The shock of when trade magazine Sight & Sound announced an update to its Best Films of All Time list, giving first place to a three-hour Belgian arthouse film directed by a woman has faded. Even so, remembering it for sure still arouses the indignation of some people.
It’s kind of fair to Chantal Akerman, who certainly has virtues as an enviable and even influential filmmaker in European and independent cinema that came decades later. Now, in a show of knowing how to see the opportunity, Filmin has brought her award-winning ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ to streaming and, in addition, several more works from her filmography. Today we select some that are worth as much or more than the movie in question.
‘I, you, he, she’ (‘Je, tu, il, elle’, 1974)
Distribution: Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire Wauthion.
Akerman’s first fiction feature film, and second overall, takes place as a French and Belgian co-production, the former sneaking into the film’s DNA. Many details of the nouvelle vague mark the development of this daring film of peculiar structure and curious reflections on romance.
The director spoke on occasions about how Godard’s films and specifically ‘Pierrot the Fool’ influenced her to dedicate herself to cinema. Although this ‘I, you, he, she’ is not ‘Pierrot the Mad’, but a timed and existential study loaded with interesting honesty. One of her scenes, with the filmmaker herself on camera, has a fascinating connection to ‘A Ghost Story’.
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‘News from Home’ (1976)
Interventions by: Chantal Akermann.
But even more honest is his first effort after the mammoth (?) ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’, which changes the three hours duration for a more accessible 85 minutes and goes from fiction to documentary. Although it really falls somewhere between non-fiction and the particular static observation of the previous film and also of his first work, the documentary ‘Hôtel Monterey’.
Here she shows us still images of New York while off-screen we hear the director herself narrating the letters her mother sends her from Europe. Between that impenetrable facade of art and essay, Akerman’s voice reveals the emotional impact that those words have, giving another appreciation to the images we see and making a really exciting job without falling into the easy.
See in Filmin
‘Not Home Movie’ (2015)
Interventions by: Natalia Akerman, Chantal Akerman.
Another documentary work that also involves his mother. But this time neither of them are off-screen, instead in front of the camera, and the spacious streets of New York are replaced by the cramped spaces of a Brussels city apartment. Her last movie premiered a few months before the director’s death and shortly after his mother did.
A documentary film that is interesting to recover after times of pandemic, where the observation of the close environment and the fragility of our parents became a necessity. It could be said that Akerman he was ahead of his time again. Here the mother-child connection is more conventionally emotional, recounting hard moments such as surviving Nazism or the proximity of death.
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