Writing in tongues: Chantal Akerman's News From Home

Chantal Akerman, quoted in Christina Creveling's contribution to 'Women Working', Camera Obscura, no. 2, Autumn 1977, 118.

Marie de Sévigné, quoted by Charles A. Porter, 'Foreword', in Yale French Studies, 71-72 (double issue) (1986), 4.

Brenda Longfellow , 'Love letters to the Mother: the work of Chantal Akerman', Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory , 13 (1-2) (1989). The films looked at are: Je tu il elle (1974), jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News From Home (1976), and Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978).

Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement , The Newly Born Woman, trans. by Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1996), 154.

Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester , Freud's Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin , 2000), 146.

Sigmund Freud , 'Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria ('Dora')', in Case Histories , Vol. 8 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), 49.

Janet Bergstrom, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman', op. cit. (Note 1).

Laura Mulvey , 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 1989), 16.

Part of Chantal Akerman's answer to the question of whether Jeanne Dielman was a feminist film; excerpt from an interview with Camera Obscura, November 1976, reprinted in op. cit. (Note 1).

I am deliberately implying both meanings - of 'structure' and of 'obscuring' - in my use of this word.

'It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [Heimich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fuifils this condition.' Sigmund Freud, 'The uncanny', in Art and Literature, Vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 368.

Quote taken from Ruby B. Rich , 'In the name of feminist film criticism ', in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, Vol. II ( Berkeley/Los Angeles/London : University of California Press, 1985), 348.

Quote taken from Ruby B. Rich who participated in a discussion of feminist aesthetics in Chicago during 1978; the panel discussion was printed under the title, 'Women and film: a discussion of feminist aesthetics', New German Critique, 13 (1978), 102.

See Note 9 above.

Akerman said: 'When you see the letters of a mother, like those of my mother, who is not a writer, who is not an intellectual, it is a subculture [...] there is no place within artistic things for this kind of expression'; quoted in Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens Chantal Akerman's Hyperealist Everyday (Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 1996), 15. For a discussion of 'nagging' as a culturally neglected syntax, see Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988); and Irit Rogoff, 'Tiny anguishes: reflections on nagging, scholastic embarrassment, and feminist art history', Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4 (3) (1992).

Freud, op. cit. (Note 6), 133.

I am grateful to Griselda Pollock for this inspiring idea.

Ibid, 136.

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze ( Leeds: Feminist Arts and Histories Network, 1995), 9.

Freud, op cit. (Note 6), 44.

Ibid, 133

Angela Martin , 'Dossier', Feminist Review, (3) (1979), 2-3.

Freud, op cit. (Note 6), 137.

Ibid., fn. 1, 152.

Akerman, op cit. (Note 1), 137.

This alienating technique is also achieved in Jeanne Dielman. When Jeanne near the beginning of the film receives a letter from her sister, she reads in a rushed monotone voice, delivering what is, up until that point, the only background information on the characters.

Early seventeenth-century salons such as the Hotel de Rambouillet, which was the Paris home of Catherine de Vivonne, were visited by women such as the great letter-writer Marie de Rabutin-Chantal Sévigné, who wrote extensively to her daughter (over 1300 letters are extant, the majority of which were addressed to her daughter). These Precieux (mannered) drawing-rooms proved to be the inaugural sites for a developing literary world that was to grow out of 'feminine' inflected conversations.

'Introduction' to Madame de Sévigné :Selected Letters, trans. by Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 14.

Longfellow, op cit. (Note 3).

Martin, op. cit. (Note 21).