In Chantal Akerman’s movie La Captive (2000), a unfastened adaptation of the fifth quantity of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Misplaced Time revealed in 1923, a younger man named Simon makes an attempt to psychically seize his lover to no avail. Monitoring her whereabouts always can not console his insatiable and unimaginable want to know her in whole.
In her new book-length essay on the movie, from which it takes its title, Christine Smallwood equally explores such a rapacious obsession — not only for the controlling, voyeuristic character of Simon, however for the critic herself, as nicely. “Criticism, like goals, usually entails some act of displacement, through which the author transfers feeling from her personal life to the article, or through which one object substitutes for an additional,” she writes in her introduction. Right here, Smallwood underscores the central theme of her ebook: the truth that we invariably carry our private histories to bear on an obsession or object of inquiry, and infrequently flip our gaze inward to observe ourselves doing so.
Half shut studying, half portraiture of Akerman, Proust, and herself, Smallwood’s engrossing essay traverses notions of time, transference, and captivity and was written in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic whereas caring for 2 young children. Smallwood grounds her writing in her visceral response to Akerman’s sentiment “that period itself will be artwork.” Akerman mentioned of her movies, “What I would like is to make folks really feel the passing of time. So I don’t take two hours from their life. They expertise them.” However for the critic, particularly one with young children confined to the house, time is a scarce luxurious. To expertise two hours of a movie is to overlook two hours with a toddler, a companion, or a father or mother. In considered one of a number of moments through which she interrupts the textual content to touch upon the writing course of itself, Smallwood explains that “penning this essay feels much less like shaping time than pouring it into the sink.” Whereas writing, her child grows up. Time passes, irrevocable and misplaced. It’s due to this fact inevitable that Smallwood’s experiences as a mom mid-pandemic inform her evaluation of Akerman’s movie.
To wit, when Simon humps Ariane earlier than instructing her to return to sleep, Smallwood acknowledges the pathology of this interplay whereas as soon as once more projecting her personal emotions onto an objectively disturbing scene of abuse. The sleep-deprived critic, a captive in her own residence, can not assist however learn Simon’s controlling directives as “a phenomenal fantasy about true home concord.” Generally we examine a textual content so carefully that we see previous the violence proper in entrance of us: Smallwood’s studying (or misreading) is deeply imbricated in a private want and wish. There isn’t a goal evaluation.
Maybe what permits Smallwood to insert her personal life into the evaluation of La Captive is Akerman’s model and kind. Well-known for her frontal photographs and lengthy takes, Smallwood quotes Akerman as having as soon as mentioned, “If you movie frontally, you place two souls nose to nose equally, you carve out an actual place for the viewer.” Akerman’s surfeit of durational photographs permits for drift, whereby the viewer can infuse these moments with their very own life and internal ideas. If, as she writes, a “lack of reserve photographs displace the response onto the viewers” in Akerman’s movie, Smallwood deftly performs this displaced response in her prose. The result’s a compelling shut studying of what it means to be captivated and captured: by artwork, by time, by kids, and by all the opposite on a regular basis detritus that constitutes a author’s and mom’s life.
La Captive (2024) by Christine Smallwood is revealed by Fireflies Press and is offered on-line and thru impartial booksellers.