No Home Movie
The final film from Belgian innovator Chantal Akerman is a deeply personal documentary about her own mother.
With her cinematic swan song, legendary avant-garde filmmaker Chantal Akerman (who died last year at the age of 65) gets profoundly personal, training her static, unblinking camera lens on her ailing mother, Natalia, a Polish-born Belgian and Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014. The effect is both powerful and alienating. Akerman’s obsession with lengthy shot duration leads to gradual revelation, as she lets scenes in Natalia’s flat unfold as lived, framed through narrow doorways just as in her most famous work, 1975’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Natalia’s kitchen even bears a striking similarity to Jeanne’s, just as, like Jeanne, her home virtually characterises her whole lived world.
Akerman has insisted her mother always remained at the centre of her work, and here their relationship is characterised by an ineffable emotional distance and incongruity of experience. Fittingly, in No Home Movie, she creates feelings of both intimacy and aloof documentation; the digital images often feel overly vivid, coldly austere, surveilling. Of course, as the title implies, this home movie is not a simple playact of a family relationship for the camera – it’s more of a coming to terms with personal and interpersonal history, and the larger cultural history that shaped it. Even as she re-appropriated the amateur film genre, Akerman remained the feminist iconoclast par excellence, celebrating but refusing to be 'ghettoised' by gender, sexuality, or even from whence she came.
No Home Movie screens in Glasgow Film Festival: 20 Feb, CCA, 5.45pm | 21 Feb, CCA, 1pm
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