To encounter Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman is to be plunged into worlds where women who are mothers are watched by women who are daughters. But centering motherhood in their works is not an exclusionary or rigidly gendering move, pointing instead to the novelist and filmmaker’s expansive feminist interest in reaching audiences like and unlike themselves. At the recent MoMA retrospective of Akerman’s work, the more I watched, the more Woolfian the director felt for her sustained invitation to read and interpret cinematically through different mother figures, as well as her direct references to Woolf’s writing. During the five-week retrospective, I was immersed in Akerman’s work in a way that was previously impossible. And as I watched Akerman’s films in the museum’s basement black box theaters, I began to think about Woolf and Akerman’s use of motherhood as a kind of conduit: an invitation from these childless daughters to engage with their works afresh.

Motherhood as a theme is so freighted in contemporary discourse, as if gender politics is for old-fashioned moms rather than something that affects all of us all the time. Even in the left-leaning academic circles that I often find myself, asking Woolf’s question from A Room of One’s Own—How many women authors appear on your bookshelves?—is sometimes treated like a leftover question not urgent enough for our genocidal times. Meanwhile, political forces outside academia are forcing women’s studies departments to close at universities across the US and leaders who are largely though not exclusively men obstruct women’s rights globally.

In this claustrophobic context, Akerman’s focus on her mother, Natalia, and her invocations of Woolf were a welcome rush of fresh air. For both filmmaker and writer, an interest in their own mothers transforms into an obsessive interest in how we read anyone or interpret anything. Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, about Mrs. Ramsay, and Akerman’s films like Letters Home, about Sylvia Plath and her mother, Aurelia, or News from Home, featuring snippets of Natalia Akerman’s letters, are staggering emotional works that move fluidly between the personal and political. In Woolf’s and Akerman’s hands, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.

As the MoMA retrospective went on, it began to feel relevant, a word I normally hold at arm’s length. These days, advertisements and sloganeering of all kinds declare so confidently what is, and is not, relevant to each of us based on what seems to me flimsy evidence from social media algorithms. But insofar as trad wives, male loneliness, and opposition to queer and nonbinary people are relevant today, these women’s work—Woolf’s portraits of mothers who are not Angels in the House, including Clarissa Dalloway in a novel celebrating its centenary in 2025, or the mothers we meet in Akerman’s movies—reminds us that a relationship so available for cultural idealization and saccharine stereotyping is, still, uneasy emotional terrain.

The difficulties of mothering and daughtering are mapped by Woolf precisely onto the challenges of reading well. In an essay about thinking through illness, Woolf recommends that we undertake “rash reading”: a kind of dreamy, half-attentive reading, which discards hyper-fixation on textual particulars for an intuitive connection with the work. “It is rashness we need in reading Shakespeare,” she writes.¹ If we read like dutiful students, any Great Book “intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the critics dull in us that thunder clap of conviction” contained within any significant work of art. This is the approach that allowed Woolf to turn memories of her own mother into the multilayered portrait of Mrs. Ramsay. We need to read rashly, in this sense, to avoid stereotypes about classic literature and about mothers.²

Woolf’s pacifism and feminism so closely inform her writerly logic that she explicitly discusses reading as political action, albeit a small one.³ Read the classics rashly, Woolf suggests, read them as you would when you are ill and impatient to get at the essence of so-called great works.

To learn to read via Woolf and Akerman is, crucially, about the proper exercise of our rights as citizens and cultural co-creators. Reading is a form of political thinking, argued Woolf in her 1926 essay “How Should One Read a Book?”⁴ For her, reading was an exercise of civil liberties, and she answers the question in her title by centering “that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.”⁵ Already a regular reviewer for the TLS and author of many books by the time she asked, not quite innocently, how one ought to read, Woolf rejects the commonplace hierarchy between writer and reader. If we expected Woolf to be an author who would want her reader to pay close attention, nose to page, then she surprises us with her actual recommendation: “Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out!”⁶

Hers is not the zone out of a beach read, where the sun and waves help turn off our attention. Rash reading is floating with intent. This is reading that looks out the window to find more clearly what the book says.

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Akerman takes up the Woolfian demand that audiences co-create the work of art. In many of her movies, Akerman refuses to use cinema’s narrative tools, especially plot and sound, in ordinary ways. In Jeanne Dielman famously, and even more challengingly in features like her 65-minute silent documentary, Hotel Monterey, she asks instead that we read each frame without the habitual conveniences of mainstream cinema, however uncomfortable such an experience might be.

And it is difficult to experience Akerman’s vision—of, for example, a seedy New York hotel turned into a series of Rothko-like doors and hallways to the sublime or subconscious—without any mediation by sound. My ears ring with tinnitus in the silence, I can’t focus thanks to the woman behind me searching her purse for candy; I can hear the E or M train roaring by the MoMA’s underground theater making everything inside rattle, reminding us it’s getting darker and colder in the autumn outside. These are distractions that inform my reading experience and to read well is also to take into account such paratexts that influence our impressions.

