Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson (review)

Chantal Akerman (1950–2015) is best known as a groundbreaking filmmaker, but her career included a wide range of ventures across the fields of literature, video, museum installations, and music. Since her suicide, virtually all reflections on Akerman function as elegies and requiems, acknowledging the range of her work, but mourning the loss of an artist who did so much to engage her spectators (and readers, viewers, listeners) in the contemplation of the rituals of daily life (especially insofar as women are concerned) and the silences that accompany them. Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson’s anthology offers twelve essays (as well as an excellent Introduction by the editors and a Foreword by Giuliana Bruno), largely focused on Akerman’s later work from the 1990s up to 2015, when her film No Home Movie and her installation ‘Now’ appeared, in the same year as her death. While Akerman’s films and writings are fairly widely available, her installations have an ephemeral quality since they can only be witnessed in the present tense. Some essays (by Albertine Fox and Cyril Béghin) include discussions of the installations, giving readers an opportunity, if not to experience them for themselves, at the very least to observe them in proximity. Indeed, observing in proximity is a major theme of the essays, most poignantly embodied by Akerman’s own status as the child of a survivor of the Shoah. Akerman’s attachment to her mother, Natalia (known as Nelly), is the subject of her last film, No Home Movie, but while that relationship was intimate, it was distant in the sense that Natalia Akerman would not speak of her experiences during the war and Chantal was thus close to, yet cut off from her mother’s life. The relationship intersects with Akerman’s own relationship with her Jewish identity, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’s essay is particularly astute in tracing the ‘geography of the heart’ in connection to the maternal and the traumatic (p. 14). Anat Zanger describes how Akerman’s relationship with the memories of the Holocaust are not her own, but those that have been passed on to her to become part of her experience. Akerman’s most famous film, Jeanne Dielmann, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), has long been understood as a daughter’s observation of the mother’s activities (Alice Blackhurst, p. 44). The essays in the volume, while concerned with more recent work, nonetheless return to the 1975 film numerous times, less to establish a thematic unity but rather to stress the complexity of what Jenny Chamarette calls a ‘consistent paradox’ in her work: the ‘impression of distance through proximity, and of intimacy through distance’ (p. 60). This paradox can be frustrating, as So Mayer argues in her discussion of Sud (1999), where Akerman ‘does not make her own implication in the racialized politics of embodiment visible or palpable’ (p. 109). This is a wonderful and thought-provoking collection, but I look forward to future discussions of Akerman where her long-time partner and collaborator, the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, is more than a brief mention.