Chantal Akerman, unclassifiable filmmaker, icon in the making

Experimental and visionary, his work shows the substance of life, its ordinary, its fantasy. Nearly ten years after her death, a retrospective in theaters and an exhibition finally recognize the Belgian filmmaker.

LFor a long time, Chantal Akerman remained on the fringes. The circle of his supporters was small. Sad irony: his suicide in 2015, at the age of 65, brought him out of the shadows a little. But his real posthumous recognition suddenly arrived two years ago, when the prestigious British magazine Sight and Sound dislodged Cold sweats (by Hitchcock) while hoisting Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels in first place in the ten-year ranking of the hundred greatest films of all time. As absurd as this kind of list may be (established among 1,639 critics, academics and film professionals), the news caused an earthquake in the microcosm of cinephilia. His name has been circulating everywhere. On Instagram, we often come across her face with sea green eyes, her little girl voice and a heavy smoker. Akerman is now an icon. Paradoxical, because his films are still largely unknown and difficult to access.

Thanks to the distributor Capricci, last year’s theatrical release of Jeanne Dielman… has already made it possible to (re)discover this visionary masterpiece from 1976. A success: twenty thousand people saw it. This is a lot in terms of the demanding film, which, let us remember, both documents and transcends the controlled, then disrupted, schedule of a widowed housewife (Delphine Seyrig, unforgettable). And now more news finally arrives: retrospective in theaters, Blu-ray box set with forty-six films (!), publication of a formidable gold mine (bringing together books, screenplays, interviews), exhibition at the Game palm. An event worthy of the continent that Chantal Akerman represents.

Between narration and autofiction

Far from being reduced to Jeanne Dielman…, his work is in fact abundant, heterogeneous, hybrid. Born under the sign of early maturity. At 15, the young girl from Brussels reads and dreams of writing. One day, in fraud, she will see Pierrot the Fool, by Godard (then prohibited for those under 18). Revelation. She then tells herself that everything is possible with a camera, that it will hold like a pen, a scalpel, a paintbrush. At 17, she made her first short film, Skip my town (1968), mind-boggling burlesque romp, where she films herself all alone like a feminine Chaplin in the kitchen of a Brussels HLM. She spills everything, mops the floor haphazardly, slathers herself in shoe polish and cream, ends up turning on the gas, causing the building to explode. The disruption, the prescience of a catastrophe, the zaniness: its mark is already there.

To go behind the camera and expose yourself, you have to dare. Six years later, this daring gesture by a woman has become exceptional. In I, you, he, shethis time she does vacuum cleaning by cloistering herself in a room, naked, with just a mattress, which she moves all over the room. She gorges herself on sugar with a teaspoon, writing on loose sheets of paper on the ground. Then decides to go out, goes a long way with a truck driver, a trivial and divine male (Niels Arestrup, handsome like Brando). Before taking refuge with a woman and embracing her tenderly, offering a ballet of naked bodies and caresses between girls like we’ve never seen before. This 1974 film is astonishing in its modernity. In the meantime, it must be said that the young woman visited New York, where she discovered the experimental avant-garde cinema of Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas. She lived there for a while, frequenting the underground scene. This stay is decisive. On his vocation to stay on the edge of the experimental, always with one foot in narrative cinema or raw autofiction.

Intimacy is a common trait of the hot trio that she formed from afar with Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel. Post-New Wave generation, atomized, a little lost, stranded on the bed – also common, the reason for seclusion. But if fatigue, discouragement, anxiety return like obsessive leitmotifs for Akerman, she finds a way out outside herself. An outside, an elsewhere, a landscape to cross, a border to cross, another to discover. “There is nothing less narcissistic than his cinema, says Corinne Maury, lecturer at the University of Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès. She always asks the question of the other, in a frontal and political manner, refusing any psychologizing approach. She attended the seminar of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas at a young age, which left an impression on her. Whether facing migrants at the Mexican border in On the Other Side (2002) or facing his mother in No Home Movie (2015), she leans on the other, not on herself. To frame is to establish an ethic for her. We do not have power over others, on the contrary, we have a duty for others. It is clear that this thought written from images appeals to students, who are very interested today in the questions of living together or its impossibility. Fifteen years ago, I was discouraged from doing a course on Akerman by telling me that there would be no one there. This is no longer the case. »

Seeing how much her primitive and conceptual cinema resonates with many current issues (migrants, the complicated link to Israel, racism, gender, etc.), she is our contemporary. Political therefore, but also poetic, plastic, sensory is his cinema. In News from Home (1977), series of still shots and sublime tracking shots of New York in the 1970s, the sound is pure and hard: it is a musical score on the rumble of the subway, the passing of cars, the captivating chanting whispered in voice-over by the director , reading his mother’s letters. Same with From the East (1993), a monumental documentary that became an installation, a slow, hallucinatory journey through an Eastern Europe suddenly freed after the dislocation of the communist bloc.

