Making Sense of Life Without Her: On Chantal Akerman

Content Warning: Discussion of suicide.

For R, wherever you are.

From the start, it seemed like Chantal Akerman’s work was haunted by the spectre of her eventual death. In her first short out of film school, Blow Up My Town, she plays a young girl destructively miming the acts of domesticity that women are burdened with – in, what Akerman called a “mirror image” of Jeanne Dielman, she is mostly confined to the kitchen – while slowly being suffocated as gas from the stove fills the room. She falls unconscious and we cut to black on the sound of an explosion. It sounds artificial and meaningless; hardly the cathartic destruction the title promises. Instead her death is nothing but another sad suicide.

Few artists have so captured the raw, unbearable brutality of being alive. Like a whole career expanded out from the scene in Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf where Max Von Sydow forces Liv Ullmann – and by proxy, us – to sit still and wait for a minute to pass, to feel the full weight of that time. In opposition to mainstream films that pass the time, Akerman wanted to make you “aware of every second passing through your body”; you share in the pain of Jeanne Dielman’s domestic servitude not by abstractly empathising with the images on screen, but by being forced to share the time with her.

It’s easy to project that pain onto Akerman herself because her films were often so personal and intimate. In News from Home she reads letters from her mother over footage of New York City, the place she moved away from her to be. It captures the complications of mother-daughter relations up so close that at points it’s almost too much to bear; those connections that are fraught and difficult but that you can’t quite let yourself let go of. Indeed, eighteen months after her mother died, and two months after the release of the film she made about her final days, Chantal Akerman died by suicide.

I can’t remember if I first heard about Akerman before or after her death, but it was close to it. The first film I saw was her last, No Home Movie, largely because of the nature of her death; I wanted to see the thoughts of someone so close to the end. And while at first there is such immediacy to the scenes of her mother shot on low-rent digital cameras and her BlackBerry, as the film increasingly dissipates into landscape shots of an Israeli desert – like the two sections of News From Home moving further and further apart – it becomes more elusive and difficult. I couldn’t find what I was looking for; the pieces no longer seemed to fit together.

I’d felt like this before, a few years before I knew about Chantal. I was fourteen and walking home from school, down the road used exclusively by students coming to and from. I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Our relationship was never uncomplicated but when we hugged she almost jumped into me. I had always loved her and in that moment everything else dissolved. We said nothing of significance to one another, nothing I really remember, we just enjoyed lingering in each other’s presence for a minute or two. Then she turned to leave, she touched me one last time and said “see you soon”. That day she went to the train station and killed herself.

For a few days I could hardly talk. I cried at a time when my feelings were too bottled up to come out in any way but anger and bitterness. When I pulled myself together enough to put flowers down at the place she died, all the bouquets and letters and pictures had been removed by the council. I left mine anyway, knowing they’d be thrown away by the end of the night. At school I would write her name on my body in permanent marker, I don’t really know why. I guess it was some way to mark the pain. And slowly, as those last words started to fill up my brain, they started to suffocate me.

As I spoke to more and more people, I realised that a lot of us saw her that day. She walked down the street at the exact time everyone was leaving, as if she wanted to make a final appearance, to say goodbye or to send a message of some kind. We really connected through our shared suffering. Sometimes we shared it in destructive ways but we didn’t know what else to do. She knew where my head was at, and so it felt like she was telling me that I would join her soon – that she’d see me when I, inevitably, gave up the fight too. But it doesn’t quite fit, it all feels too neat. She could just as easily have meant nothing by it, “see you soon” is exactly the kind of filler phrase you say just to fill the space in conversation. I don’t know. I’ll never know.

Suicide is an act that makes someone forever remote from the world, like Anna at the end of Les Rendez-vous d’Anna leaving all the messages on her phone unanswered; closing herself off from everyone and disappearing from their lives and the film all at once. Chantal’s work will keep her alive in some sense, we’ll keep talking about her and sharing in her time and pain for as long as we’re watching movies, but so much more is gone. To canonise a story of her death, neatly aligned with the clues left in her work, is to set her in stone; to truly acknowledge that she was alive is to admit that she has taken her reasons with her.

But it feels impossible to sit in the cold indifference of death, you can’t help but scramble through what’s left behind sometimes. Sometimes you’ll find yourself reconfiguring the pieces, trying to tell a newer, cleaner story, sometimes you’ll find yourself trying to connect your grief to the work of a director who only came to mean something to you years later, to try and create some sense of continuity. And sometimes you’ll find yourself, twelve years after the fact, flipping through notes you made years before, through old photos and Facebook posts; sometimes you’ll find yourself trying to make sense of the senseless, or trying to turn that pain into something useful. Sometimes you’ll find yourself here.

Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception continues at the BFI and across the UK throughout February and March.