Laurel Creighton
Ivone Margulies
Selected Directors: Chantal Akerman
Spring Semester 2023
Always the Mother
A film that replicates itself until it has lost its colors, like shadows, phantom traces.
A film that comes together in a landscape,
And drifts apart.
Out of black and white to white and black.
Almost unidentifiable.
Out of nearly abstract forms.
There, that that may become an abandoned film.
Without author, without subject, nor object. Mute
-Maniac Summer (Installation)
Chantal Akerman[1] was a woman who thought profoundly and lived with intensity. Through her unique upbringing and imprinting from her parents’ survival of the camps in World War Two, Chantal Akerman, or Akerman, as she desired to be called to preserve her father’s name, was given a unique lens through which to view the world. This unique lens is apparent in all her works, spanning multiple decades, as well as film genres. Still, I think her most poignant works pertain to her autobiography and particularly to the concept of her mother.
Akerman can only be looked at through her artistic duality, first as a non-traditional and non-realistic fiction filmmaker and secondly as an ethnographic filmmaker bent on capturing the real through her “almost fictional” portrayal of mood and tone. She must be seen straddling both worlds in order to understand her nuances and genius. To understand Chantal Akerman as an individual is to appreciate her work with warmth and depth.
I am focusing the remainder of my essay on the films No Home Movie, News from Home, and Meetings with Anna, with special mention of je, tu, il, elle, and Dis Moi. Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Jewish parents and Holocaust survivors from Poland. Chantal Akerman’s mother, Natalia, or Nelly to family, lost both her parents in the concentration camps. This early life trauma affected Chantal Akerman, who internalized the secondhand misfortune. Chantal Akerman often “put herself in the background so my mother could have her own life and room to herself, since she suffered so much in the camps.” Chantal Akerman felt that she needed to put herself second so that “above all, I could not make her suffer” (Brenez 70).
One of the ways we see Akerman’s obsessions come into the frame of her work in these movies is her relationship with food. In No Home Movie, Chantal and her mother go back and forth between each other at different points about not eating enough food. Centered around the kitchen, first, Natalia remarks that Chantal had only eaten a banana the previous day. Chantal responds that she had had what she “had needed.” Later, Natalia is eating in the dining room but tells her home health aide that she cannot eat and has no hunger, but her anxiety about Chantal makes her try to eat more, although she prefers not to. We see at some points where Chantal asks her mother to eat more, and when asked, Natalia often responds with the same or similar answers to Chantal’s responses when her mother tells her to eat more.
In the Pajama Interview, Chantal Akerman talks about her mother’s deteriorating health before No Home Movie was released. She describes that after going into the living room in the dark and falling – is this refusal to turn on the lights unless necessary an obsessive quirk that both Jeanne Dielman and Chantal Akerman’s mother have in common? - that her mother had refused to eat for five days after (Brenez, 71). In Dis Moi, we see how important food is for the Jewish grandmothers who push food onto Chantal during the interview who chide her for being too thin. This relationship between eating and not eating is clearly a traumatic response from the experience of not having enough in the camps.
Food is also seen in Meetings with Anna when Anna repeatedly refuses food at choice points within the film. First at Heinrich’s home for lunch with his daughter and his mother, then at the train station with Ida. Anna and Ida make it to the dining area, but at soon as they are within, Anna says that she prefers not to eat and to return to the train tracks. In fact, the only time we do see Anna eat in the film is extraordinarily odd. Perched over a previously ordered room service meal that has been left in the hallway of the hotel in Germany, Anna briefly picks at a plate of peas and admires a man’s shoe. The imagery of the shoes may appear odd upon a first reading of the film. However, with further analysis, it can be construed that within the concentration camps, many were left with the option of chewing on the leather on their shoes – a last-ditch effort to avoid starvation.
In the Pajama Interview with Nicole Brenez, Chantal Akerman goes on to describe a reoccurring dream where she and her mother were in the camps. She says, “…there was nothing to eat and so people were being eaten. They were going to hang us, my mother and me, from butcher’s hooks. I was so little I managed to run away. At my house, I found my mom again but only felt more guilty for having saved myself” (Berenz, 71).
No Home Movie as a title can be looked at in two ways, an ironic take on the idea of home movies, an amateur capturing of family reality often through consumer-grade film technology, or as No Home, Movie, which gives a nomadic and heart-aching melancholy to the visuals. Depending upon the individual’s understanding of the material and their frame of mind entering the film, the title can depend upon its viewer.
