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Caring for the other is an ethical as well as an aesthetic question: but where does one end and where does the other begin? Rita Charon, in her work Narrative Medicine (2006), builds a strong case against such separation in medical care, or more precisely, against the negligence of what she calls "narrative competence"—defined as the ability to absorb, interpret, and translate stories of others. Charon compares the work of health professionals to that of a skilled translator, who reads not only words but also silences and metaphors. While Charon focuses primarily on developing the concept of care as aesthetic experience for health professionals, Yuriko Saito's recent publication Aesthetics of Care (2022) draws a parallel between care ethics in general and aesthetic experience. Both, according to Saito, share the same attitudes such as open-mindedness, receptivity, respect, and collaborative spirit. In this paper, I will discuss the concept of care in Belgian film director Chantal Akerman's later works: My Mother Laughs (2019) and No Home Movie (2015). Through different media—the former being a memoir and the latter a documentary—Akerman cares for her mother and bears witness to the end of her mother's life. Taking cues from Charon and Saito, I argue that both media are media of care: they are aesthetic means of bearing witness to illness, trauma, love, and care. Especially through filmmaking, Akerman seems to have achieved the impossible: that is, the desire of the daughter not to take her eyes off her dying mother and look at her eternally. Such desire is also expressed in her film aesthetics: the long take inscribes a waiting becoming infinite; it is as if the movie, or the motion picture, is exposed to both a slow death and a passage to eternity. At the same time, unlike Charon and Saito, who position the carer as an ideal reader and viewer, I argue that Akerman as the carer is by no means perfect: her memoir offers a detailed account of her need to keep a distance and hide from her mother, and of her mother's complaint about Akerman not sharing her life with her. Distance is what Akerman struggles with regarding her relation to her mother, and she struggles with it through writing and filming. In Akerman's case, the ability to achieve the impossible with aesthetic media lies precisely in mediation and mediality: they enable a relation of care that is close, yet still maintains a safe distance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caring for the other is an ethical as well as an aesthetic question: but where does one end and where does the other begin? Rita Charon, in her work Narrative Medicine (2006), builds a strong case against such separation in medical care, or more precisely, against the negligence of what she calls “narrative competence”—defined as the ability to absorb, interpret, and translate stories of others. Charon compares the work of health professionals to that of a skilled translator, who reads not only words but also silences and metaphors. While Charon focuses primarily on developing the concept of care as aesthetic experience for health professionals, Yuriko Saito’s recent publication Aesthetics of Care (2022) draws a parallel between care ethics in general and aesthetic experience. Both, according to Saito, share the same attitudes such as open-mindedness, receptivity, respect, and collaborative spirit. In this paper, I will discuss the concept of care in Belgian film director Chantal Akerman’s later works: My Mother Laughs (2019) and No Home Movie (2015). Through different media—the former being a memoir and the latter a documentary—Akerman cares for her mother and bears witness to the end of her mother’s life. Taking cues from Charon and Saito, I argue that both media are media of care: they are aesthetic means of bearing witness to illness, trauma, love, and care. Especially through filmmaking, Akerman seems to have achieved the impossible: that is, the desire of the daughter not to take her eyes off her dying mother and look at her eternally. Such desire is also expressed in her film aesthetics: the long take inscribes a waiting becoming infinite; it is as if the movie, or the motion picture, is exposed to both a slow death and a passage to eternity. At the same time, unlike Charon and Saito, who position the carer as an ideal reader and viewer, I argue that Akerman as the carer is by no means perfect: her memoir offers a detailed account of her need to keep a distance and hide from her mother, and of her mother’s complaint about Akerman not sharing her life with her. Distance is what Akerman struggles with regarding her relation to her mother, and she struggles with it through writing and filming. In Akerman’s case, the ability to achieve the impossible with aesthetic media lies precisely in mediation and mediality: they enable a relation of care that is close, yet still maintains a safe distance.

