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Director · Screenwriter · Actor · Producer · 1950–2015

Chantal Akerman

9: briefs
13:00: average
117 min: in total

On film.briefs9

Anna's Meetings

Chantal Akerman · 1978

Chantal Akerman’s 1978 film follows Anne Silver, a Belgian filmmaker travelling across Western Europe to promote her work. She meets lovers, friends, family and strangers, but remains emotionally detached. Shot in restrained, observational style by Jean Penzer and edited by Francine Sandberg, the film builds its power through duration, repetition and unspoken tension — culminating in Anne alone, listening to unanswered messages. It is a study in autonomy, exhaustion and the quiet persistence of loneliness.

Blow Up My Town

Chantal Akerman · 1968

Blow Up My Town is a 13-minute Belgian short film directed by and starring Chantal Akerman, released in 1968. Filmed in French in a single domestic interior with no edits or soundtrack, it follows a solitary woman performing mundane kitchen tasks before an off-screen explosion ends the film. It belongs to Akerman’s early structuralist period, sharing concerns with time, repetition, and the charged ordinariness of domestic space. Though obscure and formally austere, it functions as a precise calibration of attention — less a story than a sustained observation of how routine holds latent force.

Hôtel Monterey

Chantal Akerman · 1972

Chantal Akerman’s 1972 debut feature is a silent, sixty-five-minute documentary shot in fixed long takes inside New York’s Hotel Monterey. With Babette Mangolte’s precise cinematography, it maps the building’s corridors, rooms and roof without narration, music or commentary — treating architecture as a sequence of visual propositions about time, space and perception.

Je Tu Il Elle

Chantal Akerman · 1974

Chantal Akerman’s 1974 debut is a rigorously minimal French drama following Julie — played by Akerman — through three phases: solitary withdrawal, a silent hitchhike with a talkative truck driver, and a quiet reunion with her ex-lover. Shot in long takes with no score or expressive lighting, it treats duration, gesture and silence as primary materials. Its historical significance lies in its unadorned depiction of lesbian intimacy and its foundational role in slow cinema and feminist film practice.

La chambre

Chantal Akerman · 1972

Chantal Akerman’s 1972 short La chambre is an eleven-minute, single-take study of a woman moving silently within a bare bedroom. Shot in black-and-white with no editing, no score, and no dialogue, it tests the limits of attention, duration, and cinematic presence. Its power lies not in narrative or psychology, but in the accumulated weight of stillness and the material reality of the frame.

Le 15/8

Chantal Akerman · 1973

Le 15/8 is a 1973 Belgian essay-film by Chantal Akerman, shot in black-and-white on 16mm in a Brussels apartment. Over thirty-two minutes and seven static takes, it observes a young woman’s uneventful afternoon — eating, reading, gazing — with no dialogue, music, or narrative. Its power lies in duration, silence, and rigorous attention to light, space, and repetition. A foundational work of structural and feminist avant-garde cinema, it asks the viewer to inhabit time rather than consume it.

News from Home

Chantal Akerman · 1976

News from Home (1976) is a French-language documentary by Chantal Akerman, composed of extended static shots of New York City locations — subway platforms, ferry decks, city streets — accompanied by Akerman’s voice reading letters from her mother written between 1971 and 1973. Shot by Babette Mangolte and edited by Francine Sandberg, it is a study in duration, alienation, and the quiet labour of correspondence across distance.

Room 666

Wim Wenders · 1982

Room 666 is a 1982 documentary by Wim Wenders, filmed in a single hotel room during the Cannes Film Festival. Fourteen directors — including Godard, Fassbinder, Spielberg, and Antonioni — each answer the same question about cinema’s future, recorded in uninterrupted takes. Shot by Agnès Godard on 16 mm, with music by Bernard Herrmann, the film offers no commentary, only testimony.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman · 1975

Chantal Akerman's 1975 film spends 201 minutes tracking a widowed Brussels housewife, played by Delphine Seyrig, through the exact domestic routine that structures her days, including the afternoon clients she sees for money while her teenage son is at school. Shot by Babette Mangolte from a fixed, eye-level camera that never enters Jeanne's private space and rarely cuts within a task, it was made on a budget of $120,000 and has since been named, in one major critics' poll, the greatest film ever made, a status built almost entirely on how literally it commits to watching unglamorous, repeated labour.