Chantal Akerman

La chambre

La chambre

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 series of circular pans around a small apartment, the interior’s furniture, its clutter, and the filmmaker herself—staring back at us from bed—become the subjects of a moving still life.

Film Info

  • United States, Belgium
  • 1972
  • 11 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.37:1

Available In

Collector's Set

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$79.96

La chambre
Credits
Director
Chantal Akerman
Camera
Babette Mangolte
Editor
Geneviève Luciano

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

Formalist Akerman at the Cinémathèque Française

Repertory Picks

Formalist Akerman at the Cinémathèque Française

Three formally daring short works by Chantal Akerman will play in a monthlong retrospective of the director’s work at the Cinémathèque française.

Babette Mangolte’s Time with Chantal Akerman
Babette Mangolte’s Time with Chantal Akerman
“We were different in age, but we had something in common. We were women, we had been affected by the fact that the film world was a man’s world.” In a new conversation published in Interview magazine, cinematographer Babette Mangolte sums up t…
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

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.