Even when she does not play with extended length or film sound, Akerman turns a relatively straightforward literary adaptation like Almayer’s Folly into a meditation on colonialist education and bad interpretive habits. Her directorial perspective—a liberal use of wide-frame medium and long shots, a resistance to the emotional manipulation of extreme closeups or conventional soundtrack—are cinematic features with which Akerman invites audiences to think beyond plot.

It is hard not to overidentify with Woolf and Akerman who, like so many of us, walk that tricky line between needing our mothers and resisting their influence.

Woolfian rash reading and Akermanian slow watching come from their shared perspective that interpretive acts are always difficult, intimate, gendered, whether on the page or on screen. As daughters, they address themselves to me as much as to Jeanne Dielman’s son Sylvain or Woolf’s gender-inclusive Common Reader. Renewed attention to alternative motherhood narratives is so very necessary in the present, as we face profound denigration of women’s political and health-care needs in the US and many countries globally. It is hard not to overidentify with Woolf and Akerman who, like so many of us, walk that tricky line between needing our mothers and resisting their influence.⁷

Woolf’s most famous lecture, A Room of One’s Own, still speaks to women artists today. Yet the bulk of her essays (and she wrote so very many essays) are for women and working-class people invited to read, and think, and vote for the first time in the 20th century. Woolf repeatedly says that old-fashioned professors and critics hinder such readers in the immense cultural and educational leveling that we are still navigating in this 21st century.⁸

If we read well, we will move toward a classless society, Woolf optimistically claims. One of the last essays she completed before her death, “The Leaning Tower,” began as a speech to a mixed-gender working-class audience at the Workers’ Educational Association in May 1940 in Brighton; the association had invited her to tell them about trends in contemporary British literature. The end of her speech touches me deeply, knowing the heavy depression she struggled with and the very real fear that her Jewish husband and herself were on a list of public figures to be rounded up if Germany won. From within her dread, Woolf declares that one of the pillars of a properly functioning egalitarian democracy is the public library. Using this unprecedented access to free books,

We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature. Money is no longer going to do our thinking for us. Wealth will no longer decide who shall be taught and who not…. Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground. It is not cut up into nations; there are no wars there. Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

To trespass freely is to go where our mothers couldn’t, or didn’t, but where we, thanks to them, can venture. Woolf’s writerly and political opinions extended well beyond those of her socially conservative mother, not rejecting Julia Stephen outright but understanding the limits of her loving authority and committing to a lifetime of writing against prejudice. Given that even powerful pedophiles appreciate complex novels, we cannot uncritically endorse Woolf’s opinion that reading well leads to better humanity and citizenship. Even so, an educated populace is historically harder to manipulate and oppress.

Rash reading, slow watching: these contradict our culture’s worst too-online habits, such as “skim reading” or “second screening.” It makes intuitive sense that neither Woolf nor Akerman offer easy or simple reading experiences in their books and movies.⁹ Woolf always pushed herself to change the contours of normative genre boundaries, and there too, Akerman is with her. To read well is intrinsically about reading (and writing) outside the expressive clichés that we are bombarded with in popular media. Woolf writes “novels” as much as Akerman makes “movies”—but they resist attempts to pinpoint what generically they are up to.¹⁰ Woolf and Akerman make unskimmable works, without the simplified narrative structures that allow contemporary audiences to speed through content at increased playback speeds. My undergraduates working on To the Lighthouse joke about how they need to reread sentences or even whole pages to keep up with the twists and turns of a banal dinner party that is, nevertheless, unputdownable fiction.

In the Woolfian creative mode, a reader or viewer completes an artwork by exercising her own creativity to think and complete the narrative conversation. To be a good reader, for Woolf, does not rest in knowing factoids and trivia about a movie, nor in being an academic immersed in archival minutiae. If anything, too much detail obscures thinking; the mother figure looms too large when we are very close and Woolf reminds us to look up, look outside, get our sights straight. Her ideal reader is not just someone like her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell; it is also a stranger whom she calls a “Common Reader.” Such a person—similar to the working-class adult students Woolf first met when teaching at Morley College from 1905 to 1907—is not someone to be lectured at, but, instead, conversed with.¹¹

Textual difficulty in such hands is not obtuse or classist or designed to separate so-called highbrow audiences from ordinary ones. Rather, Woolf wrote for the Common Reader in 1920s England, insisting on their sophistication, refusing to see them as lumpenproletariat. As Alice Staveley reminds us, Virginia and Leonard’s publishing company, the Hogarth Press, sold books—including Woolf’s novels and also poems by T. S. Eliot and excerpts from James Joyce—in “countless shops, railway stalls, steamship lines, libraries, educational institutes, schools, and private homes across the United Kingdom and around the globe, from London to Manchester, Edinburgh to Tokyo, Sydney to Cape Town, Birmingham to Mumbai.”¹²

