シャンタル・アクトマンに入る方法、フェミニスト映画の名手へ

In 2022, at long last, Chantal Akerman made history as the first female director to top the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll. For 70 years, the magazine’s decennial survey of best films saw the likes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story ranked alternately as critic’s favourites. No doubt the absence of female filmmakers was telling of Hollywood’s boys’ club, where women’s contributions to cinema were dismissed or ignored altogether. But it was only in the latest poll that Akerman’s mesmeric magnum opus, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), even broke into the top ten at all. When it won, feminist cinephiles and Akerman fans alike rejoiced – the auteur had finally got her due.

The film, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, will be shown nationwide as part of the British Film Institute’s retrospective season on the director, Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception. Commencing with Jeanne Dielman, the season will span the totality of Akerman’s directorial career – no less than 40 films – and culminate with her documentaries on the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. As a queer, Jewish woman born to two Holocaust survivors from Poland, we can understand Akerman’s work as singularly personal and political. Autobiographical in nature, her films explored mother-daughter relationships, loneliness, desire and escapism. She was “ahead of her time, making introspective odysseys,” says Isabel Stevens, the season’s curator, although Akerman herself believed that “all labels have to be thrown away”.

Finding favour with some of the most prolific female directors working today – Céline Sciamma, Joanna Hogg, and Charlotte Wells – Akerman’s films fused realism with a modernist scepticism. Although she rejected a feminist analysis of her work, she offered a forensic yet tender insight into the lives of her subjects, most of them women. Above all, she is remembered for her pioneering approach to cinema: Akerman was a filmmaker who redefined narrative structure, pacing, and the relationship between space and time, creating work that was at once intimate and revolutionary.

Ahead of her season at the BFI, below, AnOther has curated a guide to six of Chantal Akerman’s most defining films.

Akerman’s first film is perhaps best known for its centrepiece: an uninterrupted ten-minute lesbian sex scene. Loosely inspired by her experiences hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels, Je Tu Il Elle is a triptych of three enigmatic acts. Akerman herself plays protagonist Julie, a woman suffering a mild psychological breakdown following a breakup. Julie isolates herself in a barren room, doing little other than compulsively eating sugar, writing letters, and rearranging furniture in a futile search for order. She eventually hitchhikes with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) to see her ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). The two women have sex, and Julie’s narration reveals that her ex tells her that she has to leave in the morning, which Julie does.

Striking in its distinct lack of eroticism, Je tu il elle’s radical and unsentimental depiction of intimacy strips Julie’s body of objectification. But it’s Akerman’s distinctly queer gaze, often turned on her own naked body, that transforms the scene into an act of self-representation. An assured debut as they come, the film cemented Akerman as a pioneering and uncompromising voice in feminist and avant-garde cinema.

What to make of Jeanne Dielman, a Belgian film about a potato-peeling prostitute? Sitting at a hefty 201 minutes, the film charts a single mother’s mundane life in excruciating detail. Played by an enigmatic Delphine Seyrig, we watch Jeanne cook, clean and mother over the three days. We learn, too, that she moonlights as a sex worker, which is as much a part of her banal routine as the tasks she performs daily by rote. Her first orgasm with a client (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) leads to an unravelling of sorts, one that ends when she stabs her last (Yves Bical) to death with scissors.

Akerman’s long, unbroken takes here feel closer to reality than to cinema. Today, the film speaks truth to power: an unflinching look at the thanklessness of motherhood and caregiving, legitimising housework and sex work as valid forms of work. Through Jeanne Dielman’s acute rendering of domestic life, Akerman creates a space for us to clearly see ourselves, confronting the invisible labour that both creates and sustains our world.

Akerman’s mother, Natalia “Nelly” Akerman, was one of the most important figures in her life. While Akerman described Jeanne Dielman as “a love film for my mother”, News from Home offers the most explicit and intimate depiction of their relationship. Through shots of New York, overlaid with Akerman’s narration of her mother’s letters – sometimes tender, sometimes overbearing – the film captures a personal dynamic against the backdrop of the restless city.

Rather than simply affecting the structuralist approach so often attributed to her, the documentary expands from her earlier domestic focus to capture New York in its entirety. Commuters pass each other without a word, workers endure the quiet exhaustion of night shifts, and drifters occupy the streets late into the night. Framed in long, panning takes, Akerman drives home the loneliness and freedom a city can give in equal measure.

