Chantal Akerman Collection Vol 1(1967-1978) Temporal Boundaries and Liminal Spaces

When it comes to cineastes, the name of Chantal Akerman carries a lot of weight and respect. Despite this, however, up until this month, I had never seen a single film of hers. So, when the BFI announced a limited five-Blu-ray boxset release of fourteen landmark films from her first decade as a filmmaker (released this week, with Volume 2—covering the latter half of her career—set to appear later this year), including her four NSA entrance exam films, Bruxelles 1&2 and Knokke 1&2 from 1967, I seized my chance to finally become knowledgeable about her and see what all the fuss was about.

Born in Brussels in 1950 to Holocaust survivors, Chantal Akerman enjoyed a lengthy career, producing more than forty films of varying lengths and genres to great critical acclaim. A non-conformist auteur inspired by Godard, her body of work reflects her experimental and uniquely feminist spirit. She is perhaps best known for the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film I could not ignore as I made my way through this set. My awareness of it took several forms. There was a mounting apprehension about eventually confronting a film I knew ran a whopping three hours and twenty minutes—much of which, I was led to believe, revolved around the repetition of household tasks performed by its titular heroine, portrayed by Delphine Seyrig. Another factor in my apprehension was that the film, only Akerman’s second narrative feature, had topped Sight and Sound‘s “Greatest Films of All Time Poll” in 2022, becoming the first female-directed film to take the number one spot in the poll’s seventy-year history. Films that achieve such high praise can become daunting for a viewer or critic—especially arthouse ones. But there was another facet to my awareness: with each film I viewed, it became increasingly clear that all roads would eventually lead to Jeanne Dielman. It’s as if Akerman spent the first years of her filmmaking career crafting and honing the techniques and themes she would later master in her most landmark work.

Films like 1968’s Saute ma ville (aka Blow Up My Town), while clearly influenced by Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, signal an oncoming tragedy through increasingly frenzied housekeeping, laying a clear foundation for what was to come. Similarly, 1971’s L’Enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman) explores the isolation of its female protagonist, Claire Wauthion, trapped in the liminal space of her marital home, performing housekeeping chores. With her husband absent and only their infant daughter representing the family unit, Claire confides in her friend, portrayed by Akerman, about her life. Despite remaining silent throughout, Akerman appears as a sympathetic presence, and the film is sympathetic to Claire as she remarks on how happy she is, even as her actions imply otherwise. To that end, Akerman feels less like a friend and more like a sounding board manifested purely from Claire’s lonely imagination. This approach is further pursued in 1973’s Le 15/18, which records a protagonist performing a series of banal, everyday tasks while delivering a monologue.

Le Chambre (The Room), from the following year, sees Akerman at her most experimental as she presents, via a series of circular pans around her New York apartment, a kind of moving still life, with herself as a model – just another item in the room for us to consider. It was at this point in the set that I began to appreciate how Akerman gets us to consider the uniqueness of her existence through the seemingly mundane, and how the everydayness of life – and the traditions of filmmaking – can become anything but the norm in her hands. 1973’s Hotel Monterey seems like a natural extension of Le Chambre. Moving away from short-form movies afforded Akerman the opportunity to explore time on camera just as much as the liminality of the hotel her lens captures, but I personally found its long-form nature less compelling. To me, it felt less like meditation cinema and more like watching the hotel’s CCTV. However, her appreciation of the concept of time and her experiments in playing out her narrative in parallel to the viewer’s own time – the “time of the telling” – would pay great dividends in Jeanne Dielman.

Akerman’s first narrative feature, made in 1974 as a calling card for what she could achieve with Jeanne Dielman the following year, was Je Tu Il Elle. This film seems to encapsulate her key themes and preoccupations, as well as all she had learned across six years of filmmaking. The story of a woman (Akerman) experiencing a breakdown in the wake of a relationship breakup, the film contains the unnerving bewilderment of Saute ma ville and the isolation evident in several of the other films I have outlined. Akerman couldn’t have predicted it, of course, but much of the film reminded me of the stir-crazy effects of the lockdowns we endured in 2020–21: the restlessness, the ennui, and the loss of normal social inhibitions due to a lack of regular human contact felt all too familiar. The craving for stimulus we all felt during those uncertain times is mirrored in her peculiar habit of eating spoonfuls of sugar from a paper bag – a metaphor for the need for stimulation and the desire to create and expend energy in a limited situation. When Akerman leaves her apartment, the film somewhat inevitably correlates with our experience of stepping back into society following the hiatus. She seizes (unhealthily, unwisely) upon an initial human interaction with a stranger, a truck driver who gives her a lift, before rekindling her past relationship. The lengthy, graphic sex scene between Akerman and a returning Claire Wauthion at the film’s close serves as the final word against the isolation it commenced with, even if the future for Akerman’s character remains uncertain.

