If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.
Where to start with Chantal Akerman? She’s the queen of the feminist avant-garde, an unassailable auteur, a heroine and an enigma. She made almost 40 films across a nearly 50 year career, often appearing before her own camera and aging before our eyes from the teenager destroying her kitchen in Saute ma Ville (1968), to the sixty-something woman laying to rest family trauma in her final film No Home Movie (2015). And, of course, she is the recently crowned G.O.A.T, who as a 24-year-old channeled such conviction, depth and rigor into an over three hour portrait of a bourgeois Belgian housewife, that by 2022 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles had beaten out both Vertigo and Citizen Kane to claim the top spot in Sight and Sound’s prestigious, canon-forming Greatest Films of All Time poll.
For all these reasons, coming to Akerman for the first time can be intimidating. That’s perhaps especially true now, ten years after her death at the age of 65 in 2015. Over the past decade, the dust has settled on Akerman’s legacy, and the true extent of her influence has come into focus. At the same time, our culture has travelled through several reckonings over the role of women in art and society. In the intervening years, fuelled by the explosion of new criticism fostered through the spread of internet culture and social media, as well as the aftermath of #MeToo and other associated movements, the film industry’s attitude towards women has come under renewed scrutiny. An increased awareness of the structural barriers faced by women filmmakers has contributed to a greater appetite for women-made movies, both new and old. There’s still a long way to go, but there’s no question that over the past decade films made by women have gained greater prominence. Many of the new wave of contemporary women filmmakers channel ideas which Akerman centered in her work - female subjectivity, sexuality (especially queer desire), domestic dissatisfaction, auto-fiction, rebellion. Today, Akerman’s films feel more resonant than ever; in short, cinema finally seems ready for Chantal.
The history of the reception of Akerman’s work is an epic narrative in itself, a story of resourcefulness, conviction and perseverance. In retrospect, it’s easy to think of Akerman’s genius as a done deal, but of course, like (m)any (women) filmmaker, her story entails scrappiness and struggle. Born in Brussels in 1950, Akerman credited a formative teenage encounter with Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) with turning her on to filmmaking. In 1967, freshly expelled from school, Akerman spent a summer shooting on 8mm, experiments she used to apply for film school. Although she dropped out after a year, Akerman studied film long enough to complete a playful, explosive short Saute ma ville (1968). After doorstepping a commissioner, Akerman managed to get Saute ma ville shown on late night Belgian television and the film circulated at short film festivals. By 1974, she was working with producer Marilyn Watelet on her first feature Je tu il elle, shot partly on found film stock, and funded through money saved by Akerman from her temp jobs. In Watelet’s recollection, Je tu il elle was clearly audacious, but there was little sense it might have a wide audience: “You see, at the time… the idea that it was going to be seen was very secondary,” she remembered in 2024. “We thought that it would be seen by a very small circle and it would not go further.” Nevertheless, Je tu il elle did make an undeniable impact, running at a Paris cinema for three years consecutively. The critic B Ruby Rich would later herald the film as a watershed in queer filmmaking, “a Rosetta Stone of female sexuality.”
Then, of course, comes Jeanne Dielman, the film which officially put Akerman on the map. At its 1975 premiere in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, the filmmaker remembered sitting in the theatre with lead actor Delphine Seyrig, listening to people shift in their seats, rustle their programmes, and even leave the cinema; the next day, she received a flood of festival invitations. Jeanne Dielman immediately divided critics and audiences - some saw wilful boredom and senseless minimalism, others were thrilled by its formal boldness, its temporal exactitude and its unreadable central character. Akerman largely resisted demands to expand on the film’s political or psychological implications. And although she tended to dismiss the feminist label in interviews, her unwavering focus on domestic gestures, and on a middle-aged woman’s daily life, spoke clearly to the wider feminist movement. “I made this film to give all these actions typically undervalued a life on film” Akerman has said, a deceptively simple statement which summarised this collision of radical politics and radical aesthetic.
Jeanne Dielman has, for reasons outlined in a thousand reviews, essays and PhDs, come to be recognised as a masterpiece: as the feminist critic Laura Mulvey has described, “one might say it felt as though there was a before and after Jeanne Dielman, just as there had once been a before and after Citizen Kane.” Its position has been consolidated in the past couple of decades, and sealed by the film’s surprise crowning in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. The speed of its ascent is notable. Until relatively recently the film was not easy to screen; the work of the Chantal Akerman Foundation, founded by the filmmaker’s sister, Sylviane Akerman, after her death, has played a huge role in making her work more available. The film first made an appearance in the poll (which runs once a decade) only in 2012, when it entered at number 36. Like other artists who peak early (Orson Welles, who made Citizen Kane in his mid-twenties, is the obvious comparison), Akerman struggled at times to move out of the shadow of her best known work. As early as 1976, Akerman was expressing frustration at over earnest analysis of the film, telling an interviewer: “Jeanne Dielman is an achieved work… I can’t repeat the same things a hundred thousand times.” Luckily for us however, Akerman’s at least didn’t appear to be creatively crippled by the film’s formidable reputation and her workrate over the next few decades would remain impressive.
