Outsider Cinema

Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman. Akerman at the Namur film festival, 2011.
  • 1975Jeanne Dielman
  • 1977News from Home
  • 1974Je, tu, il, elle
Echoed in
  • Elephant2003
  • Safe1995
OC 004 · 1950⁠–⁠2015 · Brussels, Belgium

She held the camera still and let real time run, until peeling potatoes became the most suspenseful thing on screen.

Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou at fifteen and decided to make films. By twenty-five she had made Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: three days in the life of a widow, shot in long, fixed, frontal takes, where the smallest break in her routine lands like a shock.

Time in an Akerman film is literal. You watch the full length of a task, a corridor, a train journey. Her New York films, including Hotel Monterey and News from Home, pair empty streets with letters from her mother read aloud.

In 2022 critics polled by Sight and Sound named Jeanne Dielman the greatest film ever made. She died in 2015.

Films

Where to start with Chantal Akerman, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.

  1. A still from Hotel Monterey.

    Hotel Monterey

    1972 · 1 hr 3 min · 16mm, colour, silent

    A cheap Upper West Side hotel, from the lobby to the roof, in long silent takes. Lifts open and close; residents look back at the camera.

  2. A still from Je, tu, il, elle.

    Je, tu, il, elle

    1974 · 1 hr 26 min · 35mm, black and white

    Akerman plays a young woman who rearranges her furniture, eats sugar from a bag, hitches a ride with a truck driver and visits her former lover.

  3. A still from Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

    Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

    1975 · 3 hr 21 min · 35mm, colour

    Delphine Seyrig as a widow keeping a precise routine over three days. Shot in fixed takes at her eye level, it was voted the greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound's 2022 critics' poll.

  4. A still from News from Home.

    News from Home

    1977 · 1 hr 25 min · 16mm, colour

    Long takes of 1970s New York streets and subways, while Akerman reads her mother's letters from Brussels over the traffic.

Echoed in

Where Akerman's ideas turned up next.