This article reads Chantal Akerman's short film Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town, Belgium, 1968) with and against texts by Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Herman Melville. Rather than being merely a precursor to Akerman's later genre‐defining efforts in recording female domestic life, I propose that Saute ma ville displays the potentiality for domestic labor itself to be a destituent practice, rather than an expected component of reproductive, conventionally gendered work. The way that Akerman mobilizes the inoperative actions of her protagonist — a "girl without references" — in her "preference not to" perform the supportive labor of the domestic space and in so doing literally "blow up her town" makes this early work interpretable as structurally concerned and politically motivated recit in the mode of her later films, rather than merely narrative‐focused histoire. The protagonist of the film, in her Chaplinesque resistance to allow household chores to sustain her home, displays a conceptual paradigm in which those still separated from politics and from the space of the polis may yet act politically. Reading the film with Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and Deleuze's and Agamben's responses to that text puts pressure on the limits of Agamben's thought on inoperativity and reinscribes the importance of Akerman's deeply affective cinematography within an anti‐capitalist feminist critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of Akerman's lesser‐known films, Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl in the Late Sixties in Brussels, Belgium, 1993) provides a critical lens for discovering the cinéfille as a concept for Akerman's cinema and feminist film theory. Cinéfille is conceptually both similar to and different from its near homophone, cinéphile, and aligns the moving image (ciné) with the girl (fille). The article develops the concept in relation to three areas: the possibility of a cine‐love before and beyond the masculine frame of cinephilia; Akerman's complex relation to her own cinematic becoming and cinema's historiography; and the distinct temporality and duration of cinema produced by and for the figure of the girl. The article demonstrates that in Akerman's filmmaking, the figure of girl as cinéfille is not a position of resistance, nor a scene of perpetual adolescence, but a positive queer feminist creative engagement with the possibility of new forms of knowing, relating, and desiring. Attending to the emergence of the cinéfille and cinefillia allows us to articulate a sense of looking back that is not simply tied to nostalgia and loss. It also reveals a moment of creative discovery and intensity that emerges in the durational aesthetic form for which Akerman's cinema is well known. The cinéfille is a form of becoming realized in cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Cinema is one of the tools that republish and establish definitions of gender in society. So it can be assumed that the filmmaker can subvert and conceal these concepts in this way. Chantal Ackerman uses arrangements to consult with feminists and the dominant elite to expose hidden ideological contradictions. It seems permissible for the characters in the film to be challenging the traditional characters and so selecting the most special posts in these fields, by accepting many different norms for women. It is assumed that he wants to show in his works, by the reflecting women in the field of work, family and society, how affect the ideology and discourse of gender the formation of attitudes and perceptions of individuals, its relations and social interactions.This is manifested in the content of these films, feminist theory in postmodern, feminist literature, such as Laura Malloy will be used, and who believes the birth of creativity. There is always a way to change the code, which has become power. These images prove cinematically that the domestic lives of women is an artistic thing. In other words the private lives of women are being destroyed by the forces of history as much as they are living in the political arena. Besides that, unquestioning, unchallenged, and irreversible pressure on women in family roles, such as in prison, is social stupidity. And eventually leads to destruction. This is the kind of violence that can lead to more violence.

El presente trabajo propone indagar en lo cotidiano para generar formas basadas en la imagen como dispositivo performativo. De esta manera, el texto se articula a partir del concepto de performatividad de la imagen desde el proceso creativo de Chantal Akerman, para recuperar la potencia formadora de la imagen y la importancia que adquiere en nuestra vida, ante una realidad anestesiada por la repetición de imágenes. Así, con el trabajo se pretende contestar a esas imágenes desde la performatividad para abrir imaginarios posibles. Para ello, el texto se organiza según una aproximación a la obra de la cineasta Chantal Akerman. Trabajar con la imagen a través de lo autobiográfico, lo cotidiano y la memoria, experimentar con los elementos que nos ofrece el medio artístico para crear nuevas relaciones, anotaciones para una investigación artística desde la performatividad como emergencia.

