“A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer,” wrote Jack Spicer, and in her new book, inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle, Collier Schorr and Akerman dance through time. In Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet Act 1, published by The Song Cave, Akerman’s 1974 film reverberates across mediums. Like the film it draws on, the book unfolds in three movements. It opens with “On Partnering,” an essay by performance-studies scholar Peggy Phelan which orients readers and frames Schorr’s engagement with Akerman as in pursuit of a lesbian gaze. The second section is a series of letters between Schorr and Phelan reflecting on creative partnership through their own collaboration on the book. The final, longest section of Writing a Letter shifts from text to image, via three collections of film stills from recordings of dances Schorr made in response to Je tu il elle. The resulting book evokes the “centaur” art that Spicer, writing as Lorca, describes creating in After Lorca: work in which two artists become indivisible.
Lauded films like Akerman’s, once fringe and now firmly part of the cinema canon, often receive companion texts parsing their layers. But Writing a Letter is too intimate and inventive to be just a companion text—it’s a lover text. It’s a deep engagement with Je tu il elle’s first third that recreates some of its imagery and moods, while also breaking with Akerman in illuminating ways. Through these departures, Schorr reveals new depths to her source while creating a work with its own inquiries and vitality. Its heart lies closer to After Lorca, or Robin Coste Lewis’s Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy, than to a straightforward exegesis or adaptation.
In Akerman’s film, there’s an open question of deixis: who do the titular pronouns refer to? The je is clearly Julie, the narrator played by Akerman, the il is the truck driver who picks up hitch-hiking Julie in the film’s second section, and elle is the lover Julie passionately reunites with and then departs from in the film’s final third. But who is the tu, the informal French “you”? Akerman never directly answers, rendering the pronoun a dwelling with several possible residents: the viewer, the unnamed addressee of the letter Julie obsessively revises, an absent lover, her mother, the script, even God. In Writing a Letter, a new tu emerges: Akerman herself. Akerman died in 2015, but she’s vivid in these pages, in which she is always familiarly called “Chantal.” Schorr is dancing with a ghost, and in doing so, like Lorca and Lewis, or Jim Harrison in Letters to Yesenin, she is able to articulate what she could not voice alone.
Schorr first encountered Je tu il elle in the early ‘80s, when she was coming of age, and remembers it as both her first time seeing lesbian sex and her first time seeing a lesbian artist at work (the film’s final third is considered to be cinema’s first depiction of two women having sex). Decades into her celebrated career as a photographer, creating art books as well as advertising for luxury titans like Saint Laurent, Schorr felt a pull to become her own subject. But she “felt that female artists who inhabited their work were beautiful and female-presenting and that I was forever locked out of being able to exist as a spectacle,” until she recalled the way in which Akerman both directed and performed in her films, her body appearing “awkward and performative, vulnerable and powerful in its ordinariness.” In Akerman, Schorr found a mirror through whom she could access new ways of seeing and being herself.
All Akerman’s possible tus are absent in the first section of Je tu il elle; the only person we hear or see, other than a brief glimpse of a man wandering past the window, is Julie. The barrenness of her room is like an empty frame drawing our attention to all Julie is bereft of—even though we have no context for who or what this loss is, its absence is incredibly present. Julie repaints, rearranges, and then removes her furniture, peels off her clothes and half-puts them on again, and writes and rewrites the long letter in which she attempts to “explain [her]self,” before sinking into near-catatonic states of silent immobility as darkness floods the screen like ink. These long static shots are like photographs, anticipating the film stills they become in Writing a Letter. It’s one of cinema’s most piercing depictions of loneliness.
“Solo,” the first of the three dances captured in Writing a Letter, shows Schorr reenacting Julie laying out the many pages of her letter on the floor—but here the pages are print-outs of stills from Je tu il elle. In the film, the pages become both the surface Julie lives on and the psychological depths she inhabits, as she lies against them, walks over them, and presses their ink into her bare skin. Schorr repeats these actions, and carries them further: in her solo’s climax, Schorr makes the erotic element of her connection with Akerman’s work palpable in images in which she slips the film stills into her pants. “I’ve been in her so long,” Schorr writes in one of her letters to Phelan; in the stills that conclude the solo, she inverts that image, suggesting that Akerman is in her, too.
In her most generative break with the film, Schorr partners with two dancers embodying the absent figure who preoccupies Julie. Through their pas de deux, she makes tangible what Akerman leaves invisible. In “Letter Duet,” dancer Maria Metsalu lies on the printed pages of film stills as Schorr photographs and then dances with her. Schorr exists as both herself and Akerman in her dual roles of director and subject in this pas de deux. Through Metsalu and Schorr’s entangled, grappling bodies, we can see Julie fighting to make herself understood to her tu as she revises her letter over and over, and we can see Schorr’s own struggle to occupy a new role within her art.
In the book’s final passage, “Sugar Duet,” Schorr and Sophia Halimuh Parker take off from the section of Je tu il elle in which Julie manically swallows spoonful after spoonful of powdered sugar. The first image of the duet shows Parker lifting Schorr off the floor, carrying her over her shoulder. Each woman then mimes spoon-feeding the other. Throughout this pas de deux, their bodies are never not touching, though their postures make it clear that this proximity is both intimacy and a weight they struggle to bear. Looking at these pages is like seeing into Julie’s mind: her dreams; her fears. It’s also like seeing into Schorr’s, evoking both the heaviness and the sustenance of engaging so deeply with another artist’s work.
Ballerina Natalia Makarova described the process of learning choreography as “eating dances”: internalizing the movements so completely that the dancer becomes free to be able to play with and thus individualize the steps. When a dancer eats choreography, she knows it so well she can make it her own. In Writing a Letter, we see how Schorr has eaten Akerman. Even as she retraces Akerman’s footsteps, she dances beyond the path they mark. Schorr writes, in her final letter to Phelan, that she “want[ed] to insert myself, not replace.” It’s a beautiful irony that in Writing a Letter, one of cinema’s loneliest protagonists enters into such an intimate and enduring pas de deux.
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