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.

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