No Home Movie was filmed in 2013-2014 and premiered in 2015 at the New York Film Festival. The film focuses on the deteriorating health of Akerman’s mother and the conversations between them, which are performed chiefly (but not entirely) in the Kitchen. The film is Akerman’s last, as she committed suicide in 2016, less than a year later. The domestic scenes are juxtaposed with harsh desert landscapes, which dislocate the viewer from the intimacy of the mother and create a disjunction of mood. One becomes aware that the desert landscape is a metaphor for the other and presupposes a feeling of nomadism—a topic explored earlier in je, tu, il, elle, and Meetings with Anna.
No Home Movie also has references to Akerman’s most famous film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Firstly, the apartment's décor is strikingly similar to the home of Jeanne. Muted colors and antique furniture give the space that Natalie occupies a traditional look, and one notices its spotlessness. However, a significant concerning difference between the two is the arrival of a cleaning lady, which one thinks Jeanne Dielman herself would have abhorred. Another critical moment in the film is when Natalia (Nelly) and Chantal sit in the kitchen preparing potatoes for dinner. Chantal tells her mother that the skins are “where the vitamins are,” while her mother quips that she has never made potatoes with the skins on them, reminiscent of the famous potato-peeling scene from Jeanne Dielman.
The film also mentions Ida. Ida is a family friend that Akerman’s mother speaks of with fondness. Ida appears in Meetings with Anna in a train station, as well as a verbal mention in News from Home. Through these fleeting moments, we can learn of her importance to the family, Chantal Akerman, and her mother, and she is immortalized in a traditional Bazinian sense. Akerman’s preservation of the image through the film is especially prominent in No Home Movie, which acts as a memento mori.
Through Ida, we learn a bit more about Chantal, but as an audience, we can never be too confident of the truth. In Meetings with Anna, Ida speaks about Anna’s twice-broken engagement with her son. Earlier, when speaking to Heinrich, Anna mentions that she would have had two young children but that the timing was not right, and it was “nobody’s fault. ” While Ida is now established as an actual person and Meetings with Anna also is autobiographical, it could be safe to assume that at one point, Chantal Akerman had been in a relationship with Ida’s son and possibly almost had children with either him or another person. However, the reference to the twice-broken engagement could be a stylization and reference to Kafka, someone Chantal Akerman responded to artistically, especially regarding an immigrant's pared-down language.
The idea of children or the lack of children is also a theme explored in Akerman’s work. It is a form of obsession because it is evident in several of her films. Most notable are Food, Family, and Philosophy, where the off-screen voice echoes a sentiment that without children, the Jewish rite of remembrance cannot be continued, in South, No Home Movie and Dis Moi when real-life interviewees ask Chantal about her children – it is important to note that in all these films, Akerman left these parts in. Of course, a director has the final say in her editing, but these moments were ones that Akerman chose to keep.
Chantal Akerman attempted to keep the name alive for her father by using only “Akerman” for her films. Using the last name is a way of recompensing for the lack of children she would bear. She satisfies the question of “who will remember” through her work as a storyteller. Keeping history alive through her works of art, although also with some hesitancy because of the Jewish commandment to avoid idolatry. However, this attempt seemed insufficient to satisfy her father (Berenz 56).
Children are also an essential plot of Almayer’s Folly. In the Pajama Interview with Nicole Berenz, Chantal Akerman says it is important not to psychoanalyze her films but then goes on to compare the girl, Nina, and Almayer, as two sides of herself. Nina is the daughter who dared to leave her childhood home, and Almayer is a depressive person who is obsessed with his sadness and loss (Berenz 48). It is interesting to note this direct contradiction she does. We witness these contradictions often in her writing “on the contrary” in La Captive, but to witness it in an interview creates even more of an autobiographic symbiosis between Chantal Akerman as an individual, filmmaker, and character within performance.
I want to offer another interpretation of Almayer’s Folly. I find it interesting that Akerman drastically changed the ending to the Joseph Conrad film. Perhaps it is presumptuous, but I feel that the changed ending to an ambiguous one where the audience is unsure what is to become of Almayer's “Tomorrow, I would have forgotten” could pertain to Akerman’s own suicidal ideations. The film is coming toward the end of her life and at the beginning of her mother's decline. I believe Almayer’s Folly could be a working through of the child/parent relationship and what it means to survive the loss of them. Chantal Akerman already identified herself within both characters, so it would reason to be an acceptable form of psychotherapy logic to infer that this was going on behind the scenes. Perhaps, Chantal Akerman did not want Almayer to die because she was afraid of her own approaching suicide. “Tomorrow, I would have forgotten,” tells us there is no future for him, yet he is not dead, letting us work out for ourselves what that sentence means. I think the same for Akerman as well. For Almayer, his daughter was his reason to live; it does not seem absurd to say that for Chantal Akerman, her mother was the same.
News from Home also features the word “home” within the title, which makes it a focal point immediately upon its screen appearance. The viewers are contextualized to a location where intimacy is uninvited because it pertains to a strangeness unlocalized to us as strangers. Released in 1977, the film is part ethnographic documentary and part experimental essay film. It consists of structured extended durational shots of New York City with an audio track of Chantal reading her mother’s letters from six years earlier.
