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Between Les Rendez-vous d’Anna and Demain on Déménage: m(o)ther inscriptions in two films by Chantal Akerman

The article explores the film 'Demain on Déménage' (2004) by Belgian filmmaker and installation artist Chantal Akerman. The article is a revised and expanded version of a plenary lecture presented at ‘M(o)ther Trouble’, an international conference on the contemporary theories, analyses and representations of the maternal at Birkbeck University of London. Other speakers included, Laura Mulvey, Adriana Cavarero, Bracha Ettinger, Renata Salecl, Claire Pajaczkowska and Amber Jacobs. The article argues that Demain on Déménage is a gloriously comic queering of the hegemonic representation of motherhood that claims as its foundation heterosexual sexuality and the stability of the hetero-normative unit of the couple. Akerman’s decision to cast actress Aurore Clément in the role of a mother in 'Demain on Déménage,' over two decades after playing a daughter in her earlier film Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, encourages a reading of the 2004 film as a reprise of concerns about maternity and mother-daughter relations first explored by the artist in 1978. The article is unique in the Akerman literature in that it argues that Les Rendez-vous d’Anna has moments in common with Lee Edelman’s uncompromisingly provocative polemic against the ideology of ‘reproductive futurism’ in his book 'No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive' (2004). Drawing on a body of recent psychoanalytic theory by psychoanalyst/artist Bracha Ettinger, particularly her fundamental concepts of the ‘matrix’ and ‘metramorphosis’ the article argues that 'Tomorrow We Move' inflects Lee Edleman’s total embrace of the death drive as a queer political strategy of ‘no future’ with a matrixial movement that opens on to a different concept of futurity, symbolised not in heteronormative, post-natal terms by the child or the mother, but as a corpo-real-psychic imprint of multiple partial subjectivising strands of the originary pre-natal encounter in pregnancy common to all human beings, men as well as women.