Directed by Chantal Akerman
10 Episodes
One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past half century, Chantal Akerman—who would have turned seventy this June—took a profoundly personal, aesthetically radical approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and alienation. Influenced by the structuralist cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, exploring the possibilities of long takes and formal repetition in works like the architectural meditation HOTEL MONTEREY, the obsessive portrait of estrangement JE TU IL ELLE, the autobiographical New York elegy NEWS FROM HOME, and the austere antiromance LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA. Her towering achievement, however, remains JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, a domestic epic that has exerted an incalculable influence on the evolution of both feminist and avant-garde cinema. In later works like the singular musical GOLDEN EIGHTIES and the spellbinding Proust adaptation LA CAPTIVE, Akerman continued to expand the boundaries of cinematic language, leaving behind monumental landmarks that have pointed the way for a generation of artists who have followed in her footsteps.
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13:33Episode 1Saute ma ville
Episode 1
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1968 • Belgium
Made when the director was just eighteen, Chantal Akerman’s debut film is a blistering first expression of what would become one of her major themes: women’s confinement in and rebellion against the domestic sphere. Akerman plays a young woman who, al...
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12:07Episode 2La chambre
Episode 2
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1972 • Belgium
Chantal Akerman’s dialogue with the 1960s avant-garde movement of structural cinema begins here, with the first film she made in New York City—a breakthrough in her experiments with the bending of cinematic time and space. As the camera completes a se...
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1:03:06Episode 3Hotel Monterey
Episode 3
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1972 • United States
Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. Filmed over the course of fifteen hour...
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1:26:31Episode 4Je tu il elle
Episode 4
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
Starring Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire WauthionChantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman pl...
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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Episode 5
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan DecorteA singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...
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1:29:27Episode 6News from Home
Episode 6
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...
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2:08:18Episode 7Les rendez-vous d'Anna
Episode 7
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1978 • France
Starring Aurore Clément, Helmut Griem, Magali NoëlChantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, JEANNE DIELMAN, is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. Whi...
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1:37:30Episode 8Golden Eighties
Episode 8
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1986 • Belgium, France
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Fanny Cottençon, Pascale SalkinThe exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of cinematic visionary Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love an...
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Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy
Episode 9
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1989 • Belgium, France
Starring George Bartenieff, Judith Malina, Eszter BalintChantal Akerman explores Jewish American identity in this multilayered portrait of the immigrant experience. Shot in Brooklyn near the Williamsburg Bridge, HISTOIRES D’AMÉRIQUE takes the...
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1:58:41Episode 10La captive
Episode 10
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 2000 • Belgium, France
Starring Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar, Olivia BonamyAdapting the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” Chantal Akerman transforms the material into a mesmerizing study of voyeurism, control, and sexual obsession centere...
