Directed by Chantal Akerman

Directed by Chantal Akerman

11 Episodes

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past half century, Chantal Akerman—who would have turned seventy this June—took a profoundly personal, aesthetically radical approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and alienation. Influenced by the structuralist cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, exploring the possibilities of long takes and formal repetition in works like the architectural meditation HOTEL MONTEREY, the obsessive portrait of estrangement JE TU IL ELLE, the autobiographical New York elegy NEWS FROM HOME, and the austere antiromance LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA. Her towering achievement, however, remains JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, a domestic epic that has exerted an incalculable influence on the evolution of both feminist and avant-garde cinema. In later works like the singular musical GOLDEN EIGHTIES and the spellbinding Proust adaptation LA CAPTIVE, Akerman continued to expand the boundaries of cinematic language, leaving behind monumental landmarks that have pointed the way for a generation of artists who have followed in her footsteps.

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Directed by Chantal Akerman
  • Saute ma ville

    Episode 1

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1968 • Belgium

    Made when the director was just eighteen, Chantal Akerman’s debut film is a blistering first expression of what would become one of her major themes: women’s confinement in and rebellion against the domestic sphere. Akerman plays a young woman who, al...

  • La chambre

    Episode 2

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1972 • Belgium

    Chantal Akerman’s dialogue with the 1960s avant-garde movement of structural cinema begins here, with the first film she made in New York City—a breakthrough in her experiments with the bending of cinematic time and space. As the camera completes a se...

  • Hotel Monterey

    Episode 3

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1972 • United States

    Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. Filmed over the course of fifteen hour...

  • Je tu il elle

    Episode 4

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
    Starring Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire Wauthion

    Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman pl...

  • Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

    Episode 5

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
    Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

    A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...

  • News from Home

    Episode 6

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States

    Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...

  • Les rendez-vous d'Anna

    Episode 7

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1978 • France
    Starring Aurore Clément, Helmut Griem, Magali Noël

    Chantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, JEANNE DIELMAN, is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. Whi...

  • Dis-moi

    Episode 8

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1980 • France

    For a French television series about grandmothers, Chantal Akerman interviews elderly women who survived the Shoah, including her own mother, whose experience in the Holocaust reverberated throughout the artist’s life and work.

  • Golden Eighties

    Episode 9

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1986 • Belgium, France
    Starring Delphine Seyrig, Fanny Cottençon, Pascale Salkin

    The exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of cinematic visionary Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love an...

  • Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy

    Episode 10

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1989 • Belgium, France
    Starring George Bartenieff, Judith Malina, Eszter Balint

    Chantal Akerman explores Jewish American identity in this multilayered portrait of the immigrant experience. Shot in Brooklyn near the Williamsburg Bridge, HISTOIRES D’AMÉRIQUE takes the...

  • La captive

    Episode 11

    Directed by Chantal Akerman • 2000 • Belgium, France
    Starring Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar, Olivia Bonamy

    Adapting the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Chantal Akerman transforms the material into a mesmerizing study of voyeurism, control, and sexual obsession centere...