Aesthetics of care: caring for the mother with Chantal Akerman

Abstract

Caring for the other is an ethical as well as an aesthetic question: but where does one end and where does the other begin? Rita Charon, in her seminal work Narrative Medicine (2006), builds a strong case against such separation in medical care, or more precisely, against the negligence of what she calls “narrative competence” – defined as the ability to absorb, interpret, and translate stories of others. Charon compares the work of health professionals to that of “a skilled and deft translator,” who reads not only words but also silences and metaphors, who notes the code-switching and translates both “the tongues of the body and the tongues of the self” (107). While Charon focuses primarily on developing the concept of care as aesthetic experience for health professionals, Yuriko Saito’s recent publication Aesthetics of Care (2022) draws a parallel between care ethics in general and aesthetic experience. Both, according to Saito, “share the same attitudes and skills such as attentiveness, open-mindedness, receptivity, respect, collaborative spirit, and activation of imagination” (17-18).

In this paper, I will discuss the concept of care in Belgian film director Chantal Akerman’s later works: My Mother Laughs (2013) and No Home Movie (2015). Through different media – the former being a memoir and the latter a documentary – Chantal cares for her mother and bears witness to the end of her mother’s life. Taking cues from Charon and Saito, I argue that both media are media of care: they are aesthetic means of bearing witness to illness, trauma, love and care. Especially through filmmaking, Chantal seems to have achieved the impossible: that is, the desire of the daughter to not take eyes off her dying mother and look at her eternally. Such desire is expressed in her film aesthetics as well: the long take inscribes “a waiting becom[ing] infinite” (Béghin & Cohen 2016); it is as if the movie, or the motion picture, is exposed to both a slow death and a passage to eternity. At the same time, unlike Charon and Saito, who position the carer as an ideal reader/ translator/ viewer, I argue that Chantal as the carer is by no means perfect: her memoir offers a detailed account of her need to take distance and hide from her mother, and of her mother’s complaint about Chantal not sharing her life with her. Distance is what Chantal struggles with regarding her relation to her mother, and she struggles with it through writing and filming. In Chantal’s case, the ability to achieve the impossible with aesthetic media lies precisely in mediation and mediality: they enable a relation of care that is close yet still maintains a safe distance.