News from Home was the film that followed Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It references her early years as a 21-year-old in 1970s New York, where she met and was exposed to structuralist filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and her cinematographer Babette Mangolte. The vocal track is our first exposure to Natalia as a genuine individual, and we gain intimate glimpses into her identity and Chantal Akerman’s relationship with her.
In the film, Akerman’s mother repeatedly complains that her daughter does not write enough and that she “never talks about important things.” A statement later echoed verbatim in No Home Movie when Chantal herself is off camera. Natalia and Sylviane discuss Chantal while she is unaware of their discussion. This candid conversation that we are not supposed to be hearing tells us that Akerman’s inability to find the words to express herself to her mother has not changed over the four decades that span between the two films. However, it is interesting to note that the mother’s silence about her traumatic survival of the camps in World War II that causes the most distress to Akerman. Without knowing what has taken place for her mother, Akerman is forced to create an image of what has happened. One wonders if a discussion about the “important things” that happened to Natalia were to have taken place and what that would have meant for Chantal in her creative work moving forward.
In News from Home, we better understand the visual silences of the extended duration takes of the city as a form of expression and a sort of answer to her mother’s badgering and one-sided conversations. But if there is anyone Chantal Akerman can talk to, it seems to be her mother. In Meetings with Anna, the mother-daughter scene portrays the amazing openness of character on the part of Anna Silver, the semi-autobiographical character painted by Chantal as herself.
In No Home Movie, Chantal admits that she feels that she has never grown up but instead stayed a girl. This passage in the film reminded me of a passage in Freud’s Illusion when he explains that a child realizes that they will stay in a child-like state and that they will continue to need protection from the adults surrounding them, particularly the father (Freud 30). Nevertheless, it makes me wonder if Freud’s theory of sexuality is correct and if a preoccupation with the mother can supplant the father in individual cases. Thus, making sense of such a naked scene between Anna and her mother in Meetings with Anna.
Meetings with Anna was Akerman’s first big-budget film. Janus Films and ZDF produced it. The film also has a tie with the idea of hindered communication. In News from Home, the letter writing takes precedence over our aural attention. In Meetings with Anna, the same strange transitive effect can be heard through “Talk-Blocks” (Margulies 154). Long monologues which take place from one character to another. Often in a frontal-facing position which gives an anti-natural feeling and theater-like effect. Anna becomes a conduit for the audience to absorb and digest the over-sharing of the characters she encounters on her nomadic journey from Germany to France. However, whatever awkwardness Anna shows when she is around others persists even when she is alone. Anna’s silence at the end of the film when alone in bed, Anna Silver plays her answering machine. She is unable to place a call to Italy in Hamburg – we never get to hear what she would say to her lover, the most intimate of all life partners (minus the mother in Akerman’s exception).
When Chantal Akerman says, “You must always write when you want to make film, although you know nothing of the film you want to make. Yet you already know everything about it.” She is speaking to the natural desire that makes artists reach down into themselves to pull themselves apart and reanalyze themselves, over and over, repeatedly - ad infinitum as children of intense and memorable parents with troubled pasts, postmemory and enmeshment become immanent. Postmemory is the transference of traumatic memory from generation to generation (Lebow 47). While not rooted in the time of the happening, a child recreates the scenario from beginning to end using his/her imagination. This time-traveling makes an insurmountable liminal space for children to climb out of. Unable to move out of the moment of trauma that preceded their birth, the past becomes a repetition of facts – facts that are created and recreated through transitive memory.
In Freud’s investigation of his research in aesthetics, he claims that the distinction between Unheimlichand Heimlich is not easy. Heimlich in German means “familiar,” “native,” and “belonging to the home.” A simple definition of Unheimlich would be Heimlich’s opposite, “unfamiliar,” “foreign,” and “belonging to the other” (Freud, 2). In Daniel Sander’s Wörterbuch der deutchen Sprache (1860), there is an example given that says “The Zecks [a family name] are all “heimlich.”’ ‘” Heimlich”? “What do you understand by “heimlich”? ‘Well,… they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again’” (Freud, 3). Through his discoveries, Freud claims that to be unheimlich means that it comes from heimlich. What is strange, eerie, or unfamiliar comes from the home and from something familiar to us. The strangeness is when it is made unknowable in some sense. This feeling of anti-naturalism within Akerman’s movies often presents itself within these confines, especially so in her work in News from Home, No Home Movie, Jeanne Dielman, Sauté ma Ville, and D’Est, to name only just a few.
