A home movie calls to mind childhood memory. They’re time capsules, going back to an age before we know the truth about the world we live in. They’re salt packets of nostalgia, nearly always showing us as children, wide-eyed and ready to claw at a world we don’t yet know can snap back.
This is no home movie, even though when we age, and are still someone’s child, still our mother’s daughters, we grow wiser, and less open to the world. Childhood is trusting, thinking the wide earth will have the same open arms we are raised in. The same arms we run into on a grainy video camera with the date and time flashing in a corner. But when that red recording light stops, when the camera is set down as the wonder fades, the world loses that safety.
This is the premise of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie. The same kind of grainy video diary as before, but knowing now how the world can take and take.
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So many of us take our mothers for granted. Motherhood is not a thankful role in our society, oft forgotten. And even more often assumed to be a constant presence. We hardly see this mother figure in our lives as a person in the same way as we are. Instead seen as a protector since birth, and we avoid dwelling upon what our mothers have been through.
No Home Movie is a final plea for understanding, a raw character study of Akerman’s own mother, and how what she doesn’t say sometimes means more.
The opening shot is near static, a dry, spidery tree gently rocked by the wind ripping through the desert. Its branches are withered like the hands of an old woman. Perhaps it is mother earth herself, on her last breaths, and gone quiet.
This single tree is the last of the greatest mother of all that we can see, and it can hardly move its wooden hands anymore. Age takes away these movements, and even when we can still think for ourselves, time rips the words from our lips. Sometimes these words are taken by this new fog that rolls over, the storm of Alzheimer’s and dementia that sends memories far back in the past, but some of these words are unspeakable anyway.
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To hear the horrors our mothers have seen is alien. They are strong to us, unbeatable, and that is because so much is left unspoken. Akerman’s mother notably never spoke about her experiences during the Holocaust, one hard wall drawn in her daughter’s cinema of emotional vulnerability.
The two’s relationship was last explored on this scale in News From Home, a series of unedited letters in a travelogue on the loneliness and distance created by this move half across the world. So much gets lost in translation when we write over time, letters taking a miniature age to arrive, and last writing’s problems feel trivial by the time of the next.
No Home Movie is a final show of familial intimacy. Living together the way you do as a child, but now roles reverse as her mother’s day to day memory slowly fades. Our mothers care for us as children, and tell us we have a duty to care for them as they age.
These relationships grow messy, we lose the ability to understand the other and why they say these things. But as we grow older, we grow more and more like our mothers, perhaps against our younger wills. This is where we learned communication, it is who taught us to speak and how to move through the world. And the bond between mother and daughter is often the hardest to shake.
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It’s incredibly sad this is Chantal Akerman’s unplanned final film, as it is an intensely melancholy (though quite tender) way to go out. In a way, her mother had been the thread tying her films together, a body of work tackling the complexities of motherly love, the loneliness of travelling the expanse of the world, Jewish identity, and the rules women are expected to live by.
It’s hard to imagine her work without the complex relationship with her mother, something that she picked apart in her lens, a plea for understanding on film. Trapped within her Brussels apartment, it’s a fitting closing, limited rooms echo the claustrophobic fatalism of Saute Ma Ville, the playfully mortal reel that started it all.
No Home Movie is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.
