Back in New York City… Chantal Akerman: Volume 1, 1967-1978, BFI Blu-ray box set Out Now!

 

I sat with my son watching the view from a ferry leaving the south of Manhattan and heading slowly on its way to Staten Island. There was no music just the sound of lapping water, the odd seagull screech and no voice-over as, transfixed we watched the emotional shape of the buildings become clearer on a misty late 70’s morning, the Empire State still poking its way through from mid-town, the old docks on the right where can be found the Liverpool clipper, Wavertree and, ominously, sadly, the twin towers on the left. I had been to the top of both in the 80s and seeing them standing proud carries more meaning than even Chantal Akerman expected when she made this film but, as with all of her work exhibited on this remarkable set, she was mindful – as my son observed – and how our AI crammed minds respond to her images continues to evolve.

This new BFI set collects together Akerman’s work from the first decade of her career and includes all three of her films included in the most recent Sight and Sound poll on the 100 Best Films: Je tu il elle (1974), Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) – No. 1! - and this film of New York alienation and discovery, News from Home (1976). It is one extraordinary film after another and News from Home is every bit as engaging as the other two being a visual exploration of a Manhattan that is both too big to take in and also too familiar to not take personally.

I spent a number of months in New York City over a series of trips in the 80s and 90s and my first ride on the subway felt like I had stepped into a film; its cinematically familiar but also structurally awesome. At one-point Akerman films on the Lower East Side in the fading early evening light and that sense of energy, primeval wariness mixed with a hunter’s anticipation – what-ever you’re after – is palpable. A group are filmed sitting down at a crossroads bar and duly notice and make comments about their celluloid Peeping Chantal, jokingly, slightly threateningly… New York’s fast, funny and frightening.

You find yourself looking for clues in the meaning… overt, hidden and invented by the viewer. For example, Chantal might not have expected me to work out that for one segment I worked out her camera was travelling south on the 1 Train from Christopher Street through Houston onto Canal Street, moving from the West Village to SoHo to where I have had a number of adventures and which looked hardly changed from ten years later. Unlike me she was making her own way in America at the time and needed to establish her own connections. This can not have been easy and you can feel this as letters from her mother, Natalia, are read out over the action throughout the film.

Akerman was originally in America in 1973 shooting Hanging Out Yonkers (1973) before she made her famous features and the regularity with which her mother sends her $20 shows how her life as a “vagabond” might have been precarious. As we’re drawn into the street scenes we feel her vulnerability behind the camera and against this titanic backdrop even as she had returned as an established filmmaker. In artist Sarah Wood’s wonderful newly video essay she talks about the changing relationship between the viewer and the author in the film as she finds herself looking for Chantal’s reflection in the shop windows she tracks from a dolly or hand-held and then from a bus.

Her parents were Holocaust survivors and I couldn’t help thinking of Billy Wilder looking for the faces of his lover in the crowds as he dredged through thousands of feet of film shot at concentration camps. Akerman’s films are troubled but more because of her search for peace of mind and a means of expression but there’s no escaping the tragedy of her background and the one to come for New York City.

After New York but before News… Akerman made her first feature, Je tu il elle (1974), and if you liked Jean you’ll love this too. The title translates as I You He She and that pretty much describes the breakdown of the narrative. It begins with a young woman, Julie (Akerman) alone on her apartment as she writes, reads, moves her furniture and eats sugar. There’s many interpretations for her behaviour and it feels almost intrusive with the young woman appearing vulnerable, childlike and lost. All changes as she finally heads out and interacts with the world in the form of a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who she hitches a lift from, has a brief sexual encounter and then listens to him monologue in his cab as he drives… he’s uncouth and threatening even though Julie is mildly bemused and then he relays his sexual attraction to his children in the most prosaic of ways… clearly he is a potential abuser and I’m reminded of something a girlfriend used to say, “yes, all men!”

Julie finally arrives at the home of her ex-lover (Claire Wauthion) and despite the latter’s initial distance the two eventually make love for something like twenty minutes in what is certainly one of the longest lesbian scenes in mainstream cinema history. But it’s all with a purpose as Julie, lost in between things, may enjoy the moments but her lover knows there is no post-coital future for them. As with so many of Akerman’s characters, Julie is restless and trapped, in need of a catalyst. Her “language” is holistic though and the entire film makes the statement I, as a male, want to summarise and categorise, but with this filmmaker, no category is sufficient.

Feminism posed the apparently simple question of who speaks when a woman in film speaks (as character, as director…); Akerman insisted convincingly that her films’ modes of address rather than their stories alone are the locus of their feminist perspective.