Copyright of Revista Fotocinema is the property of Revista Fotocinema and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article sets out to review the films of Chantal Akerman, mainly those that she made in the 1970s and 1980s, observing how her filmmaking formulates a journey to and from the home against the background of the historical scene post 1968. Through a selection of examples, I will argue that the singularities of her filmmaking—the exploration of suspended time, the preference for a frontal gaze at the female body, or the inclination to autobiography, being the most noteworthy traits—have their basis in her critical observation of the life of women in social spaces, and also in a commitment to their emancipation through desire. Seen in perspective, the path that Akerman takes is one of unstable—though coherent—movement through the rejection of domesticity as the place from which the oppression of women originates, the flight from this (in other words, nomadism), and a search for other interiors that function as the opposite of the family home. These other interiors are empty and anonymous rooms where time and the rules that govern society are suspended, where Akerman herself, or other characters who are her alter ego, go from one corporeal state to another, carrying out the basic activities of the body, such as eating, sleeping or having sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O artigo observa a condição de deslugar focando o olhar crítico-analítico prioritariamente no universo do cineasta, considerando que na pós-modernidade e contemporaneidade proliferam as produções que se fazem território autorreferencial do criador. Parece ser o caso de Chantal Akerman, cuja filmografia apresenta indícios do ‘eu’ no âmbito ficcional e no documental, permitindo identificar, na dimensão do que se entende como deslugar, o predomínio de um peculiar, oscilante pertencimento/não-pertencimento manifesto em constantes deslocamentos e perambulações. Neste sentido, à luz das reflexões acerca do filme como ato teórico propostas por Jacques Aumont, o estudo parte do método de análise comparativa para observar excertos dos filmes Je, tu, il, elle (1974), News from home (1976) e Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) a fim de examinar o pensamento autobiográfico que sustenta as narrativas da diretora belga — buscando confirmar a hipótese de que as labilidades espaciais e psicológicas consistem no traço distintivo de seu trabalho. O objetivo do estudo é investigar se e como tal característica é transversal na obra da diretora belga, ali impregnando a inteligência criadora de modo a afetar diretamente as articulações poéticas e sensíveis. Ao comparar as declarações de Akerman no documentário I don’t belong anywhere (2015) com as diegeses do corpus em questão, os resultados obtidos indicam ser possível, por ora, confirmar a manifestação a condição de deslugar tanto nas personagens, quanto em quem as criou.

This research focuses on Chantal Akerman’s documentary ‘News from Home’ (1977), as an example of an autobio-graphical documentary made by women. The filmmaker’s story goes through the foundations of the filial maternal relationship to provoke a reflection on the relationship between women, the generational pulse, the day-to-day routine or the extraordinary nature of their lives, the emotional void. Starting from the typologies of autobiograph-ical inscription (self-portrait, family cinema, amateur cinema, travel diary, filmed diary, filmed letters) the analysis of this piece will also allow us to identify many of the characteristics of contemporary autobiographical documentary, such as the renunciation of objectivity, the breaking of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, or the use of a particular audiovisual grammar that acts as a catalyst for the expression of two universes: Akerman’s intimate world and its symbolic representation in contemporary documentary narrative.

This article sets out to review the films of Chantal Akerman, mainly those that she made in the 1970s and 1980s, observing how her filmmaking formulates a journey to and from the home against the background of the historical scene post 1968. Through a selection of examples, I will argue that the singularities of her filmmaking—the exploration of suspended time, the preference for a frontal gaze at the female body, or the inclination to autobiography, being the most noteworthy traits—have their basis in her critical observation of the life of women in social spaces, and also in a commitment to their emancipation through desire. Seen in perspective, the path that Akerman takes is one of unstable—though coherent—movement through the rejection of domesticity as the place from which the oppression of women originates, the flight from this (in other words, nomadism), and a search for other interiors that function as the opposite of the family home. These other interiors are empty and anonymous rooms where time and the rules that govern society are suspended, where Akerman herself, or other characters who are her alter ego, go from one corporeal state to another, carrying out the basic activities of the body, such as eating, sleeping or having sex.