In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Belgian filmmaker Anna (Aurore Clément) travels across Western Europe to promote her latest film. She travels through vibrant cities – filled with pedestrians, hotel maids, and flickering TVs – and meets strangers, friends, ex-lovers, and family along the way, but never stays long. She instead exists on the periphery of others’ lives without ever anchoring herself in her own; little more than a distant observer.

This transience, marked by constant departures, tells of Anna’s self-erasure in the service of others. Unable to root herself anywhere, her loneliness is something of a parallel to Akerman’s life on the road. In the end, as Anna lies in bed listening to a series of missed calls, her life is defined by this emptiness: an existence of constant motion, but no place to belong.

In La Captive, Akerman’s languorous adaptation of Proust’s The Prisoner, time is once again suspended to explore the theme of possessive love. Simon (Stanislas Merhar), a wealthy Parisian intellectual, obsessively tracks his girlfriend Ariane’s (Sylvie Testud) every move, testing her fidelity and demanding her submission. Ariane complies, even allowing him to have sex with her while she feigns sleep – the only way Simon seems capable of intimacy.

Akerman’s use of stillness and detached gestures – paired with modern technologies like cordless phones and remote controls – suggests a chilling detachment from genuine emotional connection for Simon. Eventually, Ariane’s autonomy is gradually eroded under the weight of his control, even as she endures moments of passive compliance. Simon is maybe captive to his own paranoia but, as Akerman insists, he will always be freer than a woman trapped in this world.

What are the textures of a life? For Akerman, this question preceded the impossible task of condensing her mother’s life into a two-hour documentary. No Home Movie is a film “above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us,” Akerman declared. “About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment […] A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”

The film’s deliberately glacial pacing and sparse aesthetics recall Akerman’s previous work but with a looser, more immediate feel. She reveals as much as she hides, using the details of her mother’s small apartment and those tender hymns of the domestic to paint a fond, but incomplete portrait of Nelly. A life subtended by the shadow of the Holocaust, Akerman avoids asking probing questions about her mother’s past or illness. Instead, she lets the camera do the talking: a witness to the spaces between words and gestures.

Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception is on at the BFI in London now.

In 2022, at long last, Chantal Akerman made history as the first female director to top the Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll. For 70 years, the magazine’s decennial survey of best films saw the likes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story ranked alternately as critic’s favourites. No doubt the absence of female filmmakers was telling of Hollywood’s boys’ club, where women’s contributions to cinema were dismissed or ignored altogether. But it was only in the latest poll that Akerman’s mesmeric magnum opus, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), even broke into the top ten at all. When it won, feminist cinephiles and Akerman fans alike rejoiced – the auteur had finally got her due.

The film, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, will be shown nationwide as part of the British Film Institute’s retrospective season on the director, Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception. Commencing with Jeanne Dielman, the season will span the totality of Akerman’s directorial career – no less than 40 films – and culminate with her documentaries on the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. As a queer, Jewish woman born to two Holocaust survivors from Poland, we can understand Akerman’s work as singularly personal and political. Autobiographical in nature, her films explored mother-daughter relationships, loneliness, desire and escapism. She was “ahead of her time, making introspective odysseys,” says Isabel Stevens, the season’s curator, although Akerman herself believed that “all labels have to be thrown away”.

Finding favour with some of the most prolific female directors working today – Céline Sciamma, Joanna Hogg, and Charlotte Wells – Akerman’s films fused realism with a modernist scepticism. Although she rejected a feminist analysis of her work, she offered a forensic yet tender insight into the lives of her subjects, most of them women. Above all, she is remembered for her pioneering approach to cinema: Akerman was a filmmaker who redefined narrative structure, pacing, and the relationship between space and time, creating work that was at once intimate and revolutionary.

Ahead of her season at the BFI, below, AnOther has curated a guide to six of Chantal Akerman’s most defining films.

Akerman’s first film is perhaps best known for its centrepiece: an uninterrupted ten-minute lesbian sex scene. Loosely inspired by her experiences hitchhiking from Paris to Brussels, Je Tu Il Elle is a triptych of three enigmatic acts. Akerman herself plays protagonist Julie, a woman suffering a mild psychological breakdown following a breakup. Julie isolates herself in a barren room, doing little other than compulsively eating sugar, writing letters, and rearranging furniture in a futile search for order. She eventually hitchhikes with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) to see her ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). The two women have sex, and Julie’s narration reveals that her ex tells her that she has to leave in the morning, which Julie does.

