Chantal Akerman

Every ten years, Sight and Sound, under the British Film Institute carries a poll to identify the greatest movies of all time. In the last edition of 2022, the movie that topped the list was ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ by the Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman.

Akerman was a Jew born to Polish parents who survived Auschwitz. Jeanne Dielman wasn’t an easy watch. The three-hour-long movie showed three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman – a single parent to a university-going son who spent her days in the tediousness of domestic life and earned money through prostitution. One customer disturbs the carefully set rhythm of her life and the climax is about her decision to resolve this. Akerman was 25 when she made this movie.

Over the week, I watched a few of her other celebrated works. ‘Je tu il elle’, features her as the protagonist – a detached, isolated woman who hitches a ride with a trucker, makes out with him and then lands up in the house of a female lover. The final 20 minutes of the movie was just the lesbian encounter between the two. It wasn’t hard to understand why the movie is widely considered to be a landmark in queer cinema. However, Akerman herself was averse to the idea of being branded as an LGBT advocate.

‘Nuit et jour‘ was interesting but didnt hook me. Toute une nuit was average. But News from Home was very impressive. The telefilm was a montages of different scenes from daily life in New York. Over this was a voice-over reading aloud the letters received from a mother, probably from far away-Belgium. The letters are laced with a mother’s anxiety, anguish, love, concern, and warmth. The universal emotion of every parent fearing for the safety and well-being of their child in a distant land was so beautifully captured. The ninety minutes spent was equivalent to time travel to New York of the ’70s – the subway, the streets, the view from cabs, the Hudson, Manhattan…

There’s something about her eyes that I found so arresting. Akerman died by suicide in 2015.