Chantal Akerman, « Letters Home » , 1986

Chantal Akerman then made a video of her sole attempt at filmed theatre, positioning her camera before and even on the stage, bringing Delphine and Coralie Seyrig together in an intimate huis clos. This is how she met Claire Atherton, with whom she would collaborate for more than thirty years. 

"11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath, American poetess, 30 years old, married with two children, committed suicide. Up until that moment, she had been engaged in a long and detailed correspondence with her mother. Françoise Merle staged a show in 1984 around this correspondence, a cantata for two voices in which the voices of mother and daughter merged, dialogued, separated and sought each other. Chantal Akerman followed this path leading from madness to death, a path constantly charted by this exchange of fragile voices, recounting the difficulty of writing, the joys and suffering of life as a lover and a mother. As ever, Akerman worked first with time, and the time of madness is a material that is certainly difficult to grasp but extraordinarily motivating. The whole project can be summed up in one proposition: the pace of the film must follow the meanders of the heroine's mind. Between the euphoric periods and the ramped-up speed of words as they criss-cross each other, snapping at each other, there is more than one parallel: a veritable osmosis exists which the filming (made up entirely of reverse-angle shots) and editing (playing with the gracious or miraculous alternating slice of cuts) underscore to infinity. 

Previously, for example, in her American films, Chantal Akerman had played preferably with the wealth of long durations; here, she adapts her vision and her ear to the instinctive words of an intensely lived correspondence. When Sylvia first discovers flirting, the whole film seems to take off in a transport of joy, the images surpass each other as they underscore the voracious smiles and sparkling eyes of a laughing face that is framed close-up with a speed that is rich in meaning. And when, on the contrary, anxiety raises its head, the dry mouth and gnawed nails set the tone of the images that swing into greenish hues and pallid skin. There is such intensity of vision in this video film, such a desire to exchange comforting words, and also such a will to bruise, that the intersecting sounds and images are finally painful. Out of these incessant intersections is born an emotion that is difficult to contain." 

Antoine de Baecque, Cahiers du cinéma, n°399, September 1987