29.10.2024

dear Chantal,

i’m neither the first, nor the last person to write a letter that you will never be able to read. incidentally, this is also the name of a short film Nicolás Pereda dedicated to you a few years ago: Querida Chantal.

when I visited your grave in Père Lachaise this spring—yours was the very first I searched for, and I got lost, stuck wandering and circling around a little corner on a sloped curve, not far from Eugène Delacroix’s mausoleum, finding it just as I was about to give up—one of the things left for you by other visitors was a letter, its paper rippled by the rain. the faded, neat handwriting allowed me to make out just a few words: “Dear Chantal.” I left you some withered dandelions, hoping you might blow a few wishes back to us, those that are still here.

this month marks the start of the ninth year since you left. i got the news when I was in Belgium, your homeland, while i was at the first film festival that i ever attended outside Romania, in Namur, as part of a youth jury. we all understood what the newspapers’ omission of the cause of your death really meant. i remember the festival displaying the front page of a magazine with your portrait on it in the meeting area. i remember marveling at the aquamarine blue of your eyes; until then, i’d only seen black-and-white images of you from your youth. Strangely enough, the photo that was accompanying the news of your death—an almost impersonal agency press shot—made you feel more tangible than I’d ever known you to be.

nine years later, I am a different person, and so is the world. and i am just about to change again. during this time, your films have often been a light in the dark. and now the clock has just moved forward.

with your permission, Chantal, i will write you a few letters this coming month. i have the feeling that it will be a hard one. i will try to guide myself after you.

02.-04. 11

dear Chantal,

these days, I’ve been mostly unwell, spending most of my time lying in bed—I would have written to you more often, but all strength has simply left my body.

it’s partly somatic, but it also has a little bit of that asthenic side of myself that made me connect so powerfully with the first film of yours I saw in college: Je Tu Il Elle, especially wth the first half-hour, spent with the character you play as she navigates a period of solitude that felt very familiar. my life back then resembled your character’s life: i was also going through a period of (more or less self-imposed) seclusion, rarely leaving the house, barely eating, filling my time with pursuits whose results seemed neither apparent nor conclusive.

in Je…, i finally saw someone who, like me, seemed capable of lying in perfect silence for an indefinite amount of time. (i felt the same way when i watched La Chambre, which you made while you were in New York, alongside News from Home, the first of your works dedicated to your devastating longing for your mother—a feeling I deeply resonated with. i, too, was far from home, though not nearly as far as you were, in a room that was only temporarily mine.) someone who knew the feeling of how all energy can simply vanish from your body. the feeling of being a naked, solitary body hiding between four walls. the feeling of the strange things you do when nobody is watching.

i remember being oddly comforted to see the “lighter” parts of this type of depression (the kind of which I’ve had over and over throughout my life) in your film. the scene where you gorge yourself on a bag of sugar—presumably the only edible thing in your vicinity—is iconic to me.

i’m trying to quit smoking again, prompted by this cold. which makes me think of how hard it is to find a photo of you where you’re not smoking. i remember once being annoyed by a stupid article in The Guardian about your films. it began with an idiotic, gratuitous comment from someone who had quit smoking, which was just a way to mask their inability to actually write anything meaningful about you or your work.

you smoked American Spirit—i think there’s even a shot of a pack of them on your table in New York in No Home Movie. you can’t find them here, but I tried them a few times while abroad. they’re quite good. but i hope to never try them again.

08-11.11

dear Chantal,

it’s been a week since I last smoked cigarettes. for the past few days, i’ve been in Florence, serving on a jury at Festival dei Popoli (and it wasn’t hard to see echoes of you in some of the films from the Discoveries section—it’s truly incredible how much of an outsized influence you’ve had, especially on women filmmakers). Florence is an overwhelming place—being in a city that has had such a massive impact on the history of art, science, and politics as we know them today feels immense.

but these days, I’ve been thinking about you, about Derek Jarman (thanks to his passion for the great Italian masters), and about James Ivory (for obvious reasons, given the location). mostly about you, though, thanks to Hotel Monterey, which I finally watched (and loved) before leaving on this trip, and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna. all the while, I considered the week’s news and I found myself wondering if, perhaps, you’d had some sort of premonition that the world was heading toward complete ruin back when you… it’s a macabre thought. i apologize for it.