Which brings us to Jeanne Dielman itself. A three-hour-and-twenty-minute movie that takes its audience across three days in the life of its eponymous character, a widowed and deeply meticulous housewife who, we discover through three interactions with men calling at her flat in the late afternoon, turns tricks to make ends meet. By this point in my experience, I was aware that Akerman is an important and skilled filmmaker, even if I didn’t necessarily find all of her work to my taste. However, the techniques she deploys in Jeanne Dielman made me confront my tastes. This is a film absolutely concerned with its own temporal structure and the concept of “shared duration” between its character and the audience. In focusing on the domestic routine of the protagonist, the film is distinctive in that it refuses to employ the storytelling approach other filmmakers might use; there are few ellipses here, where dead or redundant moments are cut, because Akerman believes these moments to be anything but dead or redundant. That is why they are played out in all their painstaking, precise detail, leading to a film whose temporal nature feels stretched beyond convention.

In today’s social media-saturated world, I wonder if audiences have the attention span for what Akerman is doing here, as it certainly required me to readjust and reevaluate how I personally interact with and view film. It would be easy to dismiss a film that consists of – indeed, emphasizes – the daily routines of an economically-minded Belgian widow and mother to a teenage son as “slow cinema” or, worse, just plain boring. But as I watched, I kept thinking back to films I personally appreciate as great movies. Withnail and I came to mind. Why do I personally rate Withnail and I so highly? It’s because of Bruce Robinson’s immaculate screenplay. Robinson, a passionate wordsmith, worked and reworked this semi-autobiographical tale throughout the 1970s and 1980s, turning it from a novel into a movie. The noticeable effect of this is that there’s not a single word wasted in Withnail and I, and certainly not one out of place. Every single line, from stage direction to dialogue, has been perfectly considered. Appreciating that led me to a revelation: if I can identify that consideration of words as a source of a film’s greatness, then it behooves me to identify how much consideration Akerman puts into every single movement her lead, Delphine Seyrig, performs in Jeanne Dielman. Once I cracked that, I stopped seizing upon every dialogue exchange between her and her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) or her and her unseen neighbor (Akerman), whose baby she occasionally minds, as oases in the desert. Instead, I began to properly consider the lengthy silent passages of mundane domestic routine that Akerman presents to her audience – which is, of course, the very life of her protagonist. In short, Jeanne Dielman isn’t like other movies; these moments aren’t the bits that take us from A to B – they are the film itself.

Of course, this pays off big in the film’s second act. The orderliness of Jeanne’s routine is lost when, on the second day, her client leaves the flat after sex. We never see what transpired in the bedroom, but we instantly know it was not good. Jeanne appears disoriented as she accompanies him to the door, her hair no longer perfectly coiffed, and her movements halting and uncertain. She forgets to turn on the light in the corridor as her client prepares to leave; she puts the money in the tureen on the dining room table as usual but forgets to replace the lid; lastly, as she tidies the bedroom and has her bath, she forgets that she has left the potatoes cooking on the stove. We instinctively know something earth-shattering has occurred – not because of dialogue or other conventional filmmaking techniques like emotional displays or close-ups of her harried face – but because the automaton-like precision we have witnessed so far from Jeanne is now gone. It is both subtle and spellbindingly effective. This continues into the third day, with evidence of unconscious slips, aimless wandering, loss of motivation, and further upsets to her routine, such as a missing button on an item of clothing or her usual seat in the café being taken. As the day goes on, the film reaches an unexpected and devastating conclusion, one that again leaves the audience considering everything they have witnessed from Jeanne prior to that moment.

