The uninitiated reader must glean from this deceptively open, diaristic text what few biographical details it yields: the narrator makes films and writes; she hails from Brussels, where her ailing mother still lives; she has had loving partners and at least one disastrous one. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She mentions one in particular, a thing she once said: “I make movies because writing was too big a risk.”. Does her appearance—her body, her face, her silence and smiles—have anything to say about her work? “Anyway here or elsewhere, what’s the difference. Haunted obviously by Chantal Akerman’s mother, but also by Akerman herself, who hovers just above the pages like an observer of herself, an observer of us, an observer of us observing her. A better cow salesman shows him how it’s done, extolling the charms of Yankel’s skinny cow, and a buyer soon appears. Frontal view of an airy, white-walled, white-curtained apartment furnished with worktables and chairs (three each), computers (two). Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last. Couldn’t she just talk about herself, reframe her work for the viewer? No, it’s not a release. Akerman’s eye is as steady: here her static framing and long takes transform each train platform and hotel room, challenging with aesthetic precision the larger chaos—personal and historical—such places invoke. Its narrator is bound foremost by contradiction: longing for home but afraid to be still; craving intimacy but unable to endure it. Having served as a generative haven of symbols and ideas, Nelly resolves into a failing body. Faced with the loss of her mother, she returns with renewed urgency to the questions that animate her most personal and powerful work: of maternal legacy, daughterly love, and the obligations that exist between women of any relation. Her perspective is diffuse, moving between first-, second-, and third-person address. It will pass. Always, though, he maintained an unwavering devotion to his roots in Bengal. It’s clear from every smile, every gesture, … Directed by Chantal Akerman. She places the camera at waist height, capturing from a child’s-eye view her mother’s increasingly lengthy naps and tortuous meals. And if the act of writing is supposed to relieve some tension, a good deal of that tension resists exorcism. What stories could she tell? If not a daughter, who might she be? Composed in short, intense fragments, the book moves between a record of Akerman’s life split between multiple cities—most notably New York, where she taught at City College, and her mother’s home in Brussels—and intimate personal disclosure, each delivered in an unaffected style that largely prioritizes clarity of expression over rhetorical gymnastics. About Some Meaningful Events: African Cinema and 50 Years of FESPACO, No Release: Chantal Akerman's My Mother Laughs, Il Cinema Ritrovato: Forward into the Past, The Long Morning: J. Hoberman’s Make My Day, Cannes 2019: The Push and Pull between Genre and Auteurism, Time is Luck: The 5th Annual Nitrate Picture Show, Merril Mushroom's Bar Dykes: Conjuring '50s Lesbian Bar Culture, Seeing the Machine in Miranda Haymon's In the Penal Colony, My Body is (the) Marginalia; The Sun Drawn a Saw Across the Strings, inSerial: part ten The Mysteries of Paris, en plein air: Ethnographies of the Digital, Meghann Riepenhoff's Littoral Drift and Ecotone, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Accentuate the Positive: YIMBY in the Service of Development, The Moral Economy in the Black Rural South. We learn about Anna mostly by watching her navigate these spaces, the way she resists containment, succumbs, then refuses again. It haunts the images of nothingness—a wind-scorched desert, empty backyard, and silent apartment—that punctuate the film, and evoke lines that appear near the end of My Mother Laughs: “I have survived everything to date, and I’ve often wanted to kill myself,” Akerman writes. Images punctuate the text, a mix of personal photos and movie stills, enhancing the book’s interest in fluidity, the way fixed things remain in motion, and vice versa. This short essay is a personal response to My Mother Laughs, a text-image book by the Belgian filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman. “I simply told a story that interested me,” Akerman said in 1975 of Jeanne Dielman, the breakout portrait of domestic, maternal annihilation she completed at age twenty-five. . I n a scene in No Home Movie (2015), the last film from the celebrated film director Chantal Akerman, which is … Early in the book, Akerman fixates on her mother’s broken shoulder, which appears in No Home Movie, whose inability to heal becomes a stark embodiment of the unidirectional encroachment of mortality. Her mother’s needs move and irritate her in equal measure. “If they sought to forget a past about which they had nothing to say,” Akerman said in 1996, “[I] shot films about that ‘nothing.’”