Making films can be a lifeline, an aid to going on living when (we feel) the world around us has disappeared. Looking, showing that there's a "there there," recording the present moment and thereby preserving it, can, for a time, make us not feel the nothingness within us. But the rescue that comes from making a film is always provisional. Why? Because every film has an end. Because if there are no more films to make, if there is nothing that deserves to be looked at (the worst case scenario), going on living will have exhausted itself, and taking one's own life (if indeed there was a life to take) may seem the only option. Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie – a film recording the slow death of her mother in her Brussels apartment – is this worst case scenario. A moving record of the psychic devastation that comes about when we, slowly but surely, lose the one object worth looking at. Panic, depression, hopelessness, and a fierce determination to go where the disappeared object went. To this last home where nothing no longer moves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Onde está o histórico e o político quando uma cineasta recusa os procedimentos de rememoração documentais como o arquivo, o testemunho e a encenação, para apenas contemplar espaços de conflito no Leste Europeu de 1993 e em Israel de 2006, sem a eles se imiscuir? Buscando responder tal questão, este artigo produz o argumento de que através da escrita de si – de uma autobiografia instituída nas lacunas da memória sobre o Holocausto – os filmes D’est e Là-bas, de Chantal Akerman, alcançam o político por uma via intersticial – aquela dos afetos e das brechas - e formula uma figura palimpséstica para a história, que não encadeia passado e presente.

The article addresses what we will refer to as absorptive cinema. It comprises films of slow duration where the characters are depicted in absorptive situations, i.e., engaged in small daily actions or in situations of self-abandonment, often apprehended by the camera in its nondramatic unfolding in real time. Absorptive cinema's most fruitful moment occured between the mid-1990s and the first half of the 2010s, when it constituted one the most recurring stylistic devices in contemporary cinema. This concept of absorption originates from the famous study by Michael Fried on the relationship between painting and the beholder in the 18th century. The conceptual and historical problematizations implied by this use of a theoretical model borrowed from another field of studies will be taken into account. The analysis of Wang Bing's Father and sons (Fu yu zi, 2014) will provide a guideline for the investigation. In the end, we will raise the question of a possible overcoming of the aesthetics of absorption in the context of Brazilian contemporary cinema, in which a trend towards the frontality of representation seems to be replacing the primacy of absorption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the sound strategies used in Saute ma ville (1968) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), both films directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. The film analysis investigates how Akerman creates the domestic claustrofobia sensations, and how the whispered song in the first short film, Saute ma ville, and the music heard on the radio by Jeanne Dielman and her son cooperate to the development of such sensations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon several theories explored in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in History and Memory, one of the few existing volumes that comprehensively study the phenomenon home movies, this paper explores how the concepts of domestic space and narration are explored, unconventionally, in a series of non-fiction films which draw upon various types of "found" material and/or footage relating to the filmmakers' domestic spaces and lives, with narration being a key element in constructing meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a common feature of moving image works that they spotlight journeys voluntarily undertaken by artists seeking to engage with different cultures and landscapes. This article focuses on Measures of Distance (1988) by Mona Hatoum and News from Home (1977) by Chantal Akerman, two itinerant works that explore the relationship between mother and daughter across continental divides. The maternal separation intersects with a feminist imperative to widen the artists' creative horizons in the 1970s and 1980s. These works are set in a broader canvas of what Jane Mills terms 'sojourner' films by artists such as Tacita Dean, Jonas Meka, b.h. Yael and Jini Rawlings, works that encompass transnational odysseys of return and pilgrimages 'footstepping' notable earlier travellers. A distinction is drawn between cross-border works that predominantly respond to a sense of adventure or a need to seek out the balm of wild environments and those that set up a dialogue between locations overseas and narratives and sensibilities the filmmaker brings from elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chantal