Letters Home
Chantal Akerman
Letters Home
FR, 1986, 104′, Eng. sub., Slo. sub.
4 €
On 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath, poet and author of The Bell Jar, thirty years old, married with two children, killed herself. In 1975, Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, published Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, an edited volume of her late daughter’s letters. In 1979, Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote Letters Home, an off-Broadway hit which addressed the factual and psychic dissonance between the Plath known to the public from her writings and work, and the dutiful Plath her mother wished to capture. Chantal Akerman’s 1986 film Letters Home adapted theatre director Françoise Merle’s rendition of the play, staged in Paris in 1984. Letters Home is therefore an object passed from a poet to her mother, from her mother to a woman playwright, then to a woman theatre director, and finally to Akerman, a woman filmmaker. Letters Home elaborates Akerman’s personal and perpetual concern with communication and exchange between mother and daughter seen also in her film News from Home (1977). The cast for Letters Home, like the Paris theatre production, are themselves aunt and niece: Delphine Seyrig (who features in Jeanne Dielman) and Coralie Seyrig.
