Chantal Akerman

Je tu il elle

Je tu il elle

Chantal 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 plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy: first with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who picks her up, and then with a female ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). Culminating in an audacious, real-time carnal encounter that brought lesbian sexuality to the screen with a new frankness, Je tu il elle finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism with a newfound emotional and psychological precision.

Film Info

  • Belgium, France
  • 1975
  • 86 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$79.96

Je tu il elle
Cast
Chantal Akerman
Julie
Niels Arestrup
Truck driver
Claire Wauthion
Girlfriend
Credits
Director
Chantal Akerman
Written by
Chantal Akerman
Cinematography
Bénédicte Delesalle
Editor
Luc Freché
Sound
Alain Pierre
Sound
Samy Szlingerbaum

Current

Chantal Akerman, 1968–1978: The Weight of Being
Chantal Akerman, 1968–1978: The Weight of Being

In the first ten years of her extraordinary career, the Belgian filmmaker used the raw materials of quotidian, marginal lives to spark a radical reinvention of cinema.

By Beatrice Loayza

Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in New York as by her own past…

By Michael Koresky

Ira Sachs Finds a Model of Artistic Courage in Je tu il elle

Under the Influence

Ira Sachs Finds a Model of Artistic Courage in Je tu il elle

The director of Frankie and Keep the Lights On opens up about how the emotional and sexual candor of Chantal Akerman’s feature debut has inspired his own deeply personal approach to cinema.

Andrew Bujalski’s Top 10
Andrew Bujalski’s Top 10

The writer-director of Computer Chess and Support the Girls lets his eye and heart wander freely through our collection, and gives us a list of some films he admires.


Josephine Decker’s Top 10
Josephine Decker’s Top 10

The director of Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley chooses a selection of old favorites that combine beauty with ugliness, the logical with the irrational.

The BFI’s List of the Best LGBT Films of All Time
The BFI’s List of the Best LGBT Films of All Time
For the past thirty years, the British Film Institute has been honoring the best in contemporary and classic LGBT cinema from around the world, with its annual BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. In celebration of the festival’s three-decade anni…
Chantal Akerman, 1950–2015
Chantal Akerman, 1950–2015
We were saddened today to learn of the death of the great Chantal Akerman. Known most widely for her 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Akerman made precise, thoughtful, and aesthetically daring films—fiction fe…

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Chantal Akerman

Director, Writer, Actor

Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion. Influenced by the structural cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, at age twenty (work by artists like Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol), Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, playing with long takes and formal repetition in her films, which include the architectural meditation Hotel Monterey (1972), the obsessive portrait of estrangement Je tu il elle (1975), the autobiographical New York elegy News from Home (1976), and the austere antiromance Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Her greatest achievement, however, is her epic 1975 experiment Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a hypnotic study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine widely considered one of the great feminist films. Such later Akerman films as the Proust adaptation La captive (2000) and the documentary on Mexican-to-U.S. immigration From the Other Side (2002) retain her daring, vital voice.