Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson Tessa Nunn Schmid, Marion. Emma Wilson, eds. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Legenda, 2019. ISBN 978-1-781886-39-7. Pp. 170. The thirteen essays constituting this edited collection offer diverse perspectives on the creative works and legacy of the Belgian film director, author, and installation artist Chantal Akerman. Her approaches to creating art as the child of a Holocaust survivor and representing mother-daughter relationships are recurrent themes throughout the diverse chapters. Unlike most studies on Akerman that focus predominately on her innovative films of the 1970s and 1980s, this book, centered on representations of identity and memory, gives more attention to her later films, installations, and literary productions. Instead of emphasizing her novel methods of filming women, the authors explore the multifaceted ways in which Akerman's works grapple with traces of the past, empathetic observation, and the representation of what is invisible or unspeakable. Her films and texts thus transmit secrets, traditions, or anxiety. According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Akerman's portrayals of Jewish identity seek to express an ineffable absence through the theme of non-belonging. Hilde D'Haeyere and Steven Jacobs explain how Akerman drew from American slapstick to create Demain on déménage (2004), a comedy haunted by memories of the Holocaust and exile. Comparing Akerman's films to Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Anat Zanger shows how Akerman represents processes of remembering and forgetting through thresholds, material objects, personal writing, and anxious gazes. Analyzing temporality and collective memory, the authors nuance the role of Akerman's mother Natalia in the director's depictions of mother daughter-relationships. For Jenny Chamarette, Akerman's films rethink the passage of time in a way that refuses aging by creating a genealogy of interchangeable female figures. Several chapters reflect on the director's polymorphic representations of pleasure and [End Page 274] sexuality. Alice Blackhurst demonstrates how Akerman represents mothers engaging in the ritual of smoking to see themselves independent of maternity, connect with the sensory world, and take pleasure in not having to explain themselves. Investigating how Akerman's films and installations allow for empathetic viewing, So Mayer draws from Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology to scrutinize cinematic attempts to document racial hate and question definitions of human rights. Essays by Albertine Fox, Adam Roberts, and Cyril Béghin study the ethics of the formal choices in Akerman's work with regard to gestures of listening, silence made visible, the musicality of her films, and her dramaturgical uses of light. Emma Wilson and Marion Schmid present Akerman as both a reader and a writer in her literary productions and cinematic adaptations. Refusing to negate the artist's lived experience and position within a global collective memory, this book provides methods of understanding cinema and art in relation to the creator's personal history, particularly with regards to familial memories of trauma. The diverse theoretical frameworks utilized in the essays allow for interdisciplinary discussions of Akerman's oeuvre and propose new approaches for film studies. Elegantly written, this publication will interest scholars of European cinema, documentaries, multimedia art, cinematic adaptations of nineteenth-century literature, cultural memory, and the Holocaust. Tessa Nunn Duke University (NC) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French