Despite a sinister part of the history of the 20th century^e century which sometimes goes back in her images, she has ensured that her cinema is the most hospitable.

Jérôme Momcilovic, film critic and teacher

The deep and quivering night, the rocking of the train, the woman with the resonating heels, it is also the sweet Aurore Clément, carnal and spectral nightlight, upright in her skirt (Anna’s Meetings1978). “It’s the “amniotic bath” side, the oceanic dimension, which touches and dazzles mesays Jérôme Momcilovic, film critic and teacher. I feel the same emotion as with noisy or experimental music. We are really in the material of a film, with an almost psychotropic effect. His cinema is fantastic. Despite a sinister part of the history of the 20th century^e century which sometimes goes back in her images, she has ensured that her cinema is the most hospitable. »

Habitable, inhabited, haunted. By all kinds of ghosts, wandering souls, passers-by waiting in the cold (From the East), Jewish emigrants survivors of pogroms and the Shoah (Stories of America, 1989). Polish Ashkenazim, his grandparents and his mother were deported to Auschwitz. His mother alone survived and was unable to say anything about this trauma. Her daughter then made “noise over silence” (she writes in My mother laughs), quote taken up by Delphine Horvilleur in her funeral oration at Akerman’s funeral. Where the rabbi mentioned “the world” that the filmmaker was able to recreate, “the strange dialogue between presence and absence, the impossibility of moving in and settling down somewhere”, his way “to always be on the road or to believe oneself on the road”, his questioning “metaphysics”, “his ability to laugh”, Also. Because there is humor and fantasy. Akerman knew how to surprise, to break his image by launching into a musical (Golden Eighties, 1986). By collaborating with stars, Juliette Binoche and William Hurt, in A couch in New York (1996). By adapting Proust, not without audacity and originality, in The Captive (2000), with Sylvie Testud and Stanislas Merhar.

Irredeemable, feminist without being, artist without being, she escaped all categories so well that she took the film out of the theater for a moment, to create installations in museums. It is the first in France to have decorsected cinema in this way, promoting bridges between visual arts, dance, literature and performance. Laurence Rassel, curator of the exhibition which took place at the Bozar in Brussels before coming to Paris, was also able to rejoice at the great success encountered: “I was struck by the transgenerational nature of the audience, people coming with their families, very curious to discover his multifaceted work, staying an entire day sometimes wandering between the monitors, reading, listening. We feel that she is a wonderful source of energy and inspiration.  » Who provides the impetus, makes you want to create, to act, to do or undo. Jérôme Momcilovic thus remembers being moved by the copy of a 16-year-old high school student, not very strong-willed, not at all a movie buff. She had written that Jeanne Dielman… reminded her of the pleasure she took as a child watching her grandmother meticulously fold the contents of her suitcase every summer. She concluded that “cinema, when it’s good, is the art of watching someone do something.”

Knowing how to look, over time: perhaps we no longer know how to do it very well, by seeing everything and anything very quickly. Akerman knew this so well that her influence continued to grow. We no longer count the films where we feel it, and the list is long of those who have recognized what they owe it (Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Kathryn Bigelow, Michael Haneke…). Without anyone having achieved this radicality, “in the sense of returning to the root of things” (Corinne Maury). More intact and vibrant than ever.

In theaters and bookstores
Chantal Akerman retrospective. First part (1974-1993), in theaters. Second part (1996-2015), from October 23.
“Chantal Akerman, tracking shot”. Exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris, from September 28 to January 19, 2025.
Chantal Akerman box set. Ed. Capricci, 14 Blu-ray, €149.95. From October 15.
Chantal Akerman, written and spoken work, ed. L’Arachnéen, 3 volumes in box, €69.