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Chantal Akerman: Adventures in Perception

Formally audiacious works from the maker of the minimal masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman.

‘Where are you Anna?’ drifts a voice out of an answerphone in Akerman’s mesmerising 1978 road trip Les Rendez-vous d’Anna. We could ask the same of the Belgian auteur. For where do we place her cinema? Across 40 films, Anna is one of many stand-ins for the director, who was ahead of her time making introspective odysseys from an innately feminist, queer, and Jewish perspective but who believed ‘all labels have to be thrown away’.

Akerman had many deep-rooted obsessions beyond self-portraiture: confinement, mother-daughter relationships, exile, anxiety and loneliness, desire and the impossibility of human connection. But she never repeated herself. Her formally audacious films of the 70s, exemplified by Jeanne Dielman, reckoned with cinema’s essence – time and space – but her obsessions would go on to surface in comedies, musicals and romances, literary adaptations, documentaries which wander into fiction and more. ‘I don’t belong anywhere’ she famously said. The same is true of her restless, uncategorisable cinema.

Isabel Stevens, season curator

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

Drama1975202 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman's magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.

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No Home But Cinema: The Spaces of Chantal AkermanNo Home But Cinema: The Spaces of Chantal Akerman

Short documentary202514 minsDirector: Jessica McGoff

This new video essay by writer and critic Jessica McGoff, traces the restless movement in the works of Chantal Akerman, where the concept of home is always slipping just out of reach.

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Je tu il elleJe tu il elle

Drama197486 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Akerman’s debut feature, with its 10-minute lesbian sex scene, revealed its maker to be a radical and uncompromising force in cinema.

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Golden EightiesGolden Eighties

Musical198699 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Song, dance and romance charge this joyous hair-salon set musical, but Akerman’s take on 80s consumerism is anything but frothy.

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Saute ma villeSaute ma ville

Drama196813 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman’s plays a manic heroine in her early, incendiary critique of domesticity and conformity.

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Le DéménagementLe Déménagement

Drama199339 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Surrounded by unpacked boxes, a man delivers an extended monologue on indecision and regret.

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Les Rendez-vous d'AnnaLes Rendez-vous d'Anna

Drama1978128 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

A quasi self-portrait that was unfairly neglected on its release, this road movie is a profound musing on loneliness, displacement and the long shadow of the war.

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News From HomeNews From Home

Documentary197689 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman reads letters sent to her from her mother in Belgium, against a tableau of shots of 1970s New York.

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No Home MovieNo Home Movie

Documentary2015118 minsDirector: Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman’s rigorously observational portrait of her late mother takes on a whole new significance in the wake of the director’s own premature passing.