I am stunned when I hear Delphine Seyrig say it: “femme d’intérieur.” The actress is speaking on the 15 February 1976 episode of Les rendez-vous du dimanche, a French celebrity talk show, discussing her title role in Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The show’s English subtitles use “housewife” to describe Jeanne, whose life is carefully controlled and cloistered. What Seyrig calls her is femme d’intérieur, which translates to “interior woman,” a phrase we do not have in English, but which encapsulates a major theme in Akerman’s work.
I am watching this program at the Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, where the exhibition Chantal Akerman: Travelling is on view (it is at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, from September 2024 through January 2025). The first retrospective in Akerman’s country of birth, it charts the film director’s forty-year career. The interview runs on a television set in one of the exhibition’s many rooms of multi-channel video art works, single monitors playing interviews and television show appearances, and archival documents. Seyrig, the Lebanese-born French actress, and Akerman, the young Belgian filmmaker, are attempting to explain to the host the importance of the 201-minute film, released the year before, in 1975. Conveying the film’s significance is difficult because its subject matter seems excessively ordinary, so ordinary, in fact, that it is not usually pictured in cinema at all: three days in the life of a woman as she goes about her domestic affairs—cleans, shops, cooks, rinse, repeat. One variation from the ordinary is that she stops her household chores each weekday afternoon between five and five-thirty to perform another kind of labor: sex work with a male client, a different man each time.
Jeanne is a widow, and this sex work is how she pays the bills, keeps the house, and supports her ungainly teenaged son, Sylvain. He speaks in heavily accented French (for unexplained reasons, his first language is Flemish), reads at the table, rarely makes eye contact, never says thank you, and looks too old to live at home. (The actor, Jan Decorte, was twenty-five at the time.) We watch this apparently ordinary woman as she moves through her one-bedroom home, a space weighed down by heavy mahogany furniture (sofa, wardrobe, and table) and drenched in oppressive shades of green, pale mustard (wallpaper, chairs, kitchen tiles), and rose (washcloth, drapes, bathroom wall). The color red also appears: veal, ground beef, blood gushing from the neck of her third and final trick after she unexpectedly stabs him with a pair of scissors. It’s not that Jeanne doesn’t go outside—she visits the butcher, a café, and goes to several shops in a vain search for a button for Sylvain’s jacket—but the rhythm, aesthetic, framing, and action of the film are so defined by a confined set of interior spaces that the street, the sky, and the people in the city seem unreal, a gray Brussels mirage, when they briefly appear.
A film with relatively sparse dialogue and no soundtrack, save for the radio or television occasionally playing in the background of the cramped rooms at 23 quai du Commerce, Jeanne Dielman is not only about Jeanne’s life in the interior of her apartment, but also about her interior life. Many of Akerman’s films explore this duality of inner and outer experience, from her experimental shorts to her more mainstream features. Nothing much happens, not usually, not in the way film has taught us to expect. What does happen is whatever happens to you as you watch the long shots of static spaces and silent, solitary characters; in this sense the films are about your own interior.
Like many women artists who lived through the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, with its often-splintered positions on equality and representation, Akerman was hesitant to explicitly characterize herself as a “feminist filmmaker” or a “woman director.” She did not want anyone to pigeonhole her as an artist with niche concerns or to be placed in what she perceived to be a separate category. Seyrig, in contrast, frequently used her celebrity to advocate for women’s rights. With Carole Roussopoulos she directed an adaption of the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist and would-be assassin of Andy Warhol. Seyrig also directed Sois belle et tais-toi (“Be Pretty and Shut Up”), a documentary shot in 1976 and released in 1981 about sexism in film, and co-founded the feminist video collective Les Insoumuses—“insoumise” (disobedient) plus “muses”—with Roussopoulos and filmmaker Ioana Wieder.
In the French TV interview, Akerman and Seyrig argue for feminism as a nuanced language—something we might consider to be as much visual and spatial as it is spoken and written. “It is the first time I have seen this subject treated on film, and it’s very rare to see new subjects in cinema—we always see the same ones,” Seyrig says, pointing out how many millions of femmes d’intérieurs exist in real life. “The film was based on my childhood memories,” Akerman explains, “seeing women from behind who were bent over, carrying bags.” It is about what she had observed, what she knew and recognized from life. In a nearby room at Bozar, Jeanne Dielman plays across multiple monitors: we see Jeanne sitting at her kitchen table, peeling potatoes, checking if the milk is sour, finding herself at a loose end as the day begins to unravel and she remains in her apartment, as if suspended in time and space, until that final, fateful client arrives, and she kills him. Akerman reasserted her position in a radio interview given shortly after Jeanne Dielman’s release: “I’m not a militant. I simply make films that are not colonized, that have not been filtered through the language of men. . . . I think I’m making films that are very close to how I feel and to what I am, and I don’t speak the language of men to express myself. And so, that’s my way of being in the fight.”