The presence of unheimlich in News from Home is evident in the letter reading, which locates the viewers in the dimension of Akerman’s home in Brussels. At the same time, the visual layer dislocates and makes a broken symbiosis of audio-visual. In No Home Movie, the film’s majority takes place within the home of Natalia; however, the breaks of the acrid desert, which permeate the film’s beginning, ending, and that punctuate specific points throughout, make us aware that there is also this unfamiliar other of life outside the home which can be dry, desolate, and unforgiving. The juxtaposition of the two, like in News from Home, continues the thread of weaving unheimlich narrates throughout.
Meetings with Anna is a bit different than News from Home and No Home Movie because it is more representational within its fictionality. However, there are still traces of the home and the defamiliarization of the home within the film. For example, the food which Akerman has stated was almost the same as the food she would eat as a child but somehow not quite right. When Anna eats and then rejects the plate of peas, this is the unheimlich. The familiarity between Ida and Anna is also intimate and strange, as Anna is tender but reserved and remains in a neutral frontal position during their time together. However, the most strange and unusual is the chamber scene between Anna and her mother – lying in bed together, Anna is naked and speaks to her mother about her lesbianism. The nakedness and the subject matter, while the tenderness between mother/daughter borders on the unnatural, it is still permissible and familiar to the audience.
When Chantal Akerman says that her primal scene returns continually towards “all images of evacuation, of walking in the snow with packages toward an unknown place, of faces and bodies placed one next to the other, of faces flickering between robust life and the possibility of a death which would strike them down without their having asked for anything.” I am reminded of chapter three in Feud’s Illusion, where he begins to bring the notion of the reason humanity has need of a G-d. As nature itself is cold, chaotic, and relentless – faith brings humankind out of the animal kingdom and defends us from the forces of nature.
Freud says, “There are the elements, which seem to mock at all human control: the earth, which quakes and is torn apart and buries all human life and its works; water, which deluges and downs everything in a turmoil; storms which blow everything before them; there are diseases, which we have only recently recognized as attacks by other organisms; and finally there is the painful riddle of death, against which no medicine has yet been found, nor probably will be. ” (Freud, 19). But what if it was not nature that performed these things, but humanity, formed within a civilization that dutifully respects the Judeo-Christian religion? How does one remedy this effect within a postmemory?
Freud states that the massive collective nature can be a traumatic experience, but also this corresponds to the individual level. Freud says that as a child, we often are left feeling defenseless and turn to our parents for protection, soothing, and guidance. If one’s parents were met with disaster and calamity at a young age, how would this impact their ability to nurture other small children as they approach their imprisonment within the camps?
In Meetings with Anna, Akerman explores this with her character of Heinrich, a teacher who is cuckolded by a Turkish man who now lives alone with his mother and his daughter in his childhood home. In a talk-block, Heinrich shares in a litany cadence his personal and political changes that have taken place from before his birth, starting with the planting of the tulips by his father, “who died at Stalingrad.” The world has been left to those faced with a disaster in Europe to recompense for a disaster far out of their control. A sadness marks each individual Anna meets, all of whom have been impacted directly by the warring countries during World War Two.
In Akerman’s early work during the structuralist period of the ’60s and ’70s, many artists' greatest concern was with the “dissolving the boundaries between realities and representation was translated into a widespread use of real-time representation” (Margulies, 47). Although symbiotic in her relationship with her mother and her obsessions stemming from her relationship with her mother, Akerman’s work is also challenging for the mother. Throughout her work, we see Akerman as both director, character, and individual carve out her own territory in relation to these themes. Her films are a working through of what obsessions she has, and we root for her. The spaces between the silences, both from Akerman herself and from her mother’s experiences in the camps, create a crevasse that Akerman’s filmic language permeates into. It is unknown if Chantal Akerman ever witnessed peace, but one can assume throughout her time on this earth that the films she left gave her some. Through her striving to connect the past, present, and post-memory traces, we can realize something about our own nature of obsession, retreat, and surrender even if Chantal Akerman is still not free of her mother.
Works Cited
Brenez, Nicole. “Chantal Akerman, the Pajama Interview. ” HAL (Le Centre Pour La Communication Scientifique Directe), French National Centre for Scientific Research, 2011, hal-univ-paris3. archives-ouvertes. fr/hal-01500070.
Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday. 1996, read. dukeupress. edu/content/nothing-happens.
Lebow, Alisa. “Memory Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est. ” Camera Obscura, vol. 18, no. 1, Duke UP, May 2003, pp. 35–83. https://doi. org/10. 1215/02705346-18-1_52-35.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. 1927, ci. nii. ac. jp/ncid/BA19648637.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1919, https://web. mit. edu/allanmc/www/freud1. pdf
[1] The names will be addressed as follows: Chantal Akerman when relating to her as an individual, Akerman when being used as a director, and Chantal to discuss her work as an actress.
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