In 2013, Chantal Akerman flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her mother, Natalia (Nelly), who was dying. Nelly was the only member of her Polish-born family to survive Auschwitz, having fled in exile to Belgium in 1938. Repairing geographical distance and staying with her mother in her apartment, the filmmaker records, on camera and in writing, a melodious ceremony of their days together. The semi-surreptitiously shot vignettes of her final film, No Home Movie (released in 2015), eliminate incident and story to cinematically render the repeated gestures and essence of quotidian days of daughterhood/motherhood during palliative care in the space of the domestic.

The grey Belgian autumn fills the apartment with the diffuse light and the balcony peers onto the neighbour’s garden below. Sequestered at the end of the hall in her mother’s home (‘a refuge where I can write and smoke with the window open,’ she notes), Akerman writes My Mother Laughs, first published in 2013. A book that resembles a ‘sneeze’, so says Eileen Myles in the preface to the 2019 edition, captures the (in)tolerant, fraught love and duty of a daughter. The sneeze is a syncope that interrupts. These diarised works frame her mother’s long quiet days of confinement within the walls of her apartment, hidden from the unseen and unseeing world in motion. A life destined to end.

In its close attention to the late work of Chantal Akerman (and others including Roland Barthes and Lynne Tillman), this paper will consider reparative caregiving and impossible, irrecoverable absence or territories. It will review the diarised form as mutually aesthetic and therapeutic and extend to consider the ethics of intimate documentary and the quotidian biographical. The paper will take a hybrid form, weaving comparative, critical and theoretical analysis with narrative poetics to propose and enact a compelling relation of reparative aesthetics in visual culture and literature.