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No Home Movie
- Director: Chantal Akerman
- Writer: Chantal Akerman
- Producer: Chantal Akerman; Patrick Quinet
CGiii Comment
Akerman's final film...
No Home Movie was introduced by an academic from Edinburgh University...her words were emotive and full of praise for this much-lauded, self-taught filmmaker.
Basically...we were about to witness something special, something beautiful. The lucky few were sitting in this tiny cinema...our cups runneth over.
Opening scene: a scrubby tree, in the desert, being blasted by a vicious wind. And, for what seemed an eternity, the camera remained on that little scrubby tree...you could hear the clatter of cups hitting the floor...the realisation that we were not going to witness something special, something beautiful...it was deafening.
115 minutes of - practically - nothing. 115 minutes savagely squandered.
Filming [badly] Skype conversations is not film-making...the few and far between conversations are either elongated goodbyes (you hang up first) or about eating. There's nothing about Auschwitz...apart from a weird scene where Akerman tells the cleaner that her mother was in Auschwitz...the cleaner couldn't speak French and understood nada...
No Home Movie is the epitome of film snobbery. This is not the re-appropriation of the amateur fim-making genre (whatever that is)...what this is...is amateur...with an unhealthy dose of pretension thrown in...to keep the pretentious happy.
The critics who hailed this as a masterpiece...paid nothing to see it. They ticked their pseudo-academic boxes with fraudulent praise for a work of interminable, inept monotony. Those who paid to see this should demand a refund.
Money can be reimbursed...time cannot.
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
At the center of Chantal Akerman's enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother's life and her own intense connection to her mother, and in turn her mother's connection to her mother. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
Cast & Characters
Chantal Akerman as Herself