Motherwork Camerawork: Ambivalence

In Jeanne Dielman (1975), From the Other Side (2002) and No Home Movie (2015), Chantal Akerman’s camerawork does motherwork by creating spaces where characters and viewers encounter, hold, and work through events and fantasies around mothering that are shaped by discomforting feelings of ambivalence. Black feminist thinking on motherwork and fabulation guides this chapter’s exploration of how Akerman’s camerawork creates cinematic spaces where new practices of mothering and motherwork can be experienced and imagined. Akerman’s cinematic search for mothers is contrasted with Roland Barthes’s photographic search for his mother in Camera Lucida, with Akerman redefining Barthes’s punctum and studium. Finally, Alice Diop’s camerawork in Saint Omer (2022) is read as an iteration of Akerman’s distinct themes and style in its attention to an inscrutable Black mother on trial for leaving her young child on a beach to die.