we might think of Akerman’s rooms and hallways, doors and windows, as space-time units that allow her to hold what might otherwise seem aimless. They provide the immediate context for her characters and also give structure to her durational and largely non-narrative films. Examples of this are at their most concentrated in the first decade of her career (these have recently been remastered by the Criterion Collection for their nine-film box set, Chantal Akerman Masterpieces 1968–1978). In her 1968 black-and-white debut short, Saute ma ville (“Blow Up my Town”), which she made at age eighteen and self-financed by selling shares in the work on the Antwerp diamond market, Akerman plays the lead, a young woman gone gleefully haywire. We watch as she hurries into her high-rise apartment building, runs up the stairs, and hysterically makes a mess of her kitchen before turning on the gas stove and waiting for the big explosion, which arrives after the image abruptly cuts to black.
The motives of the unnamed woman are unclear, but her chaos has purpose. Her energy never slows or falters as she carries out domestic tasks with ruinous gusto. Shoe-shining results in black polish smeared up her legs; cleaning the floor and dishes is accomplished by putting everything on the ground, throwing a bucket of soapy water over it, and half-heartedly pushing around a sodden cloth with a broken broom. Before her final act of destruction, she smears cream over her face and shirt and dances, laughing, swaying, before she writes “C’EST FINI”—it’s over—on a mirror with her greasy finger. But her first act is to lock the door of the small, tiled kitchen and sit for a moment, her back resting against the wall. She is alone; no one can come in. She puts tape around the edges of the door, covering up any cracks, as she takes giant bites out of an apple. She is eager to seal her life inside and keep others out of this space. Even pets are barred—the cat gets thrown off the balcony.
In La Chambre (“The Room”), made four years later in New York, Akerman is again the work’s sole character—“figure” might be a better word, as the eleven-minute color film is as silent and as still as it is possible for a moving image to be—about whom we learn even less than we did about the woman in Saute ma ville. The camera pans slowly in a circle around a cluttered studio apartment. We see a chair at a table covered with dishes and the remains of a meal, a kettle on a stove, a door, a set of drawers, a brick wall, Akerman looking at us from her bed by the window, another chair, another window, a messy desk, a dish drainer, some socks hanging to dry, a wash basin filled with dishes, the front door. The camera pans in the same direction again, then goes around twice in the other direction, and each time you wonder what is going to transpire. Will the dark-haired woman get out of bed, go back to sleep, disappear, do something with this mountain of dishes? (No.) Will the camera ever stop moving? (No.) What are we supposed to be looking at—everything and nothing? (Yes.)
Akerman lived in New York from 1971 to 1973. She often credited the city’s avant-garde filmmakers for inspiring a turning point in her work. These artists taught her to see that the camera itself can be used to create tension and generate emotional responses. It can move side to side and forward and backward, pivot in place, arc, and wheel. It can stay rigidly still for so long that you wonder if the film you are watching has frozen; you begin to search for any tiny movements in the grain of the film, like staring hard out the window to see if it is raining. Akerman’s most generative relationship was with the French cinematographer Babette Mangolte, another European expat, with whom she worked in New York on La Chambre and Hotel Monterey (1972) and in Brussels on Jeanne Dielman. After the languid, soft voyeurism of La Chambre, Akerman and Mangolte collaborated on a silent sixty-two-minute portrait of the down-at-heel Hotel Monterey on West 94th Street in Manhattan, where many residents lived for extended periods, some permanently (Akerman herself stayed for a few weeks while making the film).
Held low and steady, the camera watches and waits as residents shuffle by, turn corners, look at the camera in surprise or suspicion, sit in chairs or on beds, framed by windows, their backs turned. Sometimes they are sleeping, or visible only briefly as the elevator door opens then closes. You can imagine them wondering, who is this woman with the camera? The plain walls and juddering elevators and identical, threadbare rooms seem to glow and shine in the dim light.
Akerman’s camera never follows its subjects. It works from a single position, as if the film itself were a net that momentarily catches life as it passes. When critics remarked on the low vantage point of the camera in Akerman’s films, Mangolte said she wanted it to be placed low for its magnifying perspective, which is the way that John Ford shot John Wayne, who looms so large in Ford’s Westerns. Why not look up to an ordinary woman, too? Raising the eyes can induce a sense of wonder. Akerman often said that because she was five-feet one-inch tall, that is what the world looked like to her. But this was a sly evasion: the camera shows you what you need to see and asks you not to want anything else, to stay in the space that has been offered.
Akerman’s films present her audience with moods and atmospheres. They are offerings without arguments. She became defensive when she was asked what this or that film “meant.” When language features in her films—often as writing or letters or answering-machine messages—it frequently feels free-floating, like a theatrical soliloquy or an interior monologue, even when it is delivered as dialogue.
