The Short Films of Chantal Akerman

In her debut, a 13-minute black-and-white Blow up My Town (1968), young Akerman performs routine tasks in her cramped kitchen, including cooking, drinking, and cleaning. The film is more than just an experimental depiction of an absurd day in the life of a girl. The director injects a political tone into the domestic settings and routines that are typically associated with women, despite having otherwise opposed any classification of her work as cinematic feminism during the course of her career. The routine housework is turned into chaos and revolt by her childishly clumsy gestures: she throws the food and dishes on the floor, pours over a bucket of water, starts to clean the floor, and then, amidst all the mess, begins to polish her shoes, and even rubs her white calves with the black polish. She temporarily restores order, then immediately causes chaos. She continues in this reckless manner until she blows up the kitchen and everything this place represents for women.
Akerman funded Blow up My Town by reselling diamond stocks at the Antwerp stock exchange and filmed it at age 18, only three months after she dropped out of her studies in Belgium. Although the main inspiration for Blow up My Town came from Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1968), which enthused the 15-year-old Akerman to make films, and the film can be perceived as an expression of the new generation (after all, it was 1968), her debut film clearly defines the oeuvre of the author (and is also the twin of the later, more well-known film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975). Blow up My Town already signals all the themes and stylistic devices that make Akerman’s cinematic language profoundly her own and identifiable: interest in women and their daily lives; the meaning of time in films and in real life (breaks, inactivity, unfilled time, and boredom); and domestic, sparsely furnished spaces as settings that are essential to developing the characters who occupy them. Akerman frequently took on the roles herself, performing actions, rituals, or repetitions while staring directly into the camera (she eats, sleeps, writes constantly, lies in bed, moves the furniture, reads her mother’s letters, etc.).
In the 1972 short film The Room, the camera films the author’s New York apartment in a 360° panorama shot. From an upholstered chair, the horizontal movement takes us to a still life on a table, then to a big steel kettle, a wooden chest of drawers, and a bed with a woman—Akerman herself. Since there is no sound, we are forced to carefully observe the room, its various details, the shots, and the variations in the woman’s gesticulation with each slow turn of the camera. Akerman and her long-time director of photography, Babette Mangolte, were inspired to make The Room by Michael Snow’s three-hour experimental film La Région Centrale (1971), about which Akerman once said in an interview that it had opened her ‘mind to /…/ time as the most vital element of a film’. The passing of time dominates another Akerman film screening at our festival: Portrait of a Lazy Woman (1986). The film is part of an anthology called Seven Women, Seven Sins, and in it, Akerman dissects her sin introspectively. ‘It’s Saturday. I’ll make a film about laziness,’ she says while still in bed. While her partner, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, has been practicing the cello for hours, Akerman faces the task of getting up by noon. When she finally succeeds, she idles about the apartment, making a list of all the things she should do. She resists the dictated productive use of time, but by documenting the nearly static lives, the daily routines without pleasure or catharsis, and the habits of everyday women, who have been invisible throughout the cinematic history, she simultaneously creates unique works of art that reflect the reality of existence, from solitude to defeat and procrastination. Akerman invites us to sit and observe—often without averting our gaze but with great discomfort and humour—the unspectacular yet not unworthy lives of ourselves and others.