Sight and Sound presents the auteur series: Chantal Akerman

Like her filmography, which encompasses rigorously avantgarde cinema, musicals, comedies and much else, the traces Akerman left of herself in her films are wildly various. In a nifty piece of anti-self-portraiture, Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1997, made for the French TV series Cinéma, de notre temps), the director reflects on the impossibility of making a film about herself when she is commissioned to do so. “I’m an unreliable storyteller… honesty is artificial,” she tells the camera. In an interview with Nicole Brenez in 2011, Akerman would go further, warning against “rifling through [her] autobiography. It’s imprisoning.” 

And yet, no small part of what makes her cinema so unique and timely is that it is so resolutely personal, intimate, emotional and vulnerable.

— Isabel Stevens, in her introduction titled ‘Adventures in perception’

In a body of work characterised by restless exploration and tension, Akerman returned to certain themes and perfected her own stylistic rigour. In 2015, on the occasion of a major retrospective, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin outlined what made her such a distinctively exciting director.

In 1968, aged 18, Akerman wrote, directed and starred in her incendiary blackly comic debut Saute ma ville. Here, writer Eric de Kuyper and producer Marilyn Watelet recall how this mischievous film made its way into the world.

Reviewed by Jill Forbes, Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1980.

In two pieces written for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman describes being thrilled by the ‘exhilarating’ documentary Les Années 80 at Cannes, which shows Akerman, the shopkeeper’s daughter, at work on a new film about consumer culture, a musical that he finally saw nine years later.

Reviewed by Catherine Wheatley.

Watching Jeanne Dielman at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1975, Jonathan Rosenbaum questioned how to critique avant-garde films, including Akerman’s confrontational work.

Reviewed by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight and Sound, Winter 1975-6.

Chantal Akerman spoke to interviewer Wade Novy following a screening of Jeanne Dielman at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California, on 1 December 1976. It was a remarkable conversation about developing her own language as a filmmaker and how feminism has changed everything.

Reviewed by Jan Dawson, Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1979.

In 2021, Phuong Le wrote about the powerful psychogeography of Akerman’s alienated vision of Manhattan in News from Home, and how the film repays watching time and again, disclosing new secrets on each visit and disorienting even the most frequent flyer.

Reviewed by B. Ruby Rich.

Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton, Sight and Sound, July 2016.

On the eve of its release in 1984, Chantal Akerman explained how she came to make Toute une nuit, a film in which the audience should lose their sense of reality. She also offered her thoughts on her favourite directors and the limits of being described as a feminist filmmaker.

Reviewed by John Pym, Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1979.

Reviewed by Nicole Flattery.

Reviewed by Susan Barrowclough, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1984.

Reviewed by Jill Forbes, Sight and Sound, Spring 1987.

Turning to feminism, and feminist theory, to understand Akerman’s films is of limited use, argued Angela McRobbie in 1992, following the release of romantic drama Nuit et jour. Her cinema is at its best when it embraces ambiguity and introspection as it explores the lives of women.

Reviewed by Angela McRobbie, Sight and Sound, September 1992.

Reviewed by Lillian Crawford.

Stephanie Buttle talks about playing Juliette Binoche’s sidekick in flat-swapping romcom A Couch in New York, a film that deserves reappraisal, not least for the way Akerman smuggles many of her signature themes into a Hollywood genre movie.

In 1972 Akerman filmed her first feature, the mysterious silent documentary Hotel Monterey, from dusk to dawn, with cinematographer Babette Mangolte. This previously unpublished scenario for the film demonstrates her deep connection to the place and her dexterity as a writer.

Reviewed by Pamela Hutchinson.

Reviewed by Alice Lebow.

In the dreamlike La Captive, inspired by Marcel Proust, an obsessive lover spies on his girlfriend, torturing himself with the realisation that he can never know what is in her mind. On its release, Nick James spoke to Akerman about Proust, Hitchcock and making the audience think.

Chantal Akerman’s editor Claire Atherton and the Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont, an admirer of Akerman, talk about her experimental documentary D’Est, a study of Eastern Europe emerging from the Soviet era, which exists as both a film and a multimedia installation.

Reviewed by Beatrice Loayza.

Claire Atherton talks about how she and Akerman made De l’autre côté, a 2002 documentary about Mexicans trying to cross the border into the US: a process of observing without judging, which in turn encourages the audience to question their own motivations.

Reviewed by Jill Forbes, Monthly Film Bulletin, 1990.

In Edinburgh in 2012, Chantal Akerman discussed how she adapted Joseph Conrad’s novel about empire and madness into a love story about one man’s devotion to his daughter and his impossible dream of a new life in Europe – and how she found sensuality in filming nature.

Reviewed by Michael Atkinson, December 2016.

Delphine Seyrig introduced Chantal Akerman to cellist Sonia Weider-Atherton in the early 1980s and the result was a crucial artistic and romantic union. Here, Wieder-Atherton tells Isabel Stevens about performing in and composing scores for Akerman’s films, and the auteur’s appetite for music.

Delphine Seyrig also introduced Akerman to her future editor Claire Atherton. Here, Atherton recalls their first collaboration, filming a play about Sylvia Plath in which Seyrig played Plath’s mother.

How did Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde drama about a Belgian housewife, mother and part-time prostitute come to be acclaimed as the Greatest Film of All Time? Laura Mulvey explains how Jeanne Dielman found its audience and its moment – and why film culture will never be the same again.

The 2022 Sight and Sound poll result helped to secure Akerman’s legacy, not just in film culture but on the streets of Paris and Brussels, where she lived and worked. By Pamela Hutchinson.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s director Céline Sciamma writes about the profound influence of the Belgian auteur on her life and work, discussing why she had previously found it so difficult to talk about her and why thinking about the filmmaker makes her want to ‘grab film by the lapels and shake it’.