Je tu il elle (“I, You, He, She”) shows Julie, its protagonist, alone in an almost bare room for the first third of the film, during which she spends much of her time writing a letter to an unknown tu, you, while compulsively eating sugar out of a paper bag with a spoon. At first, she is clothed, sitting on a mattress by a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Later she is nude, still on the mattress but now against the windowless back wall; sheets of paper are placed on the floor in a grid, which she rearranges night and day, never sending the letter.
News from Home (1976), also epistolary, has as its basis a series of letters sent to Akerman by her mother during the two years the filmmaker lived in New York. The film opens with a car rolling slowly down a narrow street of run-down buildings. It is a shot that promises drama and that might belong to a classic New York noir, as if setting the scene for some illicit rendez-vous. But the car simply continues until it is out of shot. (Cinema buffs might recognize this street from Permanent Vacation, made by Jim Jarmusch in 1980, or from Hal Hartley’s 1994 Amateur. A perverse pairing might set News from Home alongside Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, filmed the previous year*—the two pictures forming a diptych of gendered ennui.)
Shot in color, over the course of the eighty-six minutes, News from Home is an assemblage of subway trains, platforms, sidewalks, crowds, dusky avenues, parked cars, abandoned lots, people sitting alone on stoops and benches, twinkling lights at night, brick facades, empty staircases, vacant billboards. As in Hotel Monterey, passersby sometimes look directly at the camera as Akerman drives past; they seem bemused by the camera poking out the window filming what, exactly? In other sequences, encounters with the camera provoke. On the subway, as the cars jerk and shudder through the tunnels, some passengers stare back at the camera, others sometimes saunter toward it as if acting in a film. Then there are those who walk by the filmmaker aggressively, as if they might knock her over. Others pose casually or seem embarrassed to be looked at. What is going to happen, the viewer wonders. Redefining what “action” means is Akerman’s métier.
Throughout the film, in voiceover, Akerman reads from her mother’s letters:
“Did you receive the money I sent?”
“I hope you get through the summer alright.”
“We miss you.”
“Be careful at night.”*
“I will send another twenty dollars next week.”
“Your father is working hard.”
“Your sister passed her test.”
“Please write back soon.”
“We’re not angry that you left without a word.”
“I understand now you will not return.”
Sometimes the words are partially or completely drowned out by the sound of a passing vehicle or rumbling subway car. The viewer is lulled by the long takes of street life and by Akerman’s lilting voiceover. Rather than narrate a story, the voiceover creates an emotive rhythm. Images of New York stand in for the distant daughter who receives but never replies to her mother’s letters from home. This daughter tells the stories of others while her own remains private or shrouded in fiction.
akerman flirted with autobiography at times but never fully embraced it. She made documentaries about female Holocaust survivors (her mother survived Auschwitz as a teenager, but the rest of her family were murdered there); Jewish culture and cuisine in New York; the landscape of post-Soviet Eastern Europe; the choreographer Pina Bausch; the composer Franz Schubert; the 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Texas; and the plight of migrants at the border of the United States and Mexico. She made one film about her own life, Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1997), à la Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, in which the most straightforward statement she manages, after several fits and starts, is “My name is Chantal Akerman, I was born in Brussels. And that’s the truth. That’s the truth.”
One reason the director was drawn to the unspoken and the unknowable might be the period in which she began working. At the time there was pressure on female or feminist auteurs to define themselves in terms that seemed to Akerman politically rigid. She stresses that Jeanne Dielman has no argument or message, and that it merely presents a woman’s life. Akerman’s insistence that her filmmaking is not militant can be seen as a way to distinguish her work from the more stridently political feminist cinema of the era, which she thought might diminish the complexity and ambiguity of her portrait of Jeanne or any of her quiet and contained female subjects. One of the most astonishingly feminist characteristics of Akerman’s work is, in fact, the privacy of her characters, who divulge so little. She invites us into a mind, a body, a life, in a way that is both generous and challenging. This approach also offers a lesson about the virtue of dispossession and what remains beyond our grasp, which includes Akerman herself, who will, in the end, confirm only her given name.
Les rendez-vous d’Anna (“Meetings with Anna”) (1978) and No Home Movie (2015) are her most poignantly personal projects. In the former, Akerman’s first feature film following the successful Jeanne Dielman, a young filmmaker (played by Aurore Clément) tours West Germany, Belgium, and France to appear at screenings of her hit film, which we never see or learn anything about. As she travels, she encounters people still marked by the war, eager to disclose their stories to her, which they recount in stage-like monologues. Among them are a West German divorcé who hopes he and Anna can stay in touch; a Polish woman, living in Cologne,* to whose son Anna was twice engaged but never married; a Berliner on his way to Paris because “they say that the French carry freedom in their hearts.” Anna’s mother (played by the Italian star Lea Massari), whom she has not seen in years, leaves messages at every hotel imploring her to stop in Brussels en route.