i kept thinking about Les Rendez-vous d’Anna because, lately, i’ve found myself increasingly experiencing that strange state of suspension and alienation that come together with a life on the road. (said life is, of course, is a huge privilege, especially since most of the time I get to share it with my loved one.) in the way you barely get to lay down some roots and routines before you have to leave. in the way you forge fleeting connections (often with people who do have said roots). in the way you have to let go. in the pervading feeling that you may never see those places or people again. in the constant thinking about of the next means of transport you have to catch. and in those moments of suspension when you discover the rooms you’ll be sleeping in (checking out the mattress, looking for the best spot to lay down your luggage, taking a look at the view from the window, etc.). an interrupted life, that everyone on the circuit experiences. The fact that you captured and conveyed the essence of all this forty-five years ago (!) amazes me.

on the last morning of the trip, I went to the Uffizi Galleries, where, on the second floor, among countless marvels, there’s an impressive collection of self-portraits. most were done by men. of course, some were extraordinary (Rembrandt’s moved me deeply; the successive layers of paint looked almost abstract up close), others mediocre (semi-anonymous painters posing with works of their own, usually nudes of women). with very few exceptions, the female painters only came up in the last two rooms—and, of course, the fact that their lives overlapped with major artistic movements sort of predisposed their compositions to a different sort of aesthetic, but I couldn’t help noticing how most of them “broke” the rules of classical realism. and that made me think of you.

anyways. meanwhile, I arrived back home. with much effort and some struggle, i’ve managed not to smoke—it’s day ten. let’s see how it goes from here. as it happen, there will be a series of performances inspired by you this week, in Bucharest. what a coincidence for this to overlap with series my letters to you. tomorrow, I’ll attend the first event. i’ll tell you how it goes.

12.11

dear Chantal,

i didn’t make it to the performance. i’m sorry, Chantal. i had an absolutely dreadful day. forgive me. i’ll try to go tomorrow. (i caught a glimps of some fragments online—it looks like a beautiful tribute.)

what did you do when you felt that you couldn’t take it anymore, Chantal?

during the day, i picked up my copy of My Mother Laughs. i’d started reading it two years ago—first in English, in a copy i’d borrowed from Călin, then resumed later, when it was published in a Romanian translation—but i stopped. not just because i’ve really struggled to finish the books I’ve pick up in recent years, but because i found something in your journals that hit too close to home. something deeply unsettling. frightening. too close to me.

on the page where i’d left off, the following line caught my eye: “But it’s hard to see it, in clear writing, the reason why I’ve remained an old child.” i think that’s where i stopped. “And how, because of this, I couldn’t make a life for myself. And the only saving grace is writing. And not even that.”

inside the book, i found the receipt from the bookstore where i’d bought it. though the ink had faded a little, i could still make it out: i bought it on the 16th of February, 2022. yes, now i remember the other reason i stopped reading it. i read from the book for exactly one week. then i carried it with me, in my bag, through various cities, without ever opening it again.

its edges are bent. a water spill has crumpled some of its pages. the white cover is full of flecks, probably due to other things that i’d carried oin my purse. but don’t take that as a sign of carelessness, Chantal. on the contrary, carrying the book felt like taking care of a Fabergé egg—something that has an imposing experior, which opens up to reveal something incredibly delicate, detailed, fragile, beautiful.

13.11

dear Chantal,

today i managed to eat a little something. take a shower. go outside. and laugh. at last, laugh. i’ve heard stories about your legendary sense of humor. once, someone told me a joke that you made—i can’t reproduce it, it wasn’t exactly PC—and it made me burst from laughter.

today was better, but also much worse. i’ve gotten some bad news about my health. i’ll try to face the situation with the same grace you showed to your mother, when you took care of her, the same awareness about the deterioration of the body.

