Chantal Akerman’s early features have one aspect in common: all are suffused with loneliness. In her first fiction feature, Je Tu Il Elle (1974), a character wanders between lovers old and new but is always confused as to what she really wants, only really content in isolation. In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), we follow a woman trapped in the monotony of a mysteriously empty everyday … Continue reading All The Lonely People
Marguerite Duras lived in a little flay in what was once the Hôtel des Roches Noires in Trouville on the Normandy coast for over thirty years. She spent long periods of time there from 1963 to 1996. She would stare out of the window towards the horizon line, or at least was photographed often staring out of the window towards the horizon line. Though undoubtedly … Continue reading Winter Waves: Marguerite Duras And Trouville
Fifty years ago this September, Chantal Akerman made her first film. It was a short, comical fragment about distraction and suicide called Saute Ma Ville (1968). Following Akerman herself running up to her flat, the film then shows her gradually making a mess of the kitchen where she has locked herself, taping the gaps in the door and windows ready for a slow death. The … Continue reading An Exhaustive List of Nothing and Everything in Chantal Akerman’s Flat
Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976-77) is a visual diary reflecting on a very personal history. A feature length film of sorts, it seems born out of cathartic necessity rather than simply creative ambition. Akerman had been working throughout the 1970s, and News from Home was made after her critical appreciation had more grown in stature, largely thanks to the impossible-to-ignore vigour of her four hour 1975 feature, Jeanne Dielman, … Continue reading The Quiet City
Celluloid Wicker Man 