costume that allowed me to "disconnect" yet take on characteristics of a mother sheltering her daughter from any sensuousness of the night … I could perform as a mother, having been called upon.

Woolf writes: "You will hear somebody coming. You will open the door. And then—this at least is my guess—there will take place between you and some one else the most interesting, exciting, and important conversation that has ever been heard."

Mom?

Filmmaker Chantal Akerman once recalled, in the infamous "Pajama Interview" with film scholar Nicole Brenez: "I was so scared to go to sleep, I asked my mom to repeat ‘Bonne nuit, Chantal,’ ‘Goodnight, Chantal,’ until she had found the right tone for it."

In Toute Une Nuit, a film by Chantal Akerman made in 1982, dislocation of voice interrupts the flow of time, but briefly. Chantal's mother, Nelly Akerman, is, for the first time in Chantal's movies, utilized as an actor. She leans against a wall, at night, smoking as if on a break from work, while Chantal's voice-off calls "Maman! Maman…" Here we have the response to the mother before "Goodnight, Chantal" comes into the room, as well as the call to bring her in, what Slovene philosopher Mladen Dolar would call an "effective interpellation;" and what Blanchot might see as an ecstatic union of presence and absence, much like sleep. "Thanks to this shot," writes another film scholar, "the imaginary confrontation between mother and daughter finds the most literal representation it had ever attained in Akerman's work, in the consistence of the body of the one with the voice of the other.” "The acousmatic voice," writes Dolar, "is not simply the voice whose source is outside the field of vision … [it is] the one which we cannot locate."2 The mother, saying "goodnight," is one half, the tone half, of what must occur (sleep, dream). Her voice has an identifiable source, her body. The mother's voice is paradigmatic, says Dolar: "[it is] the voice whose source the infant cannot see"; and this is best replicated in cinema through the power of the telephone, a fixture for Akerman. It is the telephone, I'd like to imagine, that sutures the voice to comedy, that brings daytime into night, as Akerman does not tend to use it as other directors, say to charge a scene with meaning or suspense. Instead, it is a place to make up one's story.

I remembered the dream of giving this presentation because I had a moment of déjà-vu in thinking about reading as "bootstrapism," as in, I might read in order to engage a certain sense of responsibility, from which I'd naturally presume that I'd be, full up on having done the responsible thing of reading, a better thinker, better at behavior—and so that I might possibly slow down in my looking to books for "self-help," or as Frances Stark puts it in her collection of writings, This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, "self-work."

I care, I'm immersed in other voices, I record them secretly, I want the care to give me the strength to act, to listen, to remember shards of conversation out of mouths not my own; I want to liberate myself from a certain "cycle of disengaged production motivated by a craving for legitimising praise," as some writer wrote, and really undertake a meaningful, exciting, perhaps undertake like the most important conversation I've ever had, the best sex I've ever had, too, something to write home about, sleepy and preordained disgusting nighttime gestures that communicate my politics of affection and dedication, and even further my politics of disliking men with the same politics or aesthetics or mystic prowess for dedication and affection, preferring instead only women artists and writers who maintain these connections to one another, and to ghosts, because obviously I must feel these women are safer for me to depend on as I invest myself in a lifetime of making, as I resign myself to myself, to making love with love, with underestimated women artists—except for you—dear—if only I opened this door to being a professional.

My eyes land on another snag: "In what way is it precisely this indebtedness to others that enables us to perform in the first place? How could we develop the ethos of a mode of performance that acknowledges the debt to the other instead of asserting the illusion of the infinite potency of the self?" I keep wanting to make this funny, but I can't. They that have the power to slow down. Potency of the self. <my italics>

"This hidden agreement-to-believe [that my work is worth doing] is even more difficult to explain to people than the 'actual' art, but it might just be the thing that convinces me I'm doing self- work and not self-help. This is how you snap out of listlessness." (FS)

