Letters Home. 1986. France. Directed by Chantal Akerman. Screenplay by Delphine Seyrig, Patty Hannock, Françoise Merle, Coralie Seyrig. With Delphine Seyrig, Coralie Seyrig. DCP courtesy Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, restored in 2019 by Modern Art National Museum-Centre Pompidou. In French; English subtitles. 104 min.
Claire Atherton first worked with Chantal Akerman in 1984, assisting on filming a production of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s Letters Home at the Théâtre Moderne in Paris, in which the great Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie enact letters the poet Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother Aurelia from her teenage years until the week before her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Editing the material two years later sparked the pair’s 30-year collaboration. “Her way of making films intersected with my own path: let things happen, respect the movement and not try to force meaning,” Atherton recalled. In constructing a feature from Akerman’s sole attempt at filmed theater, Akerman and Atherton layer sound to convey Plath’s searing pleasures and pains in finding her voice as a writer, a wife, and a mother. Overlapping dialogue, punctuated by allusions to the world beyond the page—from nursery songs to the cry of swifts and the ominous rumble of an airplane—convey a mother and daughter speaking over and beyond each other even as they ache to come together in unconditional love.