No Home Movie par Chantal Akerman

Abstract

Film edited by Michèle Bissière Akerman, Chantal, réal. No Home Movie. Int. Chantal Akerman, Natalia Ackerman. Liaison Cinématographique, 2015. When David Jenkins asked Agnès Varda if her documentary Les plages d’Agnès (2008) was to be her “swan song,” she responded: “Yes, I guess.” Fortunately for her fans, Varda has since directed a mini-series for television and has participated internationally in installations of her works. Sadly, Chantal Akerman’s final documentary, No Home Movie, will stand as her farewell film. Akerman—a pioneer of experimental film, with landmark works such as Je Tu Il Elle (1974) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), as well as the more mainstream Un divan à New York (1996)—took her own life 5 Oct. 2015, shortly after the premiere of No Home Movie at the Locarno Film Festival. Akerman ends her directorial career with a documentary that takes on the painful plight of filming the end of the life of her aging mother,Natalia Akerman—from her aching limbs and failing hearing to her unfaltering love for her daughter. Critical reviews deeming the work no better than an amateurish home movie—despite its title—are highly reductive when viewed in the context of Akerman’s œuvre. The film, like many of her previous works, is characterized by extremely long takes—some of the footage from her mother’s Brussels apartment consists of two-to-three-minute shots of a salon in which no one enters or leaves and during which all that is heard is the occasional muffled footstep. For a viewer familiar with Akerman’s work, the filming of an empty room with nothing heard but distant footfalls is emblematic of her talent for elevating the banal to an art form and, in this case, is further significant in its attempt to immortalize her mother’s presence in all its forms before it becomes an all too painful absence. Visits to the apartment are punctuated by questions that delve into her mother’s childhood and marriage as well as banal inquiries, such as: “Is that all you’re going to eat?” These interior scenes alternate with long takes of travel through rugged countryside. The extremely long tracking shots of desert scenes, filmed right to left (a stylistic choice often perceived as a metaphor for death), are laden with meaning when contrasted with a conversation that occurs at the end between Sylviane (Akerman’s sister) and her mother. Natalia regrets that Chantal never tells her “anything important” and expresses her desire to know what happens when her daughter is in Berlin or New York—“everything interesting that goes on in her life.”The long tracking shots, as well as other stationary shots of fields, seem to offer a response to her mother’s lamentation: when Chantal is away from her mother, landscapes are seen but nothing really happens. As Ackerman states in Marianne Lambert’s documentary about her life, I Don’t Belong Anywhere (2015),“I realized that, deep down, my mother was at the heart of my work.” Thus it 266 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 267 is only fitting that her last work feature the genesis of both her work and life—her mother. Boise State University (ID) Mariah Devereux Herbeck Ciment, Michel. Le cinéma en partage: entretiens avec N.T. Binh. Paris: Payot, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7436-2940-3. Pp. 416. 21 a. Inutile de présenter aux cinéphiles français et américains l’omniprésent Ciment tant est palpable son influence dans le paysage critique. Les Français le connaissent avant tout comme coordinateur de Positif, comme intervenant régulier dans l’émission Le masque et la plume sur France Inter, ou pour sa propre émission hebdomadaire sur France Culture, Projection privée. Les Américains reconnaîtront en lui l’auteur de livres sur de grands réalisateurs américains, à commencer par Stanley Kubrick, auquel il consacra le premier ouvrage majeur. Trop occupé et de son propre aveu trop impatient pour écrire un livre autobiographique, le critique s’est laissé interviewer par un collaborateur fidèle, N.T. Binh.Après un compte rendu autobiographique...