Chantal Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, opens with an image of a tree in the Israeli desert, being buffeted by strong winds. The sequence – bracing, austere – is sustained for several minutes. It functions as a knowing epigram, deliberately isolating the viewer, warning them not to come too close. This is no home movie. The starkness of the opening sequence, together with the title, voices a concern with questions of displacement and exile, adding layers of disquiet to a film largely composed of personal footage and shot mainly in the confines of a relative’s apartment – in this case, that of Akerman’s mother, Natalia ‘Nelly’ Akerman, in central Brussels.
An alluring fascination with the everyday1 and an eagerness to document the ordinary habits which inflect daily life: these have always infused Akerman’s film work, braided through her features like recurring laments. In No Home Movie these everyday realities are subtended by the shadow of the Holocaust, at which the opening sequence in Israel hints. Akerman’s mother Natalia, also known as Nelly, was an Auschwitz survivor. She was in her eighties when No Home Movie was filmed, her health slowly deteriorating from a long, terminal illness. Her fragile appearance testifies to the last throes of a life subjected to corrosive trauma, and the film shows the banal routines and tasks involved in end-of-life care. Echoing techniques developed in Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the camera maintains a respectful distance from its maternal subject. Akerman never probes into the specific diagnosis of Natalia’s illness, nor does she push for some kind of final revelation about her experience in Auschwitz. In an interview on the occasion of the film’s release, Akerman suggested that some of her early films – Jeanne Dielman included – arose as direct responses to her mother’s reticence to speak, and as attempts to compensate for a childhood “full of holes”.2 No Home Movie, she continued, was conceived as an experiment in paying tribute to such gaps, and simply witnessing the rituals that prevent ordinary life from coming apart at the seams.3 In the same exchange, Akerman recounted how, during a film festival in Mexico to promote La folie Almayer (2011), she realised abruptly that “I could not speak on [my mother’s] behalf, she was the only one who could speak, and if she didn’t want to speak, that should be it.”4
In No Home Movie, Akerman is unwilling to ventriloquise Nelly. Instead, she plays the role of quiet observer, making space around her mother’s life, patiently recording its habitual patterns and silences. The rigorous formalism of her other films here gives way to a certain looseness of sequencing and softening of camera perspectives.5 There are shots taken on BlackBerry phones and hand-held cameras, often zooming in close, which modify the formal severity of Akerman’s signature frontal views. In her reading of No Home Movie, Ivone Margulies has seen Akerman’s embrace of “the directness of the home movie form” as a template for understanding and mapping anew “the intricate relationship of symbiosis and distance”6 between daughters and their mothers. In this way, No Home Movie’s aesthetic of gauzy imperfection also makes steps towards overcoming what Jacqueline Rose has termed the “deadly template” of the mother’s “absolute devotion”, or the cultural expectation that mothers dedicate themselves to their children without reserve.7 In place of strict absolutes, No Home Movie builds an imperfect monument to the ordinary, to what Akerman elsewhere has called the “images between the images”: the everyday events which take place in kitchens or in bathrooms, not usually subject to a camera’s view.8 The impulse to capture these images permeates both the intimate display of Nelly’s daily comings and goings and also several disruptive sequences of abrasive desert landscapes, in Israel, which yank the spectator out of over-proximate complicity with the film’s events. No Home Movie always denies iconicity – after all, the Jewish faith, which Akerman frequently invokes in relation to her work, warns against such idolatrous traps.9
Akerman’s mother’s life has appeared in a host of different ways in her films – as intensely choreographed, Ibsenian melodrama in her most famous work, Jeanne Dielman, or as a distilled, epistolary presence in 1977’s portrait of urban asymmetry, News from Home. In I Don’t Belong Anywhere, a documentary made in 2015 by Marianne Lambert tracking Akerman’s self-imposed exile in New York, Paris and Israel following her mother’s death in April of the previous year, the filmmaker openly questions whether her recursive and obsessive cinematic practice can be said to ‘be about’ any subject other than her mother. Echoing this pattern, and extending a career-long desire to draw lines around a life balanced on the fragile firmaments of silence, in the promotional materials to No Home Movie Akerman explicitly foregrounds that the film:
“is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment […] A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”10
After the lacerating wind of the opening sequence, the film’s view changes to a sunny park in an unspecified location. The camera frames an elderly man sitting on a park bench with his shirt off, taking in the sun. This image, attending to a simple, sensuous pleasure, is followed by a shot of Nelly’s back garden, seen from the vantage point of one of the apartment’s windows. A blue lounge chair has been upturned on the grass. When we finally encounter Nelly, she is with her back to a camera that has been installed in the corner of a corridor, set up to record continuously. Although echoing the backwards introduction of actor Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, this shot, unlike in that prior feature, is not purposeful or choreographed. In its restrictedness and contingency, it grazes only the surface of Natalia’s condition and its exterior symptoms, showing her in pain nursing her right shoulder, and mumbling to no one in particular about it “getting dislocated”.
