At six minutes, five seconds into Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015), the film cuts from a handheld high- angle shot of a backyard to a close- up shot from behind Natalia Akerman, the filmmaker's mother. Natalia pushes a door screen left and enters the living space. A camera – Chantal – follows Natalia before stopping at the doorway. While the camera records this modest entry into an apartment's open space, the relation between subject/ mother and camera/ daughter reveals both the comfort of a family home and a hesitant urgency to fully witness, capture and hold dear. The camera's sway in Akerman's hands suggests at once the immediacy of home movie footage, and the ephemerality of an always already lost present. Such felt proximity to transient subject, space and time in these early moments of Akerman's final film, with its Akermanesque rhythm of extended long take and sudden break, enacts a flow between intimate ‘real life’ duration and the insistent minimalism of an artist devoted throughout her career to an ethics of a ‘very frontal gaze’, as Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez Lopez suggest, among others. The seeming formalist/ realist juxtaposition of No Home Movie's opening sequence, in fact, offers a subtle microcosmic mapping of a fundamental dichotomy in classic film theory, a distinction and opposition that corresponds, as Dudley Andrew writes, ‘to the cliche that all cinema has roots in either Melies or Lumiere‘(1976, vi), in either formal experimentation that foregrounds the medium's distinctiveness (formalism) or an ‘objective’ documentation that reveals an indexical link with the real (realism).