Film · European
1950–2015 · Belgian
Structural and feminist avant-garde cinema
Chantal Akerman was a Brussels-born director who made films out of duration: real time, fixed frames, doorways, corridors and domestic labour shown at the length it actually takes. Her Jeanne Dielman, made when she was twenty-five, spends three and a half hours watching a widow peel potatoes, make beds and take a client each afternoon — and in 2022 it was voted the greatest film ever made in the Sight and Sound poll, the first film by a woman ever to top it. The Holocaust, and her mother's survival of Auschwitz, sit silently behind most of her work.
Three days in a Brussels flat: a widow peels potatoes, makes the beds, takes one client each afternoon, and on the third day the routine slips (1975)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, with Delphine Seyrig.
New York street corners and subway trains filmed in long static takes while the director reads aloud her mother's letters from Belgium (1977)
News from Home — ends with a receding shot of Manhattan from the water.
A young woman shut in a room eats a bag of sugar, writes and rewrites a letter, sleeps with a lorry driver and then with a former girlfriend (1974)
Je, tu, il, elle — Akerman herself plays the woman.
A woman director travels by train between European cities to present her film, meeting her mother, a lover and a stranger in hotel rooms and stations (1978)
Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, with Aurore Clément.
A musical comedy set entirely in a shopping arcade, where the hairdresser, the clothes-shop girls and an American returning after thirty years sing about love and money (1986)
Golden Eighties (Window Shopping) — Delphine Seyrig again, singing.
A journey by camera from summer in East Germany to winter in Moscow, past queues of people waiting in the snow, with almost no words (1993)
D'Est (From the East) — later remounted as a gallery installation.
A humming girl tapes herself into a kitchen, polishes her legs with the shoe brush, throws the flowers away and turns on the gas (1968)
Saute ma ville — her thirteen-minute debut short, made at eighteen, with Akerman herself in the kitchen.
An ageing mother in a Brussels flat is filmed eating, sleeping and speaking over Skype, in the director's last film before her suicide (2015)
No Home Movie — about her mother Natalia, who had survived Auschwitz and who died in 2014.