CRASSH

Though best known for her ground-breaking contribution to women’s and experimental cinema, over a career of more than forty years, Belgian director Chantal Akerman has also offered a sustained reflection on death, loss and grief deeply shaped by her own status as a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Whether it be in the tropes of confinement and wandering omnipresent in her avant-garde work of the 1970s, or her most recent documentary series on time, space and identity, echoes of the camps are omnipresent in her films, yet the Holocaust is rarely evoked directly. This paper will focus on her most explicitly Jewish film, her 1988 docu-fiction Histoires d’Amérique, a complex and highly unusual meditation on the New York Jewish diaspora and its relations to memory, loss and transmission. Akerman herself has explicitly linked the film to her need to come to terms with the silence that surrounded her mother’s experience in Auschwitz and her grandmother’s death in the camps. Histoires d’Amérique, she explains, is a film about ‘imaginary memories’. In its mise en scène of a world of phantoms, the film summons the dead and evokes a culture that has long been eradicated. The urban wastelands of 1980s New York threatened by modernisation and gentrification become a privileged site for inscribing the past. The film is a crucial example of, on the one hand, Akerman’s work on historical imprints which shows strong affinities with Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image and, on the other, of her use of humour and the burlesque as a distancing strategy, a way of domesticating the unbearable. Akerman’s haunting and haunted film on loss and remembrance reconfigures one of cinema’s most pressing questions: how to make films after Auschwitz?