The point at which a filmmaker becomes a fine artist is based on cultural and institutional definitions of those two art forms, and on where there work is displayed in the first place. Chantal Akerman has shown the ability to tightrope between a black box and a white cube with her earlier films that challenged conventional Hollywood thought and demanded that the viewer break away from common notions of film, time, and space.  Perhaps what makes Akerman’s film work slide so easily into the art world, by art world standards, is that she has always been the kind of filmmaker to gloss over narrative structures and plumb the archeology of film itself, thus opening up a space of contention in the otherwise vapid world of mainstream cinema.

Her recent show, Maniac Summer, at Marianne Goodman Gallery in Paris this winter, on view from December 5^th until January 9^th, is a display of two new works filmed on location in Shanghai and Paris. The first floor of the gallery contains footage of a Shanghai street corner, a prelude to the rest of the show, titled Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai (Nightfall on Shanghai). The piece has been shot in real time with diagetic sound, invisible faces and bodies, and just the night’s sky irradiated by the super sexy structures inhabiting the city. The façade of the dominant skyscraper wears advertisements promoting sugary soda and cell phones. Illuminating the gallery, if not equally as much as the film projected, two cheap aquarium night lamps with flapping plastic fish lay at the base of the screen. This is the kind of tacky item you may find in any Chinatown in any city. The positioning of these items self-consciously remind us we are watching one of Akerman’s films in a neighborhood notorious for both its galleries and cheaply made purses and costume jewelry.

Maniac Summer is a bit more abstracted from the gallery setting than Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai and much more fragmented. Three screens box the viewer in with footage of (the sometimes absent) Chantal in her apartment as she performs menial chores from checking her iPod to devouring yogurt from a small glass jar. These images are juxtaposed with those of public spaces throughout Paris—here a playground, there a traffic intersection. Footage from six cameras is arranged chronologically from left to right, with each section becoming more and more abstracted as we read them, each film looping the same lapsed footage just a few seconds slower and a few inches closer. The banality of Akerman’s routine, of the things she sees out her window, and of rush hour traffic and children playing are not unfamiliar to those acquainted with her feature film work. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, known for it’s hyperrealist and minimal approach, reinforces the sense of a quotidian routine and the frustration that comes along both in acting and observing thereof.

But while Jean Dielman’s routine is captured so closely and precisely, Maniac Summer maintains more of a slapdash schizophrenia in the absence of narrative. Instead, the screens offer the oscillating litany of images in which the spectator lingers on different abstracted views of the everyday pastiche in Paris and question their own particular time and space. Where Jean Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles subverted the semiotics of cinema in order to transcend it, perhaps Maniac Summer struggles to do the same with the physical positioning of her cinema–conducting the ceremony of film in a gallery.

Above image: a still from Maniac Summer