Janet Bergstrom, Sight and Sound (1999)

Chantal Akerman in Je tu il elle

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is a film everyone should see but you need to be disciplined. Whoever you watch it with or even if you’re on your own, make sure a friend or relative locks you into the viewing room with sufficient provisions and with no electrical devices to distract. I wrote about a screening at the BFI in January here and everything I wrote is true, especially now I am more aware of her overall purpose and development as a cinema artist thanks to this set.

To some extent it’s prefigured by a short film Akerman made as an 18-year-old student Saute ma Ville (1968) in which we follow a young woman (Chantal) and her casual kitchen routine as she slowly prepares her room for suicide. The mix of the mundane and the deadly is a potent one and this film signalled not only parts of Akerman’s future method but also her concerns as the most sincere of artists.

The final feature on this set, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) was the director’s biggest budgeted effort to date and the contemporary reaction, as Kate Rennebohm summarises in her informed commentary, tended to be a mix of Akerman moving too far to the mainstream and her not moving far enough. As Kate says though at this remove the film is far more accomplished than this snobbery allows and is full of much to admire even if there were more professional and named actors in the production and a different crew from the women who had worked on Jeanne Dielman.

Lea Massari and Aurore Clément 

Unlike some earlier work Chantal didn’t have to play her main character – in this case Anna an arthouse film director played by Aurore Clément whose body of work includes Paris, Texas (1984), who is on a promotional tour through western Europe for a new film. Anna was Akerman’s middle name and the name she went by as a child, and so it’s not too much of a stretch to see this a partly autobiographical. Anna’s mother is played by the fab Lea Massari who of course played Anna, the woman who vanishes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) … I would say that there’s elements of the Italian’s focus on miscommunication and isolation in Akerman’s work as well as the interiority of women but unlike the former’s females, hers can be as closed off to the audience as any Marcello. In fact, she makes an absolute virtue of minimalist signalling which, along with so many static tableaux have us always interrogating and guessing!

 

Anna presents as slightly neurodivergent in modern parlance and often says things that are just a little too blunt or otherwise off the mark. She meets a German teacher, Heinrich (Helmut Griem – another well-travelled Euro star having featured in The Damned and Cabaret et al) and tells him as they cuddle naked in bed that she can’t make love because they aren’t in love. He takes this well as these things go and invites her round to meet his mother and daughters in their Essen townhouse. He's emotionally direct but Anna is on her way to somewhere else.

 

So, it goes with other encounters and even with her mother as the two lie in bed, Anna oddly childlike – though not eating neat sugar… - confessing a lesbian affair to her mother in ways that say everything about their relationship. There is very little easy meaning in these films and as I watch the evidence is mounting that pretty much all of what we uncover is deliberate. As with the books of Paul Auster  nothing is truly incidental and what remains, no matter how unlikely, may well be the actual truth. Chantal is a cinematic game of chess and she remains many moves ahead of her audience who even now delight at the puzzles they can unravel.

The Female Gaze - another intricate tableau 

So, a box set to relish and rewatch and the films look crystal clear and have been restored by CINEMATEK (Royal Film Archive of Belgium), with the exception of Le 15/8, which was restored by L’Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna. In addition to the above features, they include early shorts:

• INSAS Entrance exam films x 4 (1967)
• Saute ma ville (1968)
• L’Enfant aime ou Je joue à être une Femme Mariée (1971)
• Hôtel Monterey (1972)
• La Chambre (1972)
• Le 15/8 (1973)

 

Special features:

• Limited edition 5-disc set (2000 copies)
• Autour de Jeanne Dielman (68 mins): documentary by Sami Frey, and co-edited by Akerman, which explores the on-set relationships between Akerman, Delphine Seyrig and the crew
• Audio commentaries on Jeanne Dielman… and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna by Kate Rennebohm, and on Jeanne Dielman…  by Simon Howell of the Akerman Year podcast
• Audio commentary on Saute ma ville and Je tu il elle by So Mayer and Selina Robertson
• Chantal Akerman 1976: An Interview (1976, 59 mins): the filmmaker discusses her early films with B Ruby Rich
• Interview with cinematographer Babette Mangolte (32 mins)
• Entretien avec ma mère, Natalia Akerman (2007, 30 mins): Chantal Akerman talks to her mother, Natalia
• Interview with actor Aurore Clement (18 mins)
• Leaving Home – New World Vision (2024, 14 mins): artist Sarah Wood meditates on News from Home in a newly commissioned video essay
• 72 page Perfect-bound book with new essays by Lillian Crawford, Catherine Bray, Diana Cipriano, Justine Smith, Daniella Shreir, Pamela Hutchinson, Jerry White, Sarah Wood and Hannah Strong
• Archive articles by Janet Bergstrom and Laura Mulvey

 

You can purchase the set direct from the BFI either in person or from the online shop.

The second volume follows in June which gives you ample time to – slowly – appreciate the stillness and completeness of the director’s work.