No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)

[hearthesilence]

Just saw this. Excruciating towards the end. I've only seen a small fraction of her work - basically what's available from Criterion/Eclipse - but all of the ones I've seen never fail to trigger a flood of memories. Some works are so personal they actually become very universal. This time it wasn't memories of my own family but a friend's sibling I had known but hadn't thought about in a long while. She had an illness that would eventually shorten her life, but for most of it she would seem fine. One of the last times I saw her was at a wedding, sitting alone. I asked to snap a picture and she looked healthy and happy. The thought did cross my mind that there was some importance in preserving these moments while she still had them. I didn't see her for a full year and it would be the last. By then, she was very, very ill and she came with us to the beach even though she wasn't especially mobile. It was hard and awkward to make conversation as she wasn't in the mood or had a hard time doing so. All of that came rushing back and the way Akerman handles it is beautiful and devastating. It felt like the inverse to some of her work, suggesting symbiosis of environment and inhabitant, how the surroundings can feel so empty and dead without the occupant around. It's a gradual fade that parallels the mother's ebbing life. Besides the compositions and the cutaways, the change in aperture near the end brings all this out even more, sinking everything is pitch black shadow, even in the day. It feels even more heartbreaking after this entire morning, which I spent in the company of old school friends who I hadn't seen in over a year. It seems to perfectly close her body of work, and that it is actually the last is terrible to say the least.

[hearthesilence]

Icarus Films has announced that it will distribute No Home Movie. It opens on April 1 at BAM.

[lacritfan]

U.S. Playdates.

[hearthesilence]

Opens this weekend in the U.S., accompanied by Akerman related screenings in just about every major NY repertory house. New York Times review.

[backstreetsbackalright]

I was so glad to have had the opportunity to see this in the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

I just noticed this morning, though, that it is available to stream via Fandor now (subscription required, but you can sign up for a free trial).

[knives]

I'm glad even if the reasons are unfortunate that this has gotten such a higher profile than other recent Akerman films if just because in the broad she deserves to have a higher profile than as the woman behind Jeanne Dielman. This does have a lot in common with that movie though. Certainly more than any other post '70s work of hers I've seen. It highlights very strongly we talents as a structuralist to the point where the direct cinema and confessional elements like the conversations over skype are often a shocking change of mode. It is probably sloppy and it makes me sympathetic to the negative reaction to the film before Akerman's death even if I disagree. Though my softness on the film might be caused due to my mother, one of my few living links to the past, likewise being so close to her moment of death with a fatal illness occupying her body if not always our time. If she were already dead I would probably be even softer. Even without that connective tissue the character of the mother is interesting for how she presents a manipulation of time and roles. There is a scene 40 minutes in for example where Chantal Akerman nags her mother on her food and explicitly says she is taking the role of the mother as the actual mother becomes a child. On and on the film goes until their two characters become a singular character transferring bodies by time. It is an intensely sad thing that really unnerves me due to its sense of
inevitability.

There's also a very interesting sense of space to the film which is where the structuralist tendencies come out. The film regularly compares the sparse and open space of the American road to the claustrophobic enclosure that Belgium holds for Akerman as if even the country that saved the existence of her family is a scary and dangerous place. There's also no human in American with even the closest symbols of intelligent life fogged by shadows and the landscape. The austere camerawork seems to suggest that this land of safety is merely providing a more comfortable isolation, not a free home.