on Chantal Akerman’s NO HOME MOVIE
This is not a movie about home, or it is a movie about no homes.
At a certain height, wind is endless, until air disappears completely. Perverse Saussurean twist: Akerman's tree signifies an attenuated signal--birthed out of some meteorological semaphore -- we can't see it, only hear it. Early on, the film instructs us to listen.
Language is labor. Care is labor. So much of care requires the labor of language: its banal logistics (are you hungry? are you cold? do you want to lie down?) still carry a necessary weight.
The body must compensate for a lack of physical fortitude through whatever language it is capable of. One's presence is reaffirmed through all manners of speech.
"There is no distance," Chantal declares to her mother Natalia, a Holocaust survivor, via Skype.
So there can be no 'home'. We are merely everywhere, endlessly. A glitch from the present hereafter. Here, the camera (whether film or web) operates as a dormant household object. It holds vigil over many deaths. A subversion of Berger's "men act, women appear." There is only one male physically present (briefly) in this film, yet everyone is acting. Women are a layered collection of languages, histories, pregnancies, secrets, jokes; the camera just stands there.
"There is no distance." We travel without papers. Orchids atop a table; inlaid teak cabinet; Ming vase; gaudy, confused artifacts that meld from their respective points in the global supply chain. By a sunlit window, a Kentia palm quietly synthesizes chlorophyll -- subsuming a chemistry from the outside to sustain the life of an ornamental object. Framed family photographs, their analogs, anchor the rooms' corners and reflect the project's technicity back to the filmmaker. After a storm, panes of light warm rattan shades -- a frozen moment, like warped electricity immediately before a CRT TV screen goes dark.
One scene sees Natalia remarking on her eyes' loss of pigmentation. Once brown, now green. A decreasing of the self with age, as though microns lifted from the shell; our color profiles begin to shift, back to our species primordial version: "the earliest human ancestor species to develop photosensitivity were aquatic, and only two specific wavelength ranges of electromagnetic radiation — blue and green visible light — can travel through water" (1). Blue, like LOx (liquid oxygen.)
In a later scene, she is gasping for air as she eats, in the space of speech, liquid breathing. Chantal also includes an image of her shadow transposed upon a body of water. The substrate floats on its palette while genetic trauma shifts its outlines. Engulfs it.
Exhange, in Spanish, between Chantal and housekeeper. Clipped, cute discourse, lexical surface-level. Racialization of care-work is underpinned by linguistic supremacy of their employers. French is the language of the director, the household -- we know whose (not) home movie this is. Earlier in the day i had learned that trabajo (in English, the first-person indicative form of trabajar, or, simply, "job") may be etymologically linked to the tripalium, a torture device comprised of three stakes. Past present future.
This word is also the root of "travel".
Pastoral landscapes appear as reality-simulators. She spends full minutes of the film on these flat vignettes; transit of exegesis. Dunes, plains, trees. Recoding the technology of our eyes to adroitly experience tedium as a part of passage, an extension of the self.
Back at home, a violent glaucoma of the lens. The chalcedonic light bleaches everything. A chaise lounge upends. Home dissolves.
1. Pamela Rosenkranz, "Jen, Jeans, and Genes".