i gathered all my courage and went to Paula Dunker’s performance. and i loved it. there was something in the setup of this performance that felt deeply connected to your cinema and your installations—a playful dialogue that found lightness in your work. (how i wish i could do the same: to think more often of A Couch in New York than No Home Movie.) Paula described you as a star at the beginning of her monologue, during a brief overview of your biography, saying: “When you think of someone who’s gone, they come to be.”

and that’s exactly how it felt—as if you were there, behind us, smiling mischievously, holding an unlit cigarette between your fingers, watching Paula and Katia Pascariu embody you and your characters in these videos shot by Laura Săvuțiu (who also created a gorgeous installation about sleep: a projection of herself sleeping, displayed on a pillow). in these scenes, they became the two girls who ran away from home in J’ai faim, j’ai froid, or turned a local bar into the ballroom from D’Est. Paula narrated these clips, that were based on the ones featured in Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, and occasionally paused to reenact them in a live performance: the gaze sequence from your film about Pina Bausch, or the sugar-eating scene (!!!) from Je Tu Il Elle. it was incredible to watch a genderfluid woman embody Delphine Seyrig’s role in Jeanne Dielman…, or Anna in Les Rendez-vous. such a powerful gesture, showing just how deeply your cinema resonates with all of us.

i left thinking about how much of your work i still have left to discover. and how unfair you were to yourself when you described yourself as lazy in Portrait d’une paresseuse—you worked so tirelessly! why do we woemn live with this constant feeling that we’re never doing enough? (well, I know why. i know you knew too—and yet, you still felt it. but you get what i mean.)

16.11

dear Chantal,

because I want to catch up on your films, especially the musicals and later works, today i browsed the book that Viennale dedicated to you in 2011, when Hans Hurch and the team of the Filmmuseum organized a complete retrospective of your works.

the book is dedicated to the memory of Claudine Pacquot, a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma and later an editor of cinema books, and it opens with a text by Nicole Brenez titled “The Pajama Interview.” yet another coincidence – given what i mentioned in my previous letter: she wrote that anyone who knew you was faced with someone both extraordinarily strong (capable of “wresting” a film out of the most adverse of production circumstances) and profoundly verletzbar. it’s such a particular word. i find it hard to translate (and i wonder what the original French word might have been): the straightforward translation would be “vulnerable” or “fragile,” but at its roots (and through them), the word means “easily wounded,” “woundable.”

she wrote that you had a kind of willingness to sacrifice yourself for others, something she had never seen in “any figure of power, whether political, economic, or symbolic”, something “both strange and unheard of”. when you edited the transcript of the interview, she claimed you’d added a few “i don’t know”s here and there, precisely because you didn’t want to come across as preachy.

what’s extraordinary—and a testament to Hurch’ Langlois-like generosity—is that the festival also gave you the opportunity to curate a carte blanche program. i confess that these sorts of programs often feel, to me, like an even more intimate glimpse into a filmmaker’s soul than a journal or an interview. i went through the list (noting that it was mainly composed of queer cinema) with a sense wonder—from films that i’d expected to find, like Mouchette by Bresson, La Région Centrale by Michael Snow (whose praxis deeply inspired you during your New York years), or Pierrot le Fou by Godard (the film said to have sparked your desire to become a filmmaker), to titles that were a total surprise.

for example, Last Days by Gus Van Sant (a film that, come to think of it, is very you)—which I’d stumbled upon in high school while I looking for movies about Kurt Cobain, and which had hit my still crude ideas about cinema with the force of a bomb. or Happy Together by Wong Kar-Wai—one of the most beautiful films ever made, for sure, but somehow unexpected in a program curated by you. (i was delighted to see you’d also included Fassbinder’s Ali and Rossellini’s Stromboli, two of my own coups de coeur. two unseen titles to urgently add to my list: Written on the Wind by Douglas Sirk, a filmmaker I’ve been increasingly drawn to in recent years, and Moses und Aron by Straub-Huillet; likewise.)

but the biggest surprise—Vertigo by Hitchcock! the film you would dethrone from the top of the Sight & Sound list eleven years later with Jeanne Dielman…—a fact announced by none other than Laura Mulvey, who had used that very film to illustrate her thesis about the male gaze. incredible!

