Dazzling Beauty
“MY NAME IS CHANTAL AKERMAN. I WAS BORN IN BRUSSELS. AND THAT’S THE TRUTH.”
—Chantel Akerman in Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1997)
In 1975, a film by an unknown young Belgian filmmaker, running over three hours in length, premiered at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. Starring the glamorous French film star Delphine Seyrig as a housewife performing an exacting ritual of cooking and cleaning in “real time,” Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was unlike anything that had shown at Cannes before.
“People kept getting up and leaving. You could hear the seats banging,” the director recalled. “That’s when I realized that people couldn’t stand it.” Novelist Marguerite Duras reportedly stood up and yelled, “This woman’s crazy,” then exited the theatre. The next day, Akerman was declared an art house sensation: “Suddenly, at 25, I was informed that I was a great filmmaker.”
Watching a Chantal Akerman film is like taking a Rorschach test: what you see, or feel, depends on your own state of mind. One can analyze her work—and many have—but the director largely chose not to explain it herself. Akerman’s films require a commitment from the viewer, with long takes that provoke restlessness, or unease, unless one is willing to yield, in which case there follows acceptance or, perhaps, resignation—yes, this is how it goes, such is life. And there is beauty, always beauty, at times so breathtaking as to become heartbreaking.
Although Akerman has been celebrated for a cinema in which “nothing happens,” in fact, a great deal happens, on many levels, whether on the soundtrack, just beyond the frame, down hallways, or through windows partially obscured. The use of time, both prolonged and fleeting—what
