There have been few filmmakers as uncompromising as Chantal Akerman, whose reconciliation of revealing material with formal rigour pointed the way for a generation of feminist filmmakers.
Her films were never an easy watch. Jeanne Dielman, the film that made her reputation in 1975, was more than three hours long; a typical sequence was a three-minute fixed shot of actor Delphine Seyrig making meat loaf.
!['She made her house into a jail': a still from No Home Movie.](/web/20161002181046im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/f/q/0/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqfpbe.png/1470322172295.jpg)
Akerman's influence was pervasive, however, and when the news came last October that she had killed herself, there was no question among film enthusiasts that a pillar of the avant-garde had fallen.
Two months earlier I met her at the Locarno Film Festival to discuss what would be her last film, No Home Movie. It was a typically hard watch.
![Chantal Akerman.](/web/20161002181046im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/k/2/y/m/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqfpbe.png/1470322172295.jpg)
Shot almost entirely in her mother's Brussels apartment over a period of 10 years, it drifts between long glides across the knick-knacks on the shelves and long shots of the kitchen table, where the two Akerman women discuss the families of Chantal's parents and the anti-Semitism they encountered when they came to Belgium from Poland.
Exile, home, confinement, the past in the present, mothers and daughters: all of Akerman's enduring themes are here, but shot as a home movie that lasts for two hours. There is no film lighting, so much of it is blurry or in silhouette.
Locarno is the most cerebral of the European festivals – its audience well used to the unconventional – but there were boos at the public screening.
"It was very hard for me to be on the stage," said Akerman the next day. "I said, 'there is not any relation between me standing on that stage in front of a big, big crowd and my little, fragile film'. And my poor mother, who is not even there to enjoy it."
![No Home Movie is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.](/web/20161002181046im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/f/q/6/9/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqfpbe.png/1470322172295.jpg)
It was very hot in Locarno, but Akerman was rugged up in a thick jumper, her skin the dull parchment colour common to chain smokers.
"I'm so tired," she sighed. She was reluctant to talk about the film – "that really takes an outside point of view and that's not my work" – but the question of who should say what is always vexed.
"My mother went into the camps and never said a word about it," she said. "I had the feeling for a long time that I had to talk for her, which is crazy because you cannot talk for someone else."
But Auschwitz was her subject too: even at three, she knew what the number on her mother's arm meant and would dream about the camps herself every night.
"So I was obsessed by that, by her life. I was obsessed also by the way when she went out of the camps she made her house into a jail. That's Jeanne Dielman ...
"Now I realise that maybe I took a position or a place that was in a way entering in her territory by refraction. Who knows? It's complicated."
Her mother, Natalya, and her Orthodox grandparents were at once disappointed by her – "because I did not have children, I am not married" – and proud of her.
Natalya, she remembered, cut out every article written about her. But she also recalled a time in Mexico when she presented Almayer's Folly, her film about Joseph Conrad, then took questions.
"She didn't understand anything," Akerman said. "But when we went out, she said, 'You have all that, and I had only Auschwitz'."
Natalya died early last year, a few months before Akerman brought No Home Movie to Locarno.
Akerman didn't know when she started editing all those hours of material that it would be a film about her mother.
"Otherwise I would probably not dare to make it," she said. "Imagine: someone who has the idea, 'okay, I'm going to make a film about my mother's death'. She could have lived another 10 years. It was only when we had 10 hours that I said, 'ah, I see what kind of film it is. I see the subject now'."
And in the end, No Home Movie has become both their epitaphs.
No Home Movie screens on July 29 at Kino and on August 7 at ACMI as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.
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