“I want people to experience film in their body.” – Chantal Akerman

“”Where are you Anna?” drifts a voice out of an answerphone in Akerman’s mesmerising 1978 road trip Les Rendez-vous d’Anna. We could ask the same of the Belgian auteur. For where do we place her cinema? Across 40 films, Anna is one of many stand-ins for the director, who was ahead of her time making introspective odysseys from an innately feminist, queer, and Jewish perspective but who believed “all labels have to be thrown away”. Akerman had many deep-rooted obsessions beyond self-portraiture: confinement, mother-daughter relationships, exile, anxiety and loneliness, desire and the impossibility of human connection. But she never repeated herself. Her formally audacious films of the 70s, exemplified by Jeanne Dielman, reckoned with cinema’s essence – time and space – but her obsessions would go on to surface in comedies, musicals and romances, literary adaptations, documentaries which wander into fiction and more. “I don’t belong anywhere” she famously said. The same is true of her restless, uncategorisable cinema.” – Isabel Stevens

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Je tu il elle
Chantal Akerman, 1975, 86 min

With introductions by Xiaolu Guo & Andrea Luka Zimmerman

“Chantal 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 plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy: first with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who picks her up, and then with a female ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). Culminating in an audacious, real-time carnal encounter that brought lesbian sexuality to the screen with a new frankness, Je tu il elle finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism with a newfound emotional and psychological precision.” – Janus Films

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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman, 1975, 201 min

With introductions by Maria Palacios Cruz & Adam Roberts

“A 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 include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analysed and argued over for decades.” – Janus Films

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News from Home
Chantal Akerman, 1976, 89 min

With introductions by Lucy Reynolds & Nina Danino

“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 composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule.” – Janus Films

What Lies Beneath the Sky
Vladimir de Fontenay, 2015, 9 min

The first UK screening of Vladimir de Fontenay's short film, for which Akerman provides a lyrical and deeply felt voice over. A beautiful and visual conclusion to the series.

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Les rendez-vous d’Anna
Chantal Akerman, 1978, 127 min

With introductions by Ruth Novaczek & Therese Henningsen

“Chantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, Jeanne Dielman, is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. While on a tour through Germany, Belgium, and France to promote her latest movie, Anna (Aurore Clément), an accomplished filmmaker, passes through a series of eerie, exquisitely shot brief encounters – with men and women, family and strangers – that gradually reveal her emotional and physical detachment from the world. Mirroring the itinerant Akerman’s own restless wanderings, this quasi-self-portrait journeys through a succession of liminal spaces – hotel rooms, railway stations, train cars – toward an indelible encounter with the spectre of history.” – Janus Films

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La captive
Chantal Akerman, 2000, 118 min

With introductions by Nick James & Marion Schmid

“Adapting the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Chantal Akerman transforms the material into a mesmerizing study of voyeurism, control, and sexual obsession centred on the relationship between a possessive young man (Stanislas Merhar) and his passive lover (Sylvie Testud), whom he is convinced is carrying on a lesbian affair. As he relentlessly stalks her every move, the two find themselves imprisoned in a cycle of jealousy, erotic longing, and self-destruction.” – Janus Films

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Trims (working title) slates 19-147
Adam Roberts, 2016, 60 min

Introduced by the filmmaker

“In the past, film cameras shot rolls of negative, and from those negatives a print was made – which was then cut up and a few selected pieces joined at will, to produce the “cutting copy”, the desirable form of the film. What remained would be stored as reels of joined up discards, the ‘trims’. These were the rejected or unused takes, as well as the discarded tops and tails of the parts of shots that had been selected for the cutting copy. Here might be found the bad takes, the clapper boards used to identify shots, snatches of overheard director instructions, glimpses of crew, shots with microphones in view and so on. This is what cinema does not want, all that is worthless. But these trims are the mirror of the edited film, a negative cast of the perfection of the cutting copy. The one implies the other, necessarily so.

This project seeks to foreground the absent, the missing. From its cavities we might guess at the lost object. I offer this as a memorial to Chantal Akerman who is not now present, after her sudden death in 2015.” – Adam Roberts

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We would like to thank A Nos Amours for organising each introduction by artists, filmmakers, curators and writers who participated in the A Nos Amours Akerman retrospective.  Between 2013 and 2015 A Nos Amours curated the only complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s screen works yet given, culminating in the UK release of Akerman’s last film No Home Movie, and the publication of the Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook. More info: www.anosamours.co.uk