. “Last attempt at a self-portrait,” she says, holding the camera’s gaze. First published in France in 2013, My Mother Laughs is the final book written by the legendary and beloved Belgian artist and director Chantal Akerman (1950–2015) before her death. The esteemed actor, who died in November, was far more than the face of Satyajit Ray’s cinema. “Do you want to read a little, I ask, no I have blurry vision,” goes one passage. But elsewhere is always better. Permeated by her mother’s words—often banal, occasionally beseeching—those same images come to suggest the futility of any one person’s flight from home, if not from the self. How might she present herself, and her art, without subjecting both to the diminishments and distortions of portraiture? Chantal’s mother, Natalie Akerman, a Polish Jew who had survived Auschwitz and emigrated to Brussels, apparently would declare “without anyone having asked”, that she no longer remembered much Polish. My mother was totally different from the mothers of my friends. Nothingness looms, familiar but altered. The digging up of old quotes in the service of this kind of salesmanship bores her, but not because they’re untrue. Frightened, tired, but mostly calm, Akerman appears guileless and resigned by turns. Akerman muses and deflects, eventually burying herself in an allegory about the struggle of a Jew named Yankel to sell his only cow. It is better read as an extension of Akerman’s lifelong pursuit of enigma, paradox, and risk. We stand in solidarity with those affected by generations of structural violence. Cinematic and carnal ravishment are sometimes at cross-purposes, as this celebrated American essayist discovered after many fumbled attempts at merging the two. I was born in Brussels.”A series of films by Chantal Akerman is now playing on the Criterion Channel. In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s mother was dying. What revelation might the close of life bring? Akerman’s battle with self-portraiture—what her story comprises, how to tell it, and where it might end—is one she inherited from Nelly, and Nelly from her own mother, a painter who before she was murdered at Auschwitz filled huge canvases with women’s faces. “She will never let go,” Akerman writes when her mother suggests she put on some makeup, “Until her dying day she’ll be saying this kind of thing to me.” Nelly’s experience in the Holocaust—she survived Auschwitz—also weighs heavily upon her daughter. Rather than catharsis and resolution, the dominant feeling is the quietly crushing sensation of drifting subtly but inexorably apart. Even among Akerman’s restless movement and itinerant intellect, there’s a sense of repetition, of return—not necessarily to an idea of home, but to some center of gravity. Inspired by the experimental, self-reflexive style of French New Wave auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Akerman found in those blended, outsider forms an apt vehicle not just for the stories she wished to tell but the ambiguous, refracted way she wanted to tell them. Wearing an expression of soft amazement, saying little, sorry or not sorry that soon enough she’ll have to go, Anna is a figure of transience and unsettling focus. Can the artist explain her desire to create? Sharing both its subject matter and a melancholically valedictory quality with No Home Movie, the book chronicles Akerman’s processing of the end of her mother’s life, which would coincide with the waning years of her own (Nelly Akerman died in 2014, about a year before Chantal’s suicide). She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. The text’s slippage takes place also between voices, with Akerman’s words transitioning unmarked into those of the other (always female) key figures in the book: her mother, sister, lovers, etc. In light of her apparent suicide, Bean recalls Akerman’s genius and her legacy. The producers balked, insisting on something more traditional. For two hours, we will see them eating, chatting and sharing memories, sometimes accompanied by Sylvaine, Chantal's sister. As Akerman remarks, looking back upon her debris of her romance, “it was the writing I loved.”. Akerman’s long, static shots combine anonymity and fixed identity: this is nowhere but New York, a city of strangers at the center of the world. Chantal Akerman was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and professor. She was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling. See, it’s red. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Almost thirty-five years later, nursing her similarly present yet elusive mother in Brussels, Akerman writes to escape. From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and she encouraged her daughter to pursue a career rather than marry young. At first glance, it can all seem like a somewhat diaristic endeavor, a way of documenting one’s experiences and feelings while perhaps blowing off a bit of steam; though as the layers of patterning and resonance begin to accumulate one begins to sense more strongly both Akerman’s idiosyncratic command of narrative architecture. When I look at pictures of myself, I was just a normal-looking child. 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