It’s not an overstatement to say that, with Jeanne Dielman, Akerman reaches the peak of a distinctive cinematic lexicon that was her very own creation. Quite apart from the painstaking attention to detail, Akerman does some truly remarkable things here. The camera is almost exclusively static, implying a subjectivity from Akerman as a filmmaker. Whenever she introduces a scene between Jeanne and a client, she positions her camera squarely at the midriffs of her actors; their arms and hands are visible as the man removes his coat and Jeanne takes it for him, but their heads are always out of shot. The decision to ignore eye contact or micro-expressions between the two removes any question of romance from these sequences, emphasizing that they are solely business transactions. When Jeanne subsequently takes a client into the spare bedroom, Akerman keeps her camera – and, by extension, us – firmly outside, suggesting the passage of time via the light in the hallway. It goes dark, the bedroom door opens, and we surmise anything from thirty minutes to an hour has passed. Light is further utilized in a very interesting manner whenever Jeanne heads into the sitting room, where a persistent neon blue flash from somewhere outside illuminates the cabinet behind the dining table and the tureen where she deposits her income. Seemingly innocuous at first, its ever-present appearance becomes increasingly unsettling – a penetrating beam from the world beyond Jeanne’s carefully ordered existence. Taken into consideration with how the film concludes, the implications of a flashing blue light become shockingly prescient.

Following the success of Jeanne Dielman, Akerman returned to New York (where she made Le Chambre, Hotel Monterey, and 1973’s Hanging Out Yonkers, the unfinished documentary on troubled youths and drug addicts whose sound reels were lost on the city’s subway system and which is also included in this set) and the documentary medium to make 1976’s News From Home. This film is not so much a movie as an art installation. It presents a series of images of New York, accompanied by an audio of Akerman reading out several letters she has received from her mother—we are never privy to any of her replies. Gradually, as the images come to the fore, the narration recedes into the distance, suggesting the dislocation Akerman herself felt from home. Nevertheless, the use of these missives from home places the filmmaker at the heart of the movie.

The final film in the set is arguably Akerman’s most accessible work up to that point in her career: 1978’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (The Meetings of Anna). It tells the story of Anna (Aurore Clément), a filmmaker making her way across Western Europe to promote her latest release. As she does, she rekindles relationships and meets fellow transients, each of whom bares their soul to her. Despite feeling more commercial and traditional, the film sees Akerman once again exploring her key themes and preoccupations. Liminal space is obviously at the forefront of the movie, as Anna moves between hotels, hotel rooms, restaurants, train stations, and train journeys. The appreciation of a shared duration between Akerman’s characters and her audience is evident in the latter, as nighttime sequences involving Anna’s train traveling from one station to the next play out in real time. That said, I was shocked to see one extremely swift scene in this movie. When Anna and an old friend, Ida, agree to go and eat as the former waits for her train, Akerman depicts an elliptical journey on foot to a nearby eatery. Upon their arrival, however, Anna announces that she is no longer hungry, and we cut to a scene with the pair seated on a bench on the station platform. Having sat through several lengthy sequences in all of Akerman’s movies up to this point, the scene in the café, which runs for the mere handful of seconds it takes for Clément to deliver her line about changing her mind, is an astonishing and surprising moment. It’s not the only change, either; in Anna, Akerman moves her camera much more, following her characters as they walk and talk. It’s not quite an Alan Clarke walking movie, with his innovative use of Steadicam, but it’s definitely distinctive from what has gone before. It will be interesting to see what shapes Akerman’s movies take from this point onward when Volume 2 is released by the BFI later this year.

In addition to the fourteen movies included across four discs in this set, the BFI has compiled an extensive and astonishing list of extras. There are audio commentaries on Saute ma ville and Je tu il elle by So Mayer and Selina Robertson of the queer feminist film curatorial collective Club des Femmes, on Jeanne Dielman from Kate Rennebohm and Simon Howell of the Akerman Year podcast, and on Les Rendez-vous d’Anna also by Rennebohm. Then there’s a fifth disc stuffed with new and archival materials, including an hour-long interview between Akerman and B. Ruby Rich from 1976; Sami Frey’s insightful 1975 documentary Autour de Jeanne Dielman, which runs 80 minutes and explores the working relationship between Akerman and her lead, Delphine Seyrig; the thirty-minute Entretien avec ma mère, Natalia Akerman from 2007, which captures a conversation between Akerman and her mother, Natalia; interviews with Babette Mangolte and Aurore Clément from the same year that run just under an hour; and, lastly, a newly commissioned video essay entitled Leaving Home – New World Vision from artist Sarah Wood. Rounding off this limited edition of 2,000 copies is a 72-page perfect-bound book featuring new essays by Lillian Crawford, Catherine Bray, Diana Cipriano, Justine Smith, Daniella Shreir, Pamela Hutchinson, Jerry White, Sarah Wood, and Hannah Strong, plus archive articles by Janet Bergstrom and Laura Mulvey.

Mark’s Archive – Chantal Akerman vol. 1