Director Retrospective: Chantal Akerman

"I haven't tried to find a compromise between myself and others. I have thought that the more particular I am, the more I address the general." -Chantal Akerman, 1982

Chantal Akerman's films seem to alternate between containment, order, and symmetry, on the one hand, and on the other a dry intensity that registers as the reverse of restraint: lack of control, obsession, explosion. Akerman's very first film, the short Saute Ma Ville (Blow Up My Town, 1968), features the director herself, then eighteen, performing a series of actions that alternate between clearly focused projects (cleaning, cooking, eating, committing suicide) and excess - an uncontrolled mess.

Through the stylized performance of her apparently purposeless, adolescent gestures, and through the composure and symmetry of her framing and an out-of-sync voice track, Akerman cleanses her narrative of anecdote and of psychological overtones.

Akerman shares this sense of unassimilated energy with Godard, and it reappears throughout her work. She also shares with Godard, and with Michael Snow and Andy Warhol, a purposeful lack of hierarchy between the depiction of drama and the depiction of the surface of things. The gestures are at once mundane and arbitrary, so that the passage from description to drama isn't noticeable in terms of content. Two modes of organization - one geared toward plot (fragmentary as it might seem), the other a phenomenological approach to plot's "uneventful" background are blended. Akerman calls her works "images within images" - a reality where the barebones materialism comes loaded with deeper human emotions and aspirations.

In consideration of her dichotomous hyperrealist and nihilist reality, we have curated her retrospective for January and February exploring her documentaries, short films, and feature films.

A mix of depth of nuance and chronology was considered during the curation which we suppose will be apparent to the members.