A History of Stillness: Five Documentaries by Chantal Akerman

Written by Daniel Walber

Chantal Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, is a powerful work of visual stillness. Nearly all of its images were shot within the walls of a single apartment, that of the filmmaker’s mother. Like an even more formally rigorous Amour, it presents Akerman’s struggle to tangle with her family history in the last months of her mother’s life. Yet unlike Mic…