Opera Mouffe is about many things but can be argued that it is about women’s visual vocabulary. A woman’s visual vocabulary exists linked to the feminine universe and it is an inspiration of attractions that draw more attention and focus than they would if seen through a man’s lens. A woman’s visual vocabulary connects ideas on three things 1.) How is a woman seen, 2.) How does a woman see (and why) and 3.) How does a woman see herself and herself as a woman? L’Opera Mouffe is a woman’s visual vocabulary through a “montage of associations” following a pregnant Agnes Varda through a busy Parisian supermarket. Through the narration of images, we can construct her inner thoughts and feelings through symbolism. This narrative style cannot take place in words that are often dark or ambiguous and best represent her internal style of thinking. These images express to us her internal and unconscious anxieties of pregnancy. Images of a gutted melon, a cabbage with a smaller cabbage growing in its center while remaining normal, everyday objects anyone could meet. These motifs of food and its relationship to the womb but also of the people in the market, their lives, and their association to the organic human body. News from Home could be construed as an impaired communication between daughter and mother. This impairment of communication is a theme that runs through the veins of many if not all of Ackerman’s work through the subtending of verbal exchanges.
Her film is a redefinition of expressivity but not at the expense of redundancy, rather through the information. The border between text and reality is figured through the letters she receives from her mother. Barthes addresses the “effect of the real” here in Ackerman’s work. The effect of the real is an unexpected shift in address such as indirect or direct speech. This results in the authentication of rhetoric. The letters here serve as a midpoint as they are halfway between the act of speaking and writing. Akerman skews her presentation and there is a contest between releasing the meaning of the images and the voice and delicately solving the interpretations without overpowering them. News from Home is a mapping of a restricted personal history through the mundane bits and pieces, family gossip, the mothers’ changing moods revoiced and superimposed over the sights of the city at the time of reading.
Regarding subject matter, L’Opera Mouffe is a subjective documentary. This lies in the way that the viewer selects what is seen among the variety of the street vendors and then interprets the images to the current situation of being pregnant. The images in the market are chosen specifically for the relationship they bear to the pregnant woman’s body even if their implications can be seen as disturbing or even violent. As the film progresses the old, poor, and ragged individuals become more prevalent and concrete. We construct a method of symbolism or rather, Varda constructs it for us using music and objects such as the broken light bulb with an egg inside. These symbolic images can be read as a logical extension of the fantasy of Vara and the process of her vision which is being documented. News from Home has no building of dramatic tension but its images of city life give way to some measures of stress but not in a linear structural sense. The mood of the mother can add to some tension but again nothing is overpowering. The letter collapses the dual temporality of autobiographical writing. These are belated reports on one’s own experience at earlier moments in time. Through this superimposition, we are unbalancing the fiction of Ackerman’s autobiographical essay.
The use of sound over the image tracks has impressive notions regarding both L’Opera Mouffe and News from Home. L’Opera Mouffe is a series of chapters or “acts” to music hence the relationship to opera in the title. The soundtrack is lighthearted and yet can at some points lend itself to the subversive and distressing nature of the film. News from Home has no soundtrack. There are two tracks in the film, however. The first is visual with the images of New York in 1976 and the second, an aural track of Ackerman reading her mother’s letters which were sent in 1972 while she was in New York, and the ambiance of the cityscapes we are witnessing on screen. These are sounds that accompany her shots of subway doors, passing trucks, and cars. These seem referential but they are out of completely out of sync with the letters. These noises interfere with the ability to hear and dissect the letters being read at times and momentarily can shift the interest of the viewer depending on what is happening on screen. These random weavings of attention through sounds and images are common in structural minimalist films. This alienation between images and sounds is a disjunction between the mother’s letter writing and Ackerman’s space of performance with the interjection of city life. There is a push and pull of intimacy and distance going through the film. This distance can be seen to be Ackerman’s attempt to work through in her reading of the letters.
Ackerman has said that what interests her in dialogue is that it rounds up into a rhythm “…a psalmody where the meaning of phrases does not make sense”. Her rendition of the letters is akin to the monotone way a script is read in rehearsal, a Brechtian device of alienation, but it is through these acts of reading that Ackerman achieves this chantlike quality of “psalmody” she is after. This chantlike delivery transforms this compacted information into a cadence of rhythm. Ackerman also rejects the use of extradiegetic music. All the sound in her films is a concreteness of amplified diegetic sound. This noise is understood in the context of information theory where there is an “excess” of chaos that hides the signification and in that of concrete music as an expressive sonic element.
Each of these films relates to its director. In L’Opera Mouffe these are scenes and impressions of the rue Mouff through the eyes of a pregnant Varda. We see very little of her except for the image of her which appears early on to explain the following images in the scenes. Varda herself was pregnant at the time with her first child with Jacques Demy. While these are her experiences Varda has explicitly expressed that they are not to be read solely as her experiences of pregnancy and can be open to interpretation through the lens of the viewers of her films. The relationship between Chantal Ackerman and her film News from Home is the psychological guise of her resistance to her mother. Derrida has expressed that the demise of origins is for the voice to always double which is intrinsically double. Here is the narration of Ackerman’s mother’s letters with the performance structure of filmic elements of the city. This voicing of her mother’s complaints becomes in turn Ackerman’s responses to those complaints. Her mother’s writing becomes less and less her mother’s and more and more her and with a vengeance. This writing in turn becomes less of an answer and more of an echo into the void. There is no answer from Ackerman except mute city landscapes. Ackerman gives this voice to her mother’s letters but raises issues of ambivalence. Perhaps due to a daughter’s internalized feelings of inheritance and indebtedness while off becoming an individual identity. News from Home questions the notion of presence and absence.
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