Synopsis
Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment.
2015 Directed by Chantal Akerman
Documentary about humans dealing with changing technology, the basic concepts of communication, cinema, and Akerman's mother, seen in her Brussels apartment.
CW: concentration camps, suicide mention
What tragedies have our mothers endured. It seems clear to me that the world's improvements are minimal, that what "progress" we make in how oppressed people are treated by our oppressors is a minor fraction of what we deserve, of actual equity, equality, community. Still, there has been some progress, some minor gains in certain parts of the world, tiny improvements. It's better now, and it was worse in our mothers' time. In our grandmothers' time. In our great-grandmothers' time. Seen as a whole, it was worse (in specific, it is hard to imagine a worse time or world than the one Chantal Akerman's mother experienced). Even our mothers who never saw the inside of…
"The opening frame of Chantal Akerman’s final film No Home Movie is a near-static shot of a barren tree being torn apart by vicious bursts of wind. The old tree doesn’t fall, but you have to wonder how it persists in spite of the surroundings. She holds her camera on this tree for about four minutes, allowing the viewer to feel the passage of time and ponder the reasons why she held the camera on that tree for so long and what it could possibly mean. The image doesn’t necessarily open itself up to easy interpretation—Akerman was never one to make an easy picture—but it informs the type of experience that Chantal’s mother, Natalia, is going through during her final…
"Where is Chantal?"
Tying her shoes, getting up, closing the curtains, and leaving the frame as composed as she began it. Sounds continue, but their sources are offscreen.
I don't know what drove Chantal Akerman to share so much of herself with us, but I wish I could thank her for it.
To the mother who raised me on her own when I was too young to understand all the sacrifices she made. All the money she invested in my education and extracurriculars while she spent her nights in our apartment doing extra work to pay for it all, all the time she spent going to night-school so she could get her own education to help support us better. As a kid I could tell she was giving so much of herself to me and I would always tell her "you don't need to buy this for me" or "I don't need anything for my birthday, I promise" because I hated seeing her spend for me. I wanted to be small, unobtrusive,…
It’s difficult to watch this film objectively without considering the tragic circumstances that surround it. Its normal to watch a film in which the characters/actors that occupy it are now deceased, but in the case of No Home Movie, it almost feels like that element is part of the film. It reads part love letter, and part suicide note. It’s filled with such jarring emotional contrasts: maternal love & memories of the holocaust. Akerman’s mother asks over Skype why she is filming her and she replies “Because I want to show that there is no distance in the world.” The connection between her and her mother is indisputably strong, one can only imagine the heartbreak Akerman felt in losing her considering…
deterioration
natalia akerman died in april, 2014
deteri ration
chantel akerman died on october 5th, 2015. reportedly, it was a suicide.
det ri ration
my grandfather has a habit of repeating the same stories over and over. he’ll be half an hour into a story, and I’ll finish his sentence for him when he’s struggling to remember. a confused look might temporarily fill his face before my grandmother will say something like “oh ralph, you’ve told them this story already!” the first time I remember hearing the story was when I was 15 or so. he sat me down in a subway outside my high school. cookie in hand, I listened to his life story. it might have been hours…
super frustrating. lost in the limbo between hyper-personal document and universal essay film, Akerman's portrait of her mother's final years (months?) is exactly the kind of record that we always tell ourselves we'll make of our parents and grandparents... a video testament of who they were. telling their stories. usually about the holocaust. the ones told by Akerman's mother can only have value to us in the abstract, as they're much too specific and scattershot. the film is perhaps more successful, albeit more frustrating, when it twists the emphasis of the title...
not "no home movie," as if the title is a boast, but rather "no home / movie"... a movie about a nomadic existence, Akerman's untethered lifestyle (she's in…
We're all alone, even if we share our loneliness with others. There are bursts of childish exuberance as simple as pop music playing on the radio, mostly heartbreaking because of how much of a literal home movie this is. This is exactly the movie I would make in the same situation (I'm not saying I'm anywhere near as good as Akerman is) which further reinforces my belief that Akerman is one of the greatest artists ever to have lived. I mostly love the gaps: only viewing the subject of the entire film through a doorway, or a shot through a window onto the street - wanting to get out of your confines (mentally and physically) but your only escape is…
[6]
My capsule review from my TIFF Wavelengths coverage for MUBI:
To me, it has always seemed churlish and a little passive-aggressive for a critic to label a film “not for beginners,” but the god’s honest truth is, No Home Movie is not for beginners. It’s not just that Akerman’s latest is a challenging piece of cinema, although it certainly is that in several respects. It is probably both Akerman’s most openly autobiographical work. (It is an extended portrait of the filmmaker’s mother Natalia, in the period just prior to her death.) It is also Akerman’s most formally neutral work, at least on the surface—long takes with a digital camera, Mrs. Akerman puttering around her apartment, eating cereal, discussing 1939…
No, Chantal, it’s barely a movie at all. Okay, that’s a little harsh, but Akerman really loves her still shots of static nothingness, doesn’t she. It’s like, oh there’s a shot of a tree. Look, it’s a kitchen table. Wow, is that a patio chair sitting there, all by its lonesome? How eye-opening. Akerman is a keen purveyor of the less-is-more approach, but what works to draw you in to its protagonists deteriorating psyche in Jeanne Dielman, for example, seems nothing more than empty filler to pad out a feature-length running time. Still, there’s a part of this that feels intentionally detached, as if Chantal is purposefully uncompromising in her quest to document her own mother in the only way…
21/100
Starts out excruciating, like Jeanne Dielman minus Jeanne Dielman—shots of empty rooms (into which Akerman's mother may or may not occasionally, fleetingly wander) alternating with shots of human stasis. No context is provided for what's being shown, nor is there any particular reason why the absence of context would make the footage intriguing; in many cases, it's hard to distinguish between this movie and what would have been captured had someone just inadvertently pushed the record button on a camera while setting it down. (One composition neatly bisects the frame between light and darkness, but it's an anomaly.) Eventually, Akerman does start talking to her mother, which is a blessed relief. Rarely, though, do these conversations transcend mundane chitchat—there's…