No Home Video

Dir: Chantal Akerman

2015

****

From the outset, it is clear that Chantal Akerman’s documentary No Home Movie is a personal journey for the director but now, after her death, it is clear that it was her everything. The film consists of conversations between the film-maker and her ailing mother Natalia, filmed over several months. Half of the conversations take place in Natalia’s apartment in Brussels and the other half are via Skype when Akerman is working at home in the States. It was filmed entirely on small handheld cameras and on Akerman’s mobile phone and during the editing Akerman whittled down around 40 hours' worth of footage to just 115 minutes. Akerman’s mother Natalia (or Nelly as she was fondy known as) had survived years at Auschwitz, where her own parents had died. From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and she encouraged her daughter to pursue a career rather than marry young. With her mother’s influence Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion film school at age 18. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville, funding the film's costs by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. Akerman’s close relationship with her mother was captured in many of her films, some more obvious than others. In 1976’s News From Home, Akerman's mother's letters describing mundane family activities serve as a soundtrack throughout the film, a personal and effective technique that I don’t believe had been attempted before or since and in Family In Brussels, Akerman narrates the story, interchanging her own voice with her mother's. Akerman acknowledged that her mother was at the center of her work and admitted to feeling directionless after her death. The maternal imagery can be found throughout all of Akerman's films, as an homage and an attempt to reconstitute the image and voice of the mother, indeed, the parts of the film that don’t feature her mother are a directionless succession of traveling shots of her walking through a desert. The film premiered on the 7th October 2015, the day after Akerman took her own life. She once said that, at the age of 15, after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, that she decided there and then to become a filmmaker. Her first feature film, Hotel Monterey (1972), and subsequent short films, La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2, revealed the influence of structural filmmaking through both films' usage of long takes. These protracted shots served to oscillate images between abstraction and figuration. A style she would use and develop throughout her career. In 1973 she returned to Belgium and, in 1974, she received critical recognition for her feature Je, Tu, Il, Elle (I, You, He, She). Feminist and queer film scholar B. Ruby Rich noted that Je Tu Il Elle can be seen as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality". Akerman's most significant film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was released in 1975. Often considered one of the greatest examples of feminist filmmaking, the film makes a hypnotic, real-time study of a middle-aged widow's stifling routine of domestic chores and prostitution. Upon the film's release, The New York Times called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema". Akerman has acknowledged that her cinematic approach can be explained, in part, through the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, both wrote about the concept of minor literature as being characterised by ideas that minor literature is the literature that a minority makes in a major language, that the language is effected by a strong co-efficient of deterritorialisation. That every individual matter is immediately plugged into political because minor literature exists in a narrow space and everything has a collective value and what the solitary writer says already has collective value. Deleuze and Guattari claimed that these characteristics describe the revolutionary conditions within the canon of literature and Akerman has referenced Deleuze and Guattari on how, in minor literature, the characters assume an immediate, non-hierarchical relation between small individual matters and economic, commercial, juridical, and political ones. While she had an interest in multiple deterritorialisations, she also considered the feminist demand for the exercise of identity, where a borderline status may be an undesirable position. In all her films, Akerman used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity, and most of the conversations with her mother take place in her mother’s kitchen. The kitchens in Akerman's work provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation and serve the function of a backdrop to the dramas of daily life. The kitchens, alongside other domestic spaces, act as self-confining prisons under patriarchal conditions. In Akerman's work, the kitchen acts as a domestic theatre. The scenes that feature her Skyping her mother are somehow disconnected and disjointed and mimic her mother’s ailing ability to converse with her daughter and highlight the frustrations of distance between the two of them. Although Akerman is often grouped within feminist and queer thinking, the filmmaker has articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism. Akerman resists labels relating to her identity like "female", "Jewish" and "lesbian", choosing instead to immerse herself in the identity of being a daughter. No Home Movie is far more than it seems, even to the eyes of a seasoned fan of Akerman’s films. The clue is in the title but where it feels at times that the film wanders into daydream, every second is intentional. We don’t know that Akerman killed herself at the end of the film and nor do we know whether it would be her intention. It does change how the film is watched now, it was always clear that her mother’s influence was a huge part of her and her work but it is only now that we know that she couldn’t live without her. It’s an incredibly sad ending but I guess it is an honest one. It is hard to see the happy side of things but they do exist within the the conversations. An incredibly moving swan song.