Bodies in Sympathy for Just One Night

I felt wrapped in its atmosphere, folded in its mood. Toute une nuit (1982) is a film about what happens between two. Happening as repetition. Repetition as stylisation. A stylisation of affect. Affect as image. Sentimentality as aesthetics. Chantal Akerman’s film feels like a choreography of twos, a dance of portraits of intimacy, a diagram of love. 55 dramatic encounters, embraces and separations involving 75 nameless characters, usually couples, lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, all arranged in Toute une nuit: all night long, all in a single night.1If we could find a plot or a subject in this film it would be as Catherine Fowler (2003) comments “love, loneliness, eroticism and insomnia,” and throughout its 90-minute duration the film seems to be asking, acting and re-enacting persistently the same question: what is a rela-tion? A question that acquires a heightened tension by being repeat-ed in time, in just this time, in the whole of one night, Toute une nuit.