Ten years. Perhaps this is the time necessary for a work to consolidate itself as a whole and attract new perspectives on it. Thus, the return to theaters of Chantal Akerman’s work, almost a decade after her suicide in October 2015, constitutes an important event of the autumn of cinema. In April 2023, the launch of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975) brought together twenty thousand spectators on two hundred screens.
Distributor Capricci makes this point clear with a retrospective of sixteen feature films recently restored by the Royal Belgian Cinematheque. This salvo is divided into two stages: a first cycle (“1974-1993”) in theaters from September 25, the second (“1996-2015”) from October 23. To which is added an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris (“Chantal Akerman. On a trip”, until January 19, 2025), focused on the plastic work of the filmmaker, through a tour of installations and files. All of this is topped off with a generous Blu-ray box set with forty-six films, scheduled for mid-October.
This return en bloc invites, once past the monument Jeanne Dielmanto explore the vast detours of the work behind it, often perceived in its breaking lines (fictions, documentaries, television films, self-portraits), but whose obsessive coherence we understand better today. Born in 1950 in the suburbs of Brussels, Chantal Akerman got behind the camera very early and, at the age of 18, filmed her first short film, the explosive Skip my city (1968). In its beginnings, it absorbed some of the most radical aesthetic adventures of the time: firstly, that of European modernity, which it joined under the impulse of Pierrot the fool (1965), by Jean-Luc Godard; then that of the American avant-garde (Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol), in which he immersed himself during a stay in New York in the early 1970s.
His cinema will maintain this double formal requirement, without giving up reaching the public, through comedy (A sofa in New York1996; tomorrow we move2004), musicals (golden eighties1986) or the romantic one (The captive2000, according to Proust; Almayer’s madness2011, according to Conrad).
Opposite horizons
The beauty of Akerman’s cinema is to create a tension between two opposite horizons: on one side the bedroom, where we retreat, on the other the world or the temptation of distance. The whole challenge is to find passages from one to the other or establish short circuits. In I, you, him, she (1974), the director portrays herself as an indolent recluse in her apartment, a small world that she reconfigures as she pleases by moving the furniture. And finally the young woman goes out, randomly gets into a truck, walks a long way with the driver (Niels Arestrup) and then all the otherness of the world enters her field of vision. In News from home (1977), Akerman compiles views of New York in a non-legendary light (anonymous streets, neighborhoods without character), while, in voiceover, letters signed by his mother are read. The indifferent city, broken down into lines and surfaces, is perceived through the filter of this epistolary affiliation.
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