Similarly, curators of Akerman retrospectives point out that part of the highbrow fame of the filmmaker is the result of her works being hard to locate—sometimes even now available only via museum retrospectives, not on disc or on demand—rather than about her content or approach. This is a question of supply rather than accessibility. (Some more evidence: even armed with an academic library and NYPL membership, I could not locate a copy of Akerman’s book, Chantal Akerman: Self Portrait before writing this essay.) Echoing Woolf’s demand that ordinary citizens make her work their own, Akerman asks for sensitivity from viewers not predicated on cultural or economic elitism. Rather, her frequent changes of genre—from slow cinema to documentaries, short films, and musicals—reflects a career-long desire to connect with diverse audiences.

For all the cinematic elements in her prose writing, Woolf was not a straightforward champion of the movies as art. This is surprising, because she went to the cinema regularly throughout her life: watching Tarzan movies with her sister, comedies by Keaton and Chaplin, Hollywood romances, documentaries, art films, and Surrealist shorts.¹³ In her essay “The Cinema,” she calls the movies a “parasite” artform.¹⁴ This from someone who so admired The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari! The problem with cinema—at least typical mainstream cinema—is the rigid symbolism that movies often rely upon: “A kiss is love. A smashed chair is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.”¹⁵ Woolf’s examples are of visual symbols reduced on film to the emotional equivalent of a drugstore greeting card.

Such material leads to inane sentiments and just bad reading. But I think Woolf herself would be satisfied with Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé… (One Day Pina Asked…). This is ostensibly a “concert movie,” but one that turns such a generic term into an hour-long exploration of artistic mastery, influence, and dread. The movie begins with Pina Bausch’s dancers explaining her practice of starting each production by asking them: What are you proud of? The rest of the film is frenetic, showing scenes in rehearsal and during shows that confusingly blend locations and dances into one long fever dream we share with the Bausch troupe. The final wrenching scene is of Bausch looking tired and pale, wishing for herself some strength to face “big problems” in the world (which ones? She does not specify), before a jarring cut to the credits sequence set loudly to Chaplin’s theme song from Modern Times.

What do we make of such juxtapositions? What does Akerman via Pina ask of her dancers, herself, and us? Akerman does not tell us where to go. We each provide the conclusion to such an experience.

Akerman always filmed from her own height, contrary to film school dictum. The result is that we quite literally inhabit her perspective…

Woolf first met her Common Readers in nontraditional college classrooms. So I find it a nice coincidence that Akerman also taught for some years in a program that attracts all kinds of filmmakers, at City College of the City University of New York. My obsession with them both is stoked by a sense that we share the experience of conversing with students who are not much like the ones attending Oxbridge or small liberal arts colleges in the US. Inclusive public higher education also brings me in contact with minds that are independent and acute in ways that I learn from every year.

During an introductory-level media studies class this fall, at the very heights of my Woolf-Akermania, my undergraduates found out that I often watch movies much longer than “normal” runtimes of two hours or less. The best seeds are planted through humor, so it was delightful to be teased for liking Jeanne Dielman, Sátántangó, Occupied City. “So what do you learn from watching these kinds of movies?” a student asked. Well, they teach me to read, I said, fumbling for words.

Akerman filming the musician Alfred Brendel in a 1989 documentary came to mind as I scrambled to express myself in front of the class. In discussing Schubert’s sonatas, Brendel says, “Classical forms describe boundaries,” and experimental forms let us (artists and audiences) wander “at the precipice” beyond set limits. Akerman shoots Brendel in his studio, the camera often zooming out to show a beautiful upper-story room with floor-to-ceiling windows lit by the winter sun turning over the afternoon hours of filming. Tight close-ups of Brendel’s face ease into roomy long shots, inviting us to look past him and through the window in an evocatively Woolfian way.

Akerman always filmed from her own height, contrary to film school dictum. The result is that we quite literally inhabit her perspective, see what she sees, laugh alongside her at affectionate absurdities or consider urgent questions about national belonging as images of stormy clouds over the Mediterranean.¹⁶ My words can only hold space for what it means to have shared Akerman’s view of the winter light changing on a tree to the right of the frame as an old maestro plays music that he obsessively loves. There is something wild in her many portraits of other artists and practitioners that defies my ability to bring things into words. This essay—boiled down to a befuddling maxim, read rashly, watch slowly—is the closest I can get.

Reading freely, beyond the limits of genre and authority, is wild and scary. So are the responsibilities of democracy, of trespassing “freely and fearlessly [to] find our own way for ourselves.” 

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