All those who tell their stories to Anna are conversing in French, which for many is not their native tongue, leaving them stuck between languages. They speak in simple, almost childlike phrases, their language as displaced as their lives. Anna’s life on tour is also peripatetic and takes place, as we see it, in squares and horizontals: lobbies, hotels, train stations, train cars, and finally, the back seat of a cab on the way to her apartment in Paris where she lies in the dark and listens to her answering machine. “Anna where are you?” a voice asks—it is Akerman’s—and we can see from her face that she does not know. “Anyway, you’ve got to live somewhere,” a man on a train tells her. “Yes, that’s true,” she replies, staring into the middle distance. Where and when this filmmaker, who, like Akerman at the time, has been touring Europe alone with her film, feels at home is unclear.
No Home Movie is a portrait of Akerman’s mother, Natalia, who died shortly after filming ended. (Akerman took her own life just over a year later.) The title of the film—shot on handheld cameras and Akerman’s Blackberry phone—is a play on the idea of the stereotypical home movie, in both form and content. The title could also be read as “no-home movie,” referring to Natalia’s history of exile as a Jew whose family escaped from Poland to Brussels at the beginning of World War II, only to be rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Of what happened there, Natalia says only that she will go crazy if she speaks of it.
At one point, Akerman and her sister, Sylviane, beg Natalia to tell them a story. “Don’t go to sleep, maman, maman,” they plead like children, as Natalia tries to rest in her armchair. “Maman, maman, maman, no, no, tell us a story,” Akerman begs, her voice deep and coarse from years of smoking cigarettes. “Tell us a story, maman, maman,” Sylviane yells from the other room. Akerman is so distracted that she misses the stool she is trying to sit on, holding her camera, and slides heavily onto the floor, calling “Maman, maman.” It feels like something we should not be seeing. “Tell us a story” might be a way of asking about Natalia’s childhood or adulthood or how she met their father. They could be asking for a story about Natalia’s hopes and dreams or the walk she took this morning or Auschwitz, fear and survival. Akerman will never hear the story she wants Natalia to tell; with this film she makes a version of it herself.
Akerman once described Les rendez-vous d’Anna as a film about the fear of making films. Anna’s paralysis, her taciturn, impassive manner and avoidance of eye contact, could reflect a state of dissociation. But perhaps she is simply absorbed—amidst all these stories being spoken at her, phone messages left in hotels and on machines—with what she will do next. Given a big budget for her first studio film, the twenty-seven-year-old Akerman was under immense pressure to follow Jeanne Dielman with a hit, which Les rendez-vous d’Anna did not turn out to be—despite being another exquisitely still film, although about an entirely different kind of femme d’intérieur. In No Home Movie, a different kind of filmmaking fear is palpable. To record, to make permanent what is on the verge of disappearing, is also to admit impermanence. This film will be the last story she and her mother will share.
In 1986, Akerman made Letters Home, based on the letters sent by poet Sylvia Plath to her mother, Aurelia, from Plath’s teenage years up until the week before her death by suicide in 1963, aged thirty. The film stars Seyrig as Aurelia and Seyrig’s niece Coralie as Sylvia.* It begins with Seyrig reading an excerpt from the precocious young poet’s diaries: “I want, I think, to be omniscient. . . . I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but to what extent? I am I.”
There are links between Plath and Akerman, including the fact that they both ended their own lives; the protagonist of Saute ma ville tapes her kitchen door shut before turning on the gas oven, just as Plath did. The poet is another of Akerman’s alternative, projected selves, filling page after page of news to send back home (as Akerman herself did not). And here, the distant epistolary daughter Plath is voiced by Seyrig, playing the mother who outlived her (as Akerman’s did not). It’s a portrait of a daughter by way of a portrait of a mother (as No Home Movie both is and is not). Akerman’s women are quiet, composed, in repose in bedrooms and kitchens, until they escape or explode. This sense of obscurity could be interpreted as the filmmaker denying us access to their interiority, of depicting the femme d’intérieur as eternally confined. But perhaps it is something else: woman as both omniscient—“the girl who wanted to be God”—and fully inhabiting her body, without qualification.
Of Seyrig as Jeanne, sitting alone in the dark at the end of Jeanne Dielman, her otherwise immaculate cream blouse streaked with blood, Akerman said we cannot know what she is thinking: “It’s not Jeanne Dielman’s secret, it’s Delphine’s secret.”* As she is the first to freely admit, Akerman is not the arbiter of her characters’—or her actors’—interiority. This eternal mystery is something she leaves to your imagination.
