Film Comment – July 01, 2019

reads as a tribute to the resilience that continues to drive Natalia

decades after losing her parents and extended family in con-

centration camps. In one poignant passage, Akerman adopts her

mother’s perspective to describe how her obsession with order

and cleanliness developed as a reaction to Auschwitz’s harrowing

conditions. While frustrated with Natalia’s remarks about her

disheveled appearance, Akerman identifies with her need for

beauty and harmony, and recalls being entranced by her mother’s

looks and clothes as a little girl. This vibrant youthfulness contrasts

with the old woman’s crippled body and her aching moans and

gasping breaths—which we hear continuously in No Home Movie

as we watch Natalia go about her daily routine with the help of her

caretaker, Clara (also a recurrent figure in My Mother Laughs).

Regarding herself as an “old child” at odds with adult society,

Akerman muses on her own morbid urges. (She committed

suicide in October 2015.) But unlike No Home Movie, My Mother

Laughs ends on a rather lighthearted note as Akerman comes to

terms with the futility of trying to prepare for her mother’s death

and grounds herself back in

the present by reuniting with

a former girlfriend. At once a

celebration of and a farewell

to life, My Mother Laughs

brims with vulnerability,

wisdom, and the visual and

rhythmic inventiveness that

characterizes Akerman’s

filmmaking. Moving toward

the universal with cathartic

effect, it is destined to take its

place among literature’s most

heartfelt accounts of the patient,

unconditional love binding

mothers and daughters.

July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 79

At once a celebration of and a farewell to life, My Mother Laughsbrims with vulnerability, wisdom, and the

visual and rhythmic inventiveness that characterizes Chantal Akerman’s filmmaking.

There’s little on European-

born studio-era giants—Lang,

Curtiz, Hitchcock, Ophüls, Renoir,

Siodmak, et al—and Jahveri

deliberately avoided soliciting

commentary on one canonical

work, Paris, Texas, though there

are new considerations of Wen-

ders’s Hammettand The State of

Thingscourtesy of Jonathan

Rosenbaum. Rather, the high-

lights of Films from Elsewhere

focus on lesser-known works such

as Babette Mangolte’s The Sky

on Location, Sophie Calle and

Greg Shephard’s No Sex Last

Night, and Peter Watkins’s

Punishment Park, which Leo

Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes

regard as particularly incisive in

its use of the American desert as

“the very heart of the nation’s

conflictual energies,” and its

vision of the country in a “condi-

tion of permanent division.”

I may be biased, but it strikes

me that Films from Elsewhere’s

paramount deficit is its lack of exe-

gesis on the view from Canada,

with Cronenberg, Peter Mettler,

and Michael Snow being but a few

filmmakers whose perspectives

benefit from immediate proximity.

But Jhaveri’s idea is so generative

that a second volume wouldn’t be

unwelcome.—José Teodoro

Maternal Instincts

Chantal Akerman’s writings contemplated life

with and without her ever-central mother

BY YONCA TALU

My Mother Laughs

By Chantal Akerman, translated by Corina Copp

The Song Cave, $20

O

riginally published in french in 2013, and now

available in an English translation by the poet and

critic Corina Copp, the late Belgian filmmaker

Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs is a shattering

memoir about her octogenarian mother’s final years and an

intimate companion piece to her documentary on the same

subject, 2015’s No Home Movie. Unfolding in a nonlinear

associational style that mirrors Akerman’s fluctuating psyche

during trying times, My Mother Laughs charts her symbiotic

love-hate relationship with her mother Natalia, an Auschwitz

survivor whose traumatic past never ceased to haunt the director

and her work since her seminal 1975 breakthrough, Jeanne

Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

Filled with joie de vivre despite her physical disintegration,

Natalia clings to small quotidian pleasures like taking a warm bath

or eating her favorite seafood, while her daughter struggles with the

awareness of her mother’s impending death. Unable to imagine a

future without her but also avoiding her company for fear of being

overwhelmed, Akerman exorcises her demons by writing in the

back room of Natalia’s apartment in Brussels, where she delves into

her childhood memories and dissects her recently ended toxic

affair with a younger woman in New York.

Although permeated with existential malaise, My Mother Laughs

xx

No Home Movie x 2