92 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
BOOKS
Akerman’s journey in life was not
one of being normal, but rather
of being messy, a stowaway,
a bad passenger, a joke
MY MOTHER LAUGHS
By Chantal Akerman (translated by Daniella
Shreir), Silver Press, 176pp,
ISBN 9780998829081
THE CHANTAL AKERMAN
RETROSPECTIVE
HANDBOOK
Edited by Adam Roberts and Joanna Hogg,
A Nos Amours, 244pp, ISBN 9781916153707
CHANTAL AKERMAN:
AFTERLIVES
Edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson,
Legenda, 184pp, ISBN 9781781886397
Reviewed by Catherine Wheatley
In her afterword
to Chantal
Akerman’s
My Mother
Laughs, critic
Frances Morgan
describes
her attempts
to capture the experience of the late Belgian
filmmaker’s visual work in writing. “Your page
fills with lists and more lists: sequences of
actions (wash, peel, fold, knit, sleep), inventories
of repeated objects, spaces and sounds (phone,
train, brakes, corridor, shoes) and basic
technical observations (slow man, traffic high
in mix).” Morgan is perplexed. Surely, she asks,
“writing is supposed to be more than this?”
How to write about Akerman is the problem
posed by three recent books. Or, to be more
precise – since Akerman herself is one of the
writers concerned with this conundrum –
how to render her in words. Her films are
complex, hypnotic layerings of sound and
image. They are works in which, to borrow
a phrase from one of the director’s most
perceptive critics, Ivone Margulies, “nothing
happens”. Sometimes, they are captivating.
Sometimes – just sometimes – they are boring.
The Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook,
self-published by A Nos Amours, the
programming team founded by filmmakers
Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, offers a quite
literal approach to Akerman’s lists and more lists.
Part exhibition catalogue, part essay collection,
the book is a compendium of screening notes
and hand-outs produced for the exhaustive
retrospective of Akerman’s work organised by
the editors that took place between September
2013 and October 2015. Short extracts of dialogue
from her films sit alongside transcripts of short
talks and reproductions of interviews and essays
first published elsewhere. The book also collates
a number of blog posts written by Roberts for the
A Nos Amours website, and articles co-authored
with Hogg for the Guardian and Frieze magazine.
It is, in the elegant phrasing of Laura Mulvey’s
foreword, “a memorial to an extraordinary
enterprise”. It is also, not incidentally, a beautiful
object, published in the style of a classic Gallimard
novel: its plain blue title embossed upon a smooth
cream cardboard. It is not, however, an easy book
to read, or to navigate. Searching for a particular
essay, for example, I had to riffle through the
pages until I stumbled, almost by chance, across it.
Perhaps this fragmentary approach is apposite
to the subject matter. After all, as the writer and
poet Eileen Myles puts it, Akerman’s films cast us
into a “shifting space” in which we might move all
over the place. Certainly they are far from linear.
Myles is here introducing Daniella Shreir’s careful
translation of Akerman’s Ma mère rit (My Mother
Laughs), a companion piece to No Home Movie, the
last film the director made before her suicide in
- Produced by the feminist publisher Silver
Press, My Mother Laughs is an account of Akerman’s
days spent caring for her ailing mother that
marries – as the best of Akerman’s work does –
mundane detail with profound philosophical
insight, described in a voice that will be familiar to
admirers from her many voiceovers.
In her note on the translation, Shreir confirms
that before starting work she watched videos of
Akerman speaking English, the better to capture
the particular grain and cadence of her speech.
She describes the director’s idiosyncratic use of
language, her disregard of the rules of grammar:
alternating between questions with and without
question marks; bringing in new speakers
without introduction, using tenses inconsistently.
This is rebel writing. It is not normal. But then, as
Myles insists in her foreword, Akerman’s journey
in life was not one of being normal, but rather
of being messy, a stowaway, a bad passenger, a
joke – a “knight errant exemplar” who refused to
duplicate the models society has set out for her.
Just so, much of the criticism that can be found
in these three books might be termed ‘abnormal’,
in the best sense. Non-linear, non-expository,
non-compliant, non-critical. “I might think of this
whole book as a sneeze,” writes Myles, referring
to My Mother Laughs. “Or a black hole imploding.”
Akerman’s style infects the essays that feature
across all three books, which are often written
in the first person, sometimes autobiographical.
A number of them wonder what it is about her
that has such a peculiar effect. For the scholar
Giuliana Bruno, “it is as if this woman, this artist,
had the ability to relay experiences that come
from a place of reflection inside many of us”.
Bruno’s essay is the first piece in Marion Schmid
and Emma Wilson’s Chantal Akerman: Afterlives,
which is more of a standard collection of academic
essays than the other two books. The contributors
to this volume are mostly scholars, but many, such
as Alice Blackhurst and Carol Mavor, are also poets
and fiction writers. The language of film theory
features heavily: an essay on smoking in Akerman’s
films by Blackhurst, for example, features the
dense claim that cigarettes “expose a dialectical
relationship to motherhood: indexing the fraught
mechanisms which subtend the ambivalent
experience of maternity”. But Blackhurst also
describes in lyrical terms the “resuscitating
power” of smoking, borrowing from poet Sharon
Olds the idea of the ‘smoker’s song’. Even here,
then, Akerman’s voice creeps under and subverts
established practices of writing about film.
In their introduction, Schmid and Wilson
argue that Akerman’s work is characterised by
her courage: most of all by the courage to shake
up our habitual ways of being and seeing. In
their different ways, these books respond to
that call: to be, to see, to write, even to publish
beyond the norm. To paraphrase Myles, they
feel like poetry and they feel like action.
Poetry in action: Chantal Akerman
IMAGE: BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE
THREE BOOKS ON CHANTAL AKERMAN
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Books, 3