LISTLESSNESS

But is it a craft too small, Stark asks, as she considers suicide, depression, and criticism. "Art as a place too small to inhabit," as the copyrighted, cleverly inked margin notes in her book have it. "Frances, you tend to excuse, rather than express," someone once told her. She remarks on the emotion that accompanies our untellable tales, an emotion we may be so incapacitated by that we must excuse ourselves by uttering "I'm too sad to tell you." I stare at the page—that I've retyped her thinking, her labor—I'm too sad, sometimes, a solitude summed up by a distortion of Denise Riley's lament in her book Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect: "What I want back is what I was"—"What I want back is what I wanted for myself"—to tell you about my mother, who is not a telephone operator, so instead I'd like to—

Dial. Three-four-seven, two-five-five, four-nine-five-two…

- Hello?

- I am terrible at the two-step. I am terrible!

Why can't you get it?

I can't get it

The problem is that I wrote most of this talk in my sleep this morning, and I can't remember it now. Even though she's taken the candle to the bedroom to ostensibly sleep, away from the open window, she's just going to text him. Near the end of their

relationship, after an argument, he will send her a photo of his legs in a bath at the hotel he told her not to come to, though she was not far. I've changed my mind, he texts, you can come here. Really it said, "What's up?" No thank you, she thinks. She writes nothing. Five minutes later, she's in conversation. She finds herself writing, as she must: "are you ok?"

The exchange exhausts me. But there is something missing to all text exchanges, now that the telephonic technology has arrived to annul distance so utterly, and it's that phantasmatic voice—a sonorousness that helps me along, acts as a bridge between my "belief that rises through sensation but could be false" and a material body meant to reassure us both. Now what helps me along? Is this what is called "deep acting"—am I real friend or not? Mom?

PORTRAIT OF A PARASSEUSE (SLOTH)

Akerman expressed her relationship to pleasure in talking about her most famous film in an interview with Mousse Magazine in 2011: "In Jeanne Dielman I showed that not having pleasure was her last freedom.

If Jeanne had found pleasure in having sex with her client, she would have been surrendering to the men with whom she was working … fighting against pleasure is Jeanne’s resistance, it is her way of existing, her jouissance in relation to the obligation of pleasure, which was the doxa at the time I shot the film. From the 1970s on another obligation <pleasure> had come for women, taking the place of choice and freedom."

What's overcome me in recent years is the slowness I was seeking. I might even say I can barely get up, now. I am a sloth, a parasseuse.

In Sloth, a short film made for a group commission to support independent women filmmakers in 1986, which resulted in Seven Women, Seven Sins (they each chose one), Chantal Akerman's digital clock—a radio alarm—reads: 12:12. Her second clock, a square analog set atop the digital, a mere insistence, reads: 12:25. What time is it? A classic move by us sloths, to keep more than one clock around the room we sleep in, all set a few minutes ahead or behind another, so as not to know. Charlie Chaplin, who is being rushed out of bed throughout his short movie, A Beautiful Sunday Morning (1919), has the same moves as Chantal. Once he's revealed that he's already dressed, he turns over, away from the camera, to go back to sleep. His grumpy roommate's clock reads: 3:55, so it's true they've lost the day. Two instances of "someone"—if we can call Charlie Chaplin and Chantal Akerman "someones"—

himself and herself respectively—engaging in filmed self- portraiture, self-directed, self-motivated, maybe.

"To make a film, you have to get up," she says. Wearing the day's clothes beneath the night's, one is prepared to sleep a little longer. And rather than wearing her night-clothes beneath her day clothes, as Chantal did for many years—if not simply outright pajamas—in Sloth, she flips the script she does not yet have, placing herself outside of linear time while deeply aﬀected by it.

Frances Stark: "A writer asks a reader, 'read me, not 'be me.'"

