Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1972 • United States
Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. Filmed over the course of fifteen hours, from evening to dawn, with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Babette Mangolte’s carefully controlled camera gradually making its way from the lamplit lobby to the rooftop overlooking an awakening city, this radical, silent experiment in duration stands as one of Akerman’s most arresting formal achievements, collapsing time and charging the quotidian space it surveys with an eerie unreality.
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Je tu il elle
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • France
Starring Chantal Akerman, Niels Arestrup, Claire WauthionChantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman pl...
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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,...
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1975 • Belgium
Starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan DecorteA singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores ...
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News from Home
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...