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Film Fests & Special Screenings Movies & TV

Director Chantal Akerman refused to play nice

NO HOME MOVIE, directed by Chantal Akerman, 115 minutes, Monday (April 18), 6:30 and 9 pm. Rating: NNNN I DON’T BELONG ANYWHERE: THE CINEMA OF CHANTAL AKERMAN, directed by Marianne Lambert, 67 minutes, Wednesday (April 20), 6:15 pm. Rating: NNNN See listing.


The late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman was not the most user-friendly artist. 

Identity-politics activists grumbled when she refused to allow her movies to be entered into LGBT or women’s festivals. Don’t label me, she said. People looking for jolts per second and who love to be manipulated by images, story and sentiment find her work too difficult. 

But anyone who likes movies that subvert cinematic conventions finds her work thrilling. I’m one of those people. I can watch a long take unfold in real time for minutes without feeling any panic. What’s not to like about a screenwriter who’s interested in women’s inner lives and who wants to challenge the male gaze?

As someone on a mission to convert film lovers into Akerman appreciaters, I’m chuffed that TIFF and the Images Festival are paying tribute to Akerman. Two films in particular that are screening this week at the TIFF Bell Lightbox will be welcomed by Akerman fans but could also turn on cinephiles who don’t quite get her.

I only wish TIFF were screening them in reverse order. No Home Movie, Akerman’s final film (she died in October 2015), screens two days before Marianne Lambert’s excellent documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema Of Chantal Akerman. The latter is a superb introduction to the work of a unique artist, although Lambert does show the endings to some of Akerman’s films, sometimes stealing their thunder.

I-DON'T-BELONG-ANYWHERE-01_Benjamin-Charier_Image-courtesy-Icarus-Films.jpg

I Don’t Belong Anywhere


Anchored by a series of interviews with Akerman, the doc features excerpts from the films and commentary from Akerman that sheds light on her intentions. 

Her attention to detail was astonishing. Whereas another director might demand that an actor wear high heels to comment on character, Akerman knew exactly how high the heel had to be to get the precise sound she wanted.

She didn’t film scenes in real time only to bug people – she wanted viewers to bring their own feelings to the scenario. Gus Van Sant, who was deeply influenced by her, comments in the film that there’s a beauty in the way Akerman makes viewers feel time pass.

The film’s title refers to Akerman’s ping-ponging from Brussels, where her mother lived, to Paris to New York, which left her feeling like she had no roots. Belgium felt most like home, if only because her mother lived there. 

It’s fitting that No Home Movie is a documentary about her relationship with her mother, Natalia, who, Akerman says in Lambert’s documentary, was always at the core of her work. News From Home, one of her early pieces, features scenes of New York, where Akerman was living when she made the film, with Akerman reading letters from her mother. Her breakout film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, about a housewife’s everyday activities, was inspired by her mother’s life.

No Home Movie is Akerman’s last attempt to get Natalia talking about her experience as a Holocaust survivor. It has all Akerman’s hallmarks: an opening shot of the desert that lasts more than two minutes – so you can feel the wind a seemingly static camera that “waits for the shot,” happy to take its time until a character walks into the frame a sequence with her mother peeling potatoes that echoes a famous scene in Dielman.

Many have griped that Akerman’s work is cold – I’ve never found it so – but in this final movie, the love she feels for her mother, her patience with Natalia’s failing memory and the way she shares her ideas are deeply moving. The two talk often on Skype while Akerman shoots the computer screen, prompting her mother to ask, “Why do you always film?”

“To show there is no distance in the world,” Akerman says at one point “to show how small the world is,” she says at another. As in her features, this movie makes every word, every image count.

No doubt Akerman would refuse to call No Home Movie a documentary.

“As soon as you frame something,” she says in Lambert’s film, “it’s fiction.”

movies@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole

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