23.11

dear Chantal,

today, i mustered the courage to do something that felt incredibly difficult: i watched the film you made in 2006 during a residency in Tel Aviv, Là-bas. in the last decades of your life, you traveled often to Israel, where you were always warmly welcomed. you never spoke about Palestine—or, at least, not explicitly. your final installation, shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale, featured images filmed in the Negev desert (also seen in No Home Movie, from the same year) layered over an infernal soundscape of war noises: gunfire, helicopters, engines, and so on.

in an interview following the release of Là-bas, you said, “In fact, I didn’t want to, nor did I feel the will to make a film about or in Israel. […] I immediately had the impression that it was a bad idea. So an impossible idea even. Almost paralyzing. Almost sickening.” and indeed, the film isn’t about Israel—it’s about impossibility and paralysis. about a profound depression. some reviews talk about a sense of alienation present in the film, an alienation that had to do with identity. and from there, the reviewers drew a parallel to your lifelong struggle of being the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, to what perhaps might’ve been a feeling of shame for not being able to fully enjoy a life that had been so bitterly won and defended.

i jotted down a few of the things you said in the sequences where you answer the phone, set against the backdrop of shots of your window, obscured by a thin bamboo curtain—a screened, veiled world: “No, I didn’t go to see the sea. I have to work. Yes, I’m eating, I promise. No, I have to work.” i thought about all the calls and conversations i’ve had in recent years that sounded exactly like this.

then I wrote down some of what you said in the sequences you’d illustrated with a voice-over reading of fragments from your journal: “Half-deaf, I drift most of the time. Sometimes, I grab onto things for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days; sometimes, a detail brings me back to the surface, and then I start drifting again. I feel so detached that I can’t even keep a home stocked with bread, butter, and toilet paper. When I go out to buy them, I sometimes feel like I’ve accomplished an act of heroism. Overall, I don’t know how to live.” i hear you typing on a laptop keyboard while i’m doing the same thing, putting down these thoughts that felt like my own.

Tel Aviv was something you couldn’t face, at least not directly. sometimes, you could look at the sea, the beach—two things that can always be looked at—interrupted by a shot of a military plane crossing the sky, a terrible echo of the events happening near you. you recount the day you went out for cigarettes and found out there had just been a bombing nearby.

i don’t think you were alienated, Chantal. i think that, somewhere deep within, you couldn’t participate. and you didn’t have the will to participate. and that broke you, just like so many other things had broken you.

i don’t know if I’m depressed because i miss the dopamine from cigarettes, or because i’ve been through so much lately, or because everything happening around me makes me want to hide at home and watch everything from a distance.

26.11

dear Chantal,

i have to end our correspondence—at least for now. on the one hand, because the article that will come out from this needs to be published.

on the other hand, because yesterday i woke up in a country where the threat of fascism, after many years of latency, has become existential literally overnight. i spent the day preparing for two difficult weeks, witnessing how people around me fell into shock, disbelief, and despair. then, in the evening, i went to protest. i keep thinking about how fragile everything that gained in the last 35 years is and how reversible it all seems to be—a thought that brings me back to D’Est, to its tracking shots. there’s something in them that recalls the early films of the Lumière brothers: the same primal contact with a terra incognita. what was it like to witness a univerrs that had just turned upside down, its wounds exposed to the entire world to see, Chantal?

i think the contemporary online hellscape would have depressed you—the division, the desolation of division. the impossibility of dialogue. its fundamental insecurity for women and queer people. its role in erasing history. in radicalization.

i looked up your Facebook profile a few days ago. i knew you had one from my gender studies professor, who had you as a virtual friend. remembering Chantal Akerman. your sister, who runs a foundation in your name, writes to you often, thinks about you a lot, and posts pictures of you. in them, you’re different from how i’ve known you so far—completely different: her photos of you are “regular”. for the first time, I see you in snapshots taken on phone cameras, a little crooked, a little blurry, sometimes a little shaky—or a picture of you as a baby. in one of these photos, you’re celebrating your mother’s last birthday, together. in that photo, you could be anyone. and that feels wonderful to me.

wish us luck, Chantal.
talk to you soon.

flavia

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.