Akerman's documentary Sud [South, 1999] investigates the brutal racist murder of James Byrd Jr that took place in Jasper, Texas in 1998. Sud is a socio-political documentary, but it is also, as the director explains, an experimental film about the relation between physical and mental landscapes, between social and affective ecologies. This article places Akerman's film in the context of contemporary debates about non-anthropocentric ontologies. Whereas some critics have been keen to assert a strong distinction between socio-political analysis on the one hand and affective and ecological analysis on the other, Sud demonstrates not only how these approaches can combine but also how the ecological and the affective can extend a political critique of inequality. To explain how this is achieved, the article draws on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, and introduces the notion of the "spectator-environment." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elucidates the complex ethical paradigm at the heart of Chantal Akerman's work and thought, arguing first that her ethics are as concerned with the figure of the self as they are with the figure of the other and that, second, these ethics exist as much in the spatial and durational structures of her work as in the content of her images. In this way, this article contends that approaching Akerman's work through the question of ethics allows one to see consistencies across her film and installation work, even as her aesthetic strategies shift across the different dispositifs of the cinema and the gallery or museum. Addressing these shifts, I offer the concept of Akerman's 'ethical pedagogy of the image' – a term that implies both a method and a site of instruction. Drawing on these two meanings, this article ultimately reveals that Akerman's pedagogical aim involves turning viewers' ethical attention back on to themselves – to offer a prompt and a space for reconsideration of their own ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, Chantal Akerman created two works – a feature film Tomorrow We Move (Akerman, 2004) and a video installation To Walk Next to One's Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (Akerman, 2004) – which feature the diary that her Jewish maternal grandmother had kept before dying at Auschwitz. Prompted by the contradictions manifest in the installation (spontaneity vs control; uniqueness vs familiarity), I will argue for an intricate interrelation between the documentary video and the fiction film. In relation to the thematic content of both works, I will subsequently demonstrate that the 'porous' form of narrative that this assemblage generates allows Akerman to challenge and transform dominant conceptions of storytelling, identity, history and memory. In particular, through analysing the modes of writing she portrays in both films in relation to Virginia Woolf 's work, I will contend that Akerman is deeply aware of the political implications of thinking porously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Disappearance' in Chantal Akerman's films means, in this essay, disappearance from a specific person. The attributes of the one who disappears are charged with special meaning for the one left behind, the one affected by the disappearance. It is not that someone used to be present and now they are not, but that one person is no longer there for another person. A dyad is involved, but its presence is felt from the perspective of half of that dyad. Whence the aptness of Barthes's prologue to The Lover's Discourse, that today that discourse is one of extreme loneliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Chantal Akerman is generally considered a feminist cineast by the commentators of her work, especially regarding her 1976 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. This film perfectly fits into the cognitive orientation of the women’s movement of the second wave in politicizing domestic work. I argue in this article that the feminist point of view of the author is graspable in two cinematic dispositives used throughout her work: firstly, the way she forces us to look at the banal generally devalued, and secondly, the autoethnographic component of her cinema affirming the fluidity of the subject and a situated point of view. Chantal Akerman is precursor of a practice theorized since the 1980s as a consequence of the « Crisis of representation », consisting in shifting the focus from to Other to the self.

Pour réaliser ses documentaires, Chantal Akerman a traversé des frontières en filmant des personnes souffrantes, menacées, vulnérables. Cette errance permanente dans les territoires des autres lui a permis d’élaborer au fil des films une mémoire à soi. Nous suivrons dans le cadre de cet article une trajectoire allant de D’Est à No Home Movie, son dernier film, en passant par Sud, De l’autre côté et Là-bas, des œuvres où l’approche du réel, toujours au bord de la fiction, trace une fuite en avant lui permettant de mieux comprendre les liens perdus de son origine juive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]