Striking in its distinct lack of eroticism, Je tu il elle’s radical and unsentimental depiction of intimacy strips Julie’s body of objectification. But it’s Akerman’s distinctly queer gaze, often turned on her own naked body, that transforms the scene into an act of self-representation. An assured debut as they come, the film cemented Akerman as a pioneering and uncompromising voice in feminist and avant-garde cinema.

What to make of Jeanne Dielman, a Belgian film about a potato-peeling prostitute? Sitting at a hefty 201 minutes, the film charts a single mother’s mundane life in excruciating detail. Played by an enigmatic Delphine Seyrig, we watch Jeanne cook, clean and mother over the three days. We learn, too, that she moonlights as a sex worker, which is as much a part of her banal routine as the tasks she performs daily by rote. Her first orgasm with a client (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) leads to an unravelling of sorts, one that ends when she stabs her last (Yves Bical) to death with scissors.

Akerman’s long, unbroken takes here feel closer to reality than to cinema. Today, the film speaks truth to power: an unflinching look at the thanklessness of motherhood and caregiving, legitimising housework and sex work as valid forms of work. Through Jeanne Dielman’s acute rendering of domestic life, Akerman creates a space for us to clearly see ourselves, confronting the invisible labour that both creates and sustains our world.

Akerman’s mother, Natalia “Nelly” Akerman, was one of the most important figures in her life. While Akerman described Jeanne Dielman as “a love film for my mother”, News from Home offers the most explicit and intimate depiction of their relationship. Through shots of New York, overlaid with Akerman’s narration of her mother’s letters – sometimes tender, sometimes overbearing – the film captures a personal dynamic against the backdrop of the restless city.

Rather than simply affecting the structuralist approach so often attributed to her, the documentary expands from her earlier domestic focus to capture New York in its entirety. Commuters pass each other without a word, workers endure the quiet exhaustion of night shifts, and drifters occupy the streets late into the night. Framed in long, panning takes, Akerman drives home the loneliness and freedom a city can give in equal measure.

In Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, Belgian filmmaker Anna (Aurore Clément) travels across Western Europe to promote her latest film. She travels through vibrant cities – filled with pedestrians, hotel maids, and flickering TVs – and meets strangers, friends, ex-lovers, and family along the way, but never stays long. She instead exists on the periphery of others’ lives without ever anchoring herself in her own; little more than a distant observer.

This transience, marked by constant departures, tells of Anna’s self-erasure in the service of others. Unable to root herself anywhere, her loneliness is something of a parallel to Akerman’s life on the road. In the end, as Anna lies in bed listening to a series of missed calls, her life is defined by this emptiness: an existence of constant motion, but no place to belong.

In La Captive, Akerman’s languorous adaptation of Proust’s The Prisoner, time is once again suspended to explore the theme of possessive love. Simon (Stanislas Merhar), a wealthy Parisian intellectual, obsessively tracks his girlfriend Ariane’s (Sylvie Testud) every move, testing her fidelity and demanding her submission. Ariane complies, even allowing him to have sex with her while she feigns sleep – the only way Simon seems capable of intimacy.

Akerman’s use of stillness and detached gestures – paired with modern technologies like cordless phones and remote controls – suggests a chilling detachment from genuine emotional connection for Simon. Eventually, Ariane’s autonomy is gradually eroded under the weight of his control, even as she endures moments of passive compliance. Simon is maybe captive to his own paranoia but, as Akerman insists, he will always be freer than a woman trapped in this world.

What are the textures of a life? For Akerman, this question preceded the impossible task of condensing her mother’s life into a two-hour documentary. No Home Movie is a film “above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us,” Akerman declared. “About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment […] A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”

The film’s deliberately glacial pacing and sparse aesthetics recall Akerman’s previous work but with a looser, more immediate feel. She reveals as much as she hides, using the details of her mother’s small apartment and those tender hymns of the domestic to paint a fond, but incomplete portrait of Nelly. A life subtended by the shadow of the Holocaust, Akerman avoids asking probing questions about her mother’s past or illness. Instead, she lets the camera do the talking: a witness to the spaces between words and gestures.

Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception is on at the BFI in London now.