APPLES

To middle at the end. In filmmaker, photographer, and writer Moyra Davey's concluding text for her film Hemlock Forest (2017): "She feels alive when she's behind a camera, when she's shooting her own scenes, when she is making something." The text is heard from Davey's own voice as we watch her filming her young adult son, Barney, and their dog… frolicking, basically…in an expanse of grass surrounded by what I take for an upstate New York pattern of woods meant to echo, here, the lush forests of Scandinavia she refers to earlier in the film. The sentiment of aliveness when making stands as a formal question of Davey's overarching choice, as is revered in much of her work, to piece together fragments from other voices, other texts, those named, such as Akerman and Mary Wollstonecraft, and unnamed. "A French writer said apropos of fragments, 'choosing is easier than inventing,'" she says, dubiously familiar with her own process.

I'm reading an essay called "Exhaustion & Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform" in a pamphlet I find in my research for this piece, looking for Frances Stark, about whom the writer writes: "The space her work opens up is an open continuum in which other voices resonate through her voice … where the ghosts can only speak when the one who summons them speaks too." I don't particularly care to focus on this mode of composition—toppling influences, voices, texts, finding each other in each other. This concept of seeing, for instance, as a "politics of appreciation," is familiar to me already… so familiar now that I am not sure if I'm inventing it for myself or choosing. Davey, in Hemlock Forest, is derailed, as she puts it, and consumed by, the work of, and the death of, Chantal Akerman, as I have been. "You said that you thought you'd never again feel the euphoria of filmmaking. And Seyrig said to you, 'You have to make, make, make,'" she writes in an epistolary gesture,

addressing Akerman as a friend. She goes to the Cloisters, or so I suspect, and closes her camera lens on Christ Child with Apple.

When I see the film, which I did just this past Sunday in a screening in Lincoln Center's annual documentary festival Art of the Real, I'm struck by the image (shown here in a photograph of a still from it) having also included it in an attempt at avant- gardish video-work myself, made about four years ago, in a 20- min. piece I called A Letter that attempted to adapt Alice Notley's epic feminist narrative poem, The Descent of Alette (1996).

To the dismay of my desire for aﬃnity, upon coming home to rewatch A Letter to make sure, I discover they are diﬀerent Christ children with apples, and that Davey's is a sculpture located in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Unable to sleep, I reach over and turn on the light, write.

desolation of acting a part that you claim for yourself leads to a fraudulence…

(the emptiness of playing a writer who can't get the job done)

but …not claiming a part for yourself AND yet Acting it… as Chantal does in playing herself

serving a function—it was cost-eﬀective and she was already around or playing (acting) another—

feels closer to: The Irreverance / of Acting… not exactly not-desolate

Aestheticizing, finally, all that goes into acting out who you claim to be— furnishes, somehow.

Adds light, color, sound…

to what seems pitiable, passive, empathic, unending.

It's not irreverence exactly that's achieved in casting oneself, I decide later. What's more resonant is a "sympathetic presence"—a term used by a scholar to fondly describe Akerman in her role as herself in bed in her apartment on Spring St. in the intimate short La Chambre, made right after Hotel Monterey (both 1972). About which, as Davey mentions, Chantal said, "I can breathe, I'm really a filmmaker." Playing oneself also feels closer to a case of the zany: "an aesthetic about performing as not just artful play but aﬀective labor" (Sianne Ngai). A near-antonym I land on when looking up desolation in the hopes of thesaurus-search-titling this piece is "euphoria"—it nails the sense of being alive when one is making. Later I see (aforementioned) that Davey has also employed it. "To title does so much more," concludes Stark in "A Craft Too Small." To be freed from emotional incapacitation by a title.

To cast oneself lying about in bed—eating an apple—to write yourself in, rather than write yourself out, and to trouble the line

between play and work—another way to snap out of listlessness. I figure.

The jump from feeling only somewhat alive to alive by making, to writing—art of the real. I’m a real friend.

1 Mateus Araujo, "Chantal Akerman, Between the Mother and the World," Film Quarterly, Fall 2016, Vol. 70, No. 1.

2 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.