In Chantal Akerman movie The captive (2000), a loose adaptation of the fifth volume of Marcel Proust's novel Looking for lost time Published in 1923, a young man named Simon tried to psychically captured his lover in vain. Following her where is at any time cannot console her insatiable desire and impossible to know it in total.
In his new Book length test on the filmFrom where he takes his name, Christine Smallwood explores such an obsession raptor in the same way – not only for the voyeuristic character controlling of Simon, but also for criticism herself. “Criticism, like dreams, often implies an act of displacement, in which the writer transfers the feeling of his own life to the object, or in which an object replaces another,” she writes in her introduction. Here, Smallwood underlines the central theme of his book: the fact that we invariably bring our personal stories on an obsession or an object of investigation, and often turn our gaze inward to look at us.
Narrow part, partly the portrait of Akerman, Prouse and itself, the captivating test of Smallwood crosses the concepts of time, transfer and captivity and was written during the Pandemic Covid-19 while taking care of two small children. Smallwood bases his writing in his visceral reaction to the feeling of Akerman “this duration itself can be art”. Akerman said about his films: “What I want is to make people feel time. So I don't take two hours of their lives. They experience it.” But for the critic, in particular that with young children confined to the house, time is a rare luxury. To discover two hours of a film is to be missed two hours with a child, a partner or a parent. In one of the many moments when she interrupts the text to comment on the writing process itself, Smallwood explains that “the writing of this essay is less like to shape time than to pour it into the sink”. By writing, her baby grows. Time passes, irrevocable and lost. It is therefore inevitable that Smallwood's experiences as Mother Mid-Pandemic informs her analysis of Akerman's film.
Namely, when Simon Bosse Ariane before asking him to fall asleep, Smallwood recognizes the pathology of this interaction while projecting his own feelings once again on a scene of objectively disturbing mistreatment. Private sleep criticism, captive in his own house, cannot help reading Simon's control directives as “a beautiful fantasy on real domestic harmony”. Sometimes we study a text so closely that we see beyond violence just before us: reading (or reading errors) of Smallwood is deeply intertwined in a personal desire and need. There is no objective analysis.
Perhaps what allows Smallwood to insert its own life in the analysis of The captive is the style and form of Akerman. Famous for his frontal photos and long grips, Smallwood quotes Akerman as having said once: “When you film in front, you put two souls face to face too, you cut a real place for the spectator.” Akerman's surfing of hardening allows a drift, in which the spectator can infuse these moments of their own lives and his interior thoughts. If, as she writes, a “lack of reserve photos moves the reaction to the public” in the film of Akerman, Smallwood skillfully performs this inappropriate reaction in his prose. The result is a convincing narrow reading of what it means to be captivated and captured: by art, by time, by children and by all the other daily detritus which constitute the life of a writer and the mother.
The captive (2024) by Christine Smallwood is published by Fireflies Press and is available online and via independent booksellers.