Though dislocation – signalled by the wind-ravaged tree and the capsized chair – characterises No Home Movie’s narrative and aesthetic throughout its 115-minute running time, a sense of fracture and the unexpected twisting of a life’s course is counterbalanced by a closeness between mother and daughter of a degree unseen in the rest of Akerman’s oeuvre. In an article exploring autobiographical innovations in Akerman’s work since 2011, Marion Schmid ventures that, together with the photoessay Ma mère rit, the film constitutes the most defiant closing of the gap between lived experience and representation in her oeuvre.11 In one scene, Chantal and Nelly take time and care to encourage each other to eat heartily at the kitchen table. In this dynamic of mutual mothering, there is an earthy focus on orality and the vernacular as they swap family stories and Yiddish proverbs. While some of the exchanges on first hearing come across as platitudes (“Meat contains protein and builds muscle”; “You need to eat more than a banana!”) there is poignancy in the islands of feeling that swell underneath the surface of the everyday.
Chantal cannot always be in Brussels to attend to her mother; numerous Skype calls serve as supplements to their face-to-face encounters. In the first of these, Nelly’s face, tender and inquisitive, is the first to appear on a glowing laptop screen before Chantal’s image, flanked by the apparatus of her camera equipment, materialises in a second chat window. “She’s filming you!” an unidentified voice observes, in the background, to which Nelly chuckles and responds affectionately, still smiling through the webcam lens: “Always the camera”. Chantal justifies recording the encounter by saying that “I want to show that there is no more distance in the world.’ Still, despite her intention, barriers emerge.. Nelly acknowledges that being recorded adds to her self-consciousness. “You have always these ideas, don’t you, sweetheart,” she says, showing how she will always regard Chantal primarily as her daughter, independent of her status as a worldly auteur.
In 2003, the film critic Mary Ann Doane described the close-up in film history not,- as it is often thought of – as a fetishising construct but as a mode of distortion or defamiliarisation. Indeed, it is striking that, as Nelly leans in closer to the camera and her features blur into pixels, she becomes less recognisable, less legible as an elderly woman or as a face, perceptible only as a voice emanating from a screen.12 When she says to Chantal (who is trying to show off the hat she has recently acquired) “I see only your hair”, technology becomes a sphere of intimate fallibility. The clunky procedure of the calls, and their awkward manipulations of bodies and spaces, remind us that the nearness enabled by new media is still error-prone, flawed. The reluctance of both Chantal and Nelly to end the call has parallels with Akerman’s preference, across her oeuvre, for long takes and her avoidance of jump cuts, out of ‘respect,’ she has said, for the women being filmed on the other side of her camera’s lens.13
In her analysis of Bracha Ettinger’s work on the ‘maternal experience’ not as an essential or natural category, but as a shifting space of human subjectivity and meaning, Griselda Pollock argues that the mother-daughter relationship might be thought of as a series of:
transsubjective instances encountering each other across a shared matrixial borderspace. Forget wombs, insides and organs. Think instead of traces, vibrations and resonances, registered sonic and tactile intimations of othernesses, sharing space but never fusing, encountering but never dissolving their boundaries, jointly eventing without ever knowing fully the other’s event.14
Explaining this use of the term “matrix”, Ettinger herself clarifies how:
I took the intrauterine meeting as a model for human situations and processes in which non-I is not an intruder, but a partner in difference. The Matrix reflects multiple and/or partial joint strata of subjectivity whose elements recognize each other without knowing each other.15
