Making Sense of Life Without Her: On Chantal… | Little White Lies

Mak­ing Sense of Life With­out Her: On Chan­tal Akerman

19 Feb 2025

Words by Esmé Holden

A person sitting on the floor in a cluttered room, with another person visible in the background through a doorway.
A person sitting on the floor in a cluttered room, with another person visible in the background through a doorway.
A reflec­tion on try­ing to make sense of the sense­less, through the work of a Bel­gian master.

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.

A woman sitting at a kitchen table in a small, tiled room with a window and curtains.

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.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.