After Jeanne Dielman, Akerman continued experimenting in auto-fiction and minimalism with the documentary News from Home (1976), in which Akerman reads letters to her mother over images of New York City, and the drama Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), which follows a filmmaker (Aurore Clement) on a promotional tour. Both films clearly build on Jeanne Dielman’s formal and thematic preoccupations, but they also signalled new directions - the latter especially was described in one review as Akerman’s “most accessible and ‘commercial’ film to date.” The 1980s signalled a move towards more ambitious projects in terms of scale, and an expansion of Akerman’s ideas and aesthetic. In a frank 1984 interview to mark the release of the deconstructionist romance Toute une nuit, Akerman acknowledged this pull towards a larger canvas, saying “If I want to make more expensive films, I think inevitably I will have to make them for bigger audiences… there is less and less of an audience for so-called art films.” That dramatic shift was encapsulated with Golden Eighties (1986), a delicious, candy-coloured musical riffing on Jacques Demy and MGM, set entirely within a shopping mall, and complete with a yé-yé singing barbershop chorus, dancing hairdressers and a bonafide popstar, Lio, in a central role. For many critics, Golden Eighties was a step too far - too cute, too kitsch, too on the nose in its post-modern consumerist critique. In retrospect however, the film feels deeply refreshing, wonderfully committed, a big swing from someone who usually worked minimalistically with tiny budgets. The filmmaker once described by critic Jill Forbes as “marginal on three accounts… young, female and Belgian,” was explicitly reaching out beyond the margins.
This gesture outwards would continue in the 1990s, with films such as Nuit et jour (1991) and A Couch in New York (1996) leaning more explicitly into the genre conventions of erotic (hetrosexual) romance and Hollywood romantic comedy. Perhaps Akerman’s most successful compromise between her experimental sensibility and the European arthouse tradition, is La Captive (2000), a story of obsessive love adapted from Proust. “All the autobiography and deconstruction we’ve come to expect of Akerman… are here subsumed to the cause of creating a truly cinematic world of allure, distraction and unknowing,” wrote Nick James in a 2001 Sight and Sound interview which compared the film to Buñuel and Hitchcock. The same feature includes a revealing aside, in which the filmmaker acknowledged her own reputation as the difficult auteur, “I forget how difficult I used to be…” Akerman admits, “I see some people in the industry and I say hello and they ignore me because they still remember I was obnoxious 20 years ago.” It’s important to acknowledge here however, that if Akerman was somehow softening by dabbling in work which might appeal to wider audiences (or at least extend beyond the feminist avant-garde) she never stopped experimenting across her practice as a whole. Alongside these narrative features, she continued to make bold auto-fictive docs, television pieces, and even, increasingly gallery based work. The striking documentary D’Est (1993), for instance, a travelogue in which Akerman wanders across Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was conceived as both a feature film and an installation work.
All this is to say that to examine Akerman only through the lens of Jeanne Dielman is to simplify her slippery, multi-faceted genius, to ignore the eroticism, the humour and the deep curiosity which characterises her expansive filmography. Yet, it is through Jeanne Dielman that most audiences will find Akerman, and how can we argue with that? Its top ranking in the Sight and Sound poll will forever place it at the forefront of her extensive and multi-facet oeuvre. It’s sad that Akerman herself was no longer here to experience the full magnitude of this shift (although given her outspoken ambivalence towards polls, you can probably assume she would have been dismissive of the accolade). Yet, in spite of Akerman’s scepticism, the Sight and Sound ranking has helped spark this current resurgence in the circulation of her work. Venues are seeing packed screenings of her work around the world, contemporary writers are continuing to engage in critical re-evaluations of her filmography, and new viewers are finding their way to her work everyday.
So what is special about this moment? Why Akerman and why now? Timing is everything. The continued active diversification of critics polled by Sight and Sound from 2012 onwards certainly has had an effect, as has the continued aftermath of the #MeToo movement and a broader cultural engagement with women’s cinematic work. Perhaps in a society dominated by over-consumption and shortened attention spans, audiences are finding themselves increasingly drawn to slower, more contemplative work, films which force us to take a closer look at the everyday and the mundane. Afterall, in the “time is money” attention economy era, watching a woman peel potatoes in real time feels, if anything, more radical than ever.
This programme note is co-written by Lauren Clarke and Rachel Pronger, members of archive activist film collective Invisible Women.
Cinemasters: Chantal Akerman runs at Glasgow Film Theatre until 30 April 2025.
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