No Home Movie affords filmic space to this unknowingness. It recognises that a life takes place on the fragile border between sickness and health, home and elsewhere, and refuses to probe these lines. Rather than attempt to compress, quicken, or create tension in its narrative with the tight cuts seen in popular cinema, No Home Movie accommodates these ambiguities in screening both memorable and mundane encounters between Chantal and her mother. While the space they give each other is not always happily afforded, nor evacuated of the occasional thrashings of the ego – Chantal frequently cuts short their Skype calls, telling her mother that she must work and can’t talk for long, and Nelly, in one telling conversation with a carer, expresses concerns that she “needs to leave [Chantal] alone” – the tenderness that results from this imperfect relationship infuses each encounter. When Chantal is in Brussels, the meandering tours through the apartment she takes with her camera contrast visually with the mechanically steadfast gaze of the perma-installed camera in the corner. In these tours we get a sense of Akerman’s unreserved affection for her mother, but also of a claustrophobic boredom that comes across in the occasionally asymmetrical nature of their dialogues – “It was so nice to have you here.” “I haven’t left yet” – and the sometimes keen attention turned towards the lines of windows, doors, and corridors, bespeaking a desire for escape. Chantal’s delayed responses to her mother’s calls for attention from the lounge chair to which she is frequently confined find uncanny parallels in a sequence from Akerman’s Toute une nuit (1982), where a woman, played by a younger Nelly Akerman herself, stands outside the patio doors of a house, abandons herself to smoking a cigarette with pleasure, and ignores for a moment the whinges for attention of a child. Melanie Klein coined the notion of a ‘good enough’ mother. But No Home Movie, in its frank depiction of the pressures of care-taking and the need to delegate end-of-life management to professional outsiders (two of Nelly’s carers making important appearances within the film) introduces the spectre of the ‘good enough’ daughter.
In a conversation filmed with one of Nelly’s carers, a Mexican woman named Clara, near the end of No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman is asked: “And you never married? And you don’t have children? Not at all?” These questions – seeking to determine the specific shape of Chantal’s difference, or the reasoning behind her choices in life – re-inscribe the typical oppositions staged between queer artistic practice and family devotion. But this is a false antithesis that No Home Movie’s portrait of a frequently remote, yet still intimately functional, mother-daughter dialectic refuses.16 While stable ideas of home are frustrated by the film’s frequent desert interludes, these interruptions always subside with a return to the matrix of the Brussels apartment, in a movement of ongoing oscillation which positions the film, in Mateus Araujo’s formulation, as a pivot “between the mother and the world”.17 A push-pull dynamic – a hesitation between the desire to attend to one’s mother and the desire to confront the abrasions of ongoing world events – does not allow voyeurism and disturbs any fantasy of immersion. Lasting typically for five or six minutes, the desert sequences give permission to the audience to let the film drift in and out of their attention, to carve some space away from its otherwise taut, unsparing gaze. In her monograph Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart defines the ordinary as a “drifting immersion that watches and waits for something to pop up”.18 In No Home Movie, it is this state, a patient and steadfast devotion to witnessing Nelly’s last months against the backdrop of which a kinetic and conflicted outside world sometimes ‘pops up’, through which Chantal and Nelly call into question fixed ideas of what a mother-daughter dynamic has to look like.
No Home Movie furthers a politicised aesthetic fostered by Jeanne Dielman. It aims to bring the ignored arenas of women’s experience and the domestic into an unprecedented cinematic spotlight. Within Akerman’s career-long effort to prove ordinary lives worthy of commemoration, it breaks new ground. Adamantly framing the banal gestures of washing, eating, taking medication and attending medical appointments, it encompasses, as Schmid writes, “the viscous matter” of declining health without infringing on the dignity of its subject, Natalia Akerman.19 The film’s pointillist, non-linear progression tapers in its closing moments towards what feels like a unambiguous endpoint: Nelly’s apartment grows quietly emptier, and the final moments of her suffering are protectively shielded from our view.
