The Cinematheque

“Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation.”

J. Hoberman, Village Voice

When Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles displaced Hitchcock’s Vertigo atop Sight and Sound​’s 2022 decennial critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time, it did more than ascend a female filmmaker, for the first time ever, to the highest rung of the canon—it forced a reckoning in film culture with an irrefutably important artist whose legacy was routinely underserved or deemed too niche for most audiences. Today, a few years removed from the results (and the backlash that ensued by a reactionary old guard), the appetite for Akerman’s work has never been greater.

Chantal Akerman, the eldest daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, was born in Brussels in 1950 and died by suicide in Paris 65 years later. In between, she authored an extraordinary body of work across multiple decades, spanning narrative and non-narrative film as well as television, installation art, and memoir. Her encounter at 15 with Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou was a bolt of instant recognition that filmmaking was her life’s vocation. A film-school dropout and transplanted New Yorker in 1971, she was exposed to experimental cinema by friend and future collaborator Babette Mangolte, most notably the structuralist films of Michael Snow. His work demonstrated to Akerman, still forging her artistic identity, the utility of cinematic duration, and that ​“a camera movement, just a movement of a camera,” she later recalled, ​“could trigger an emotional response as strong as from any narrative.”

The lessons of Snow became the bedrock of Akerman’s aesthetic—particularly pronounced in her 1972 feature debut Hotel Monterey, a surgical cross-section of a Manhattan hotel—but the persistent themes in her work originated from within. Though she recoiled at descriptions of her movies as ​“feminist” or ​“queer,” Akerman was a sexually fluid artist making personal films with a radically female gaze, and her early renown in the 1970s coincided with a crescendoing wave of women’s activism. It was amid a new zeitgeist around gender and sexuality that Akerman staged, in Je tu il elle (1974), an extended scene of two women making love (one played by the director herself), and, in its 1975 follow-up Jeanne Dielman, the unravelling of a routine-bound homemaker (portrayed by feminist crusader Delphine Seyrig) in what registers as, but isn’t, real time. (What scholar Ivone Margulies has designated Akerman’s ​“hyperrealism.”) The latter, made when Akerman was just 24, thrust its director into a limelight she would never again experience—though her brilliance was evident in any number of works that followed.

For Akerman, Jeanne Dielman was a love letter to her mother Natalia: ​“It gives recognition to that kind of woman,” she insisted, by bearing witness to the quotidian domestic labour of oppression. Indeed, the bond with her mother was an exceptionally close one, and mother-daughter dynamics would braid throughout her entire oeuvre. (In News from Home and No Home Movie, it is literally their relationship on view.) Natalia, a diasporic Pole whose parents were murdered in Auschwitz, instilled in the director a dignity in her Jewish heritage—the only label Akerman wore proudly—but also the injury of alienation and unbelonging that haunts nearly all of her films. As varied as Akerman’s work became, oscillating from austere travelogue to carbonated musical comedy, diaristic autobiography to literary adaptation, the spectre of the Shoah, and her mother, can be found. A year after Natalia’s death in 2014, Akerman took her own life.

“No Home Movies” marks Vancouver’s first retrospective devoted to the Belgian auteur, its title (better thought of as ​“no-home movies”) taken from Akerman’s final and perhaps most self-disclosing film. This series collects 18 of the director’s key works—those made during her most prominent period of the 1970s, as well as those that came after and are deserving of wider recognition. Owing to the efforts of the Chantal Akerman Foundation and CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the majority of Akerman’s catalogue has now been digitally restored. With few exceptions, our retrospective draws from these restorations.

“The many arguments about what form a ​‘new women’s cinema’ should take revolved around a presumed dichotomy between so-called realist (meaning accessible) and avant-garde (meaning elitist) work; Akerman’s films rendered such distinctions irrelevant and illustrated the reductiveness of the categories.” Janet Bergstrom, Sight and Sound

“The only filmmaker who absorbed the radical time structures of American avant-garde film combined with its commitment to personal work and employed all that in narrative art films.” Amy Taubin, The New York Times

“One of the cinema’s most original postwar auteurs—a documentarian, anecdotist, comedian, chanteuse, and restless innovator.” Michael Ewins, BFI

“A filmmaker who changed what cinema is or could be or ought to be. She strode effortlessly into the roll call of great auteurs, her work into the lists of best films ever made. And yet her films are hard to see.” Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts, The Guardian