Allieurs, siempre

I have been asked to write to Chantal Akerman—a letter she will never read—because this is how we believe the living must communicate with the dead: through a text with no interlocutor.

They say the first thing forgotten about a dead person is the voice. And yet, when I think about her cinema, it is difficult for me to think of images fixed on a screen. I can only close my eyes and hear her voice: strong, rough, warm and, at the same time, profoundly wounded. What I like in her voice is the wound. I like the voice and the wound, and the repetition of her words, resonating in space beyond their meaning, like a litany.

The first time I heard her was in News from Home (1977), a monumental film in which the almost imperceptible voice of a very young Chantal—only twenty-six, although she already had a masterpiece behind her, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—reads the letters she receives from her mother over images of a devastating New York. There they are: the empty city, exile, disorientation, solitude… but above all these things, there is her voice. A voice that whispers, repeats, dissolves into the noise of the foreign city and perhaps also suppresses a question: How can I separate your voice, mother, from the deafening noise of exile?

In her most devastating text, Ma mère rit (2013), dedicated to her mother—or rather, to that impossible conversation with her mother—Chantal writes: “And me, what am I going to do for the next four weeks? I will only endure it if I write. And anyway, here or there, what difference does it make? My life—I have no life. I never knew how to make one for myself. So here or there. But elsewhere is always better. So all I have ever done is leave, leave again and return, forever.” (Translated from the Spanish version by Elena López Riera.)

Ailleurs is a word that is difficult to translate into Spanish. It means something like “elsewhere,” or “in a distant, remote place.” It may be the word that best defines Chantal Akerman’s immense body of work and reveals her most precious legacy: the desire always to be ailleurs. Displaced, wounded, passionate, forever searching for another place, another word, a better love. To watch her films, immerse oneself in her infinite thought or enter her texts is to venture into the extraordinary fracture of being elsewhere.

This is how we love you too, Chantal. Ailleurs, always.

– Elena López Riera
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