A week before the film’s premiere in London, Chantal Akerman took her own life in Paris. In her poignant account of editing No Home Movie with Akerman, Claire Atherton – Akerman’s longtime editor – said that this most personal of films entailed hours of simply “being with” the footage before any clear idea emerged of what to do with it.20 This approach, of being with the image, with the world and with the mother, and of watching something flower into being without forcing or explicitly directing its path, is central to No Home Movie’s importance. It is as much a seduction into life and creativity as it is a sober reckoning with death. Before ending on the final image of the vacant corridor where we first saw Nelly tending her painful shoulder, the film frames a shot of Chantal sitting on a single bed in the apartment’s guest room, hunched over her feet, doing up her shoelaces. Previously cluttered with her things (cigarette lighters, endless sheets of paper, a laptop), the room is explicit in its emptiness. This penultimate, almost child-like image suggests that, at root, No Home Movie is a film that questions whether cinema can function as a holding space for the ‘ordinary affects’ which accrue from the fraught feelings generated in and by the home. In giving us a moment before we must painfully confront the evacuated corridor, it makes a final gesture towards nurturing both Akerman and us: making us ready for the transition, bracing us for the step into the unknown.
Alice Blackhurst is a writer and a research fellow in Visual Culture at King’s College, Cambridge. She writes on critical theory, contemporary film, fashion and art.
1 For a seminal account of Akerman’s hyperrealist, quotidian aesthetics, see Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). For an account of Akerman’s interweaving of the everyday through questions of exile and displacement, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chantal Akerman, The Integrity of Exile and the Everyday, LOLA Journal, Issue 2: Devils 2 Akerman famously makes reference to her childhood status as “un enfant avec une histoire pleine de trous” (“a child with a story that’s full of holes”) in her 2004 hybrid photo-textual autobiography, Chantal Akerman: Autoportrait en Cinéaste (Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 2004), p. 30. 3 See ‘Chantal Akerman Discusses No Home Movie’, Mubi Notebook, 17 August 2015 (Online) 4 Ibid, emphasis original. 5 On the ‘rigidity’ of such frameworks within Akerman’s filmography, see Steven Jacobs, ‘Semiotics of the Living Room: Domestic Interiors in Chantal Akermanís Cinema’, in Chantal Akerman: Too Far, Too Close (New York: Ludion, 2012), p. 82. 6 See Ivone Margulies, ‘Elemental Akerman: Inside and Outside No Home Movie’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 70 No. 1, Fall 2016, p. 63. 7 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Mothers’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 12, 19 June 2014, pp. 17ñ22. Rose’s writing builds on Melanie Klein and Eve Sedgwick’s theories of maternity. 8 In Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Aesthetics of the Everyday, p.4. 9 See Chantal Akerman, ‘Interview with Jean-Luc Godard’, “Jews have a big problem with the image: you do not have the right to make images, you are transgressing when you do, because images are linked to idolatry,” in Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster ed., trans. Janet Bergstrom (London, SUI Press, 2001), p. 94. 10 Chantal Akerman, on the occasion of No Home Movie‘s world premiere, Locarno Film Festival, 2015. 11 See Marion Schmid, ‘Self-Portrait as Visual Artist: Chantal Akerman’s Ma mère rit’, MLN, Vol. 131 No. 4, September 2016, pp. 1130-1147. 12 In ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.3 (2003), pp. 89-111, Doane writes of her desire, for example, to “treat the close-up synchronically rather than diachronically, as stasis, as resistance to narrative linearity”. 13 See ‘Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman’, Camera Obscura No. 2 (Fall 1977), 118-121, 119, where the aim is stated “to avoid cutting the woman in a hundred pieces, to look carefully and be respectful.” 14 See Griselda Pollock, ‘Mother Trouble: The Maternal-Feminine in Phallic and Feminist Theory in Relation to Bracha Ettinger’s Elaboration of Matrixial Ethics/Aesthetics’ Studies in the Maternal, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2009 15 See Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrix-Borderlines (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), p. 12. 16 Susan Fraiman, for example, has noted “the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other” (cited in Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts [New York: Graywolf Press, 2015], p.30). 17 See Mateus Araujo, trans. Mark Cohen, ‘Chantal Akerman, between the mother and the world’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 70 No. 1, Fall 2016 (pp.32-28). 18 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Duke, Duke University Press, 2007), p. 95. 19 Marion Schmid, ‘Self-Portrait as Visual Artist: Chantal Akerman’s Ma mère rit’, p. 1139. 20 In her tribute to Akerman, “Elle faisait confiance en la vie”, in a special edition of Cahiers du cinèma, Atherton recounts how “Nothing was conceptualized, all was there, one needed only to be attentive.” (Claire Atherton, Elle faisait confiance en la vie, Cahiers du cinèma, No. 716, November 2015, p. 91.)
