BY SEAN EGAN | Although she never achieved name recognition among mainstream audiences, Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) cuts a fascinating figure worthy of both study and praise — and leaves a body of work that will endure.
Over the course of her decades-spanning career, the prolific Belgian filmmaker produced dozens of features, shorts, and documentaries, often pushing the boundaries of cinematic form and content (including feminist and LGBT themes well ahead of their time). Now, the iconoclastic director, who committed suicide in October of last year, is getting her due in the form of “I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman,” a new look at her life and work.
“The idea of a documentary came to me for the first time in 2010 when preparing ‘Almayer’s Folly’ [Akerman’s 2011 film],” says Marianne Lambert, the documentary’s director and co-writer. “I was production manager and Chantal and I went more than once to Cambodia for location research. During these trips I got to know Chantal better, and I realized she was rather different from what people might think of her. This was the starting point of the documentary.”
The film communicates this insight through intimate conversations with Akerman, cross-cut with well-chosen clips from her expansive body of work. The viewer is treated to hearing about Akerman’s close relationship with her mother (a survivor of Auschwitz), stories of the young filmmaker’s struggles for her art (whose hustle should inspire modern low-budget directors), and her theories on filmmaking. The cumulative effect helps bring an artist, whose work is often heady, down to a wonderfully relatable human scale.
“The moments I shared with Chantal were always precious, even when they were common,” notes Lambert.
Keeping in step with the intimacy of the film, it was shot, for the most part, in Akerman’s home and the surrounding area. While that may not seem to be a particularly difficult shoot, things became a little more complicated, as Akerman had ties all over — from New York, to Paris, to Brussels — a fact cleverly referenced in the film’s title.
“We started in April 2014 in Israel, then we went to New York for five days in September, and ended in Brussels and Paris in November 2014 for three days. I knew I wanted to shoot in places or countries that mattered for Chantal. The choice of these places came very naturally,” Lambert describes of the globetrotting shooting process.
“After shooting in Israel I started working with Marc de Coster, the editor, in order to structure the material we had brought back,” she continues. “It was really during the editing that the film started taking shape and revealed itself with, as far as I was concerned, terrible moments of doubt,” she says. “I would say that it confirmed my opinion that you should follow your instinct and go for it.”
Further helping to give the documentary its structure is the examination of Akerman through an outside perspective, be it through revealing discussions with her longtime editor, Claire Atherton, who speaks on her work ethic, or American director Gus Van Sant, who talks about how her films influenced his directorial style (particularly with the 2005 film “Last Days,” a speculative look at events leading up to the suicide of Kurt Cobain).
The documentary seems to already have had something of an effect on audiences unfamiliar with Akerman.
“When ‘I Don’t Belong Anywhere’ was shown for the first time at the Locarno [International Film Festival, at the] beginning of August 2015, a group of youngsters, girls and boys, came to see me after the screening,” Lambert recalls. “They came up to me and said, ‘Thank you. We didn’t know Chantal Akerman…your film made us feel like watching her films.’ ”
If other viewers are inspired in a similar way by Lambert’s film, they happen to be in luck: Coinciding with the release of “I Don’t Belong Anywhere,” Film Forum will be running a new restoration of “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels,” Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece (starting Apr. 1). The film is a hypnotizing and singular portrait of a specific kind of woman, which uses its epic running length (201 minutes) to follow the distinctive routine of a French single mother (cooking, cleaning, etc.), and watch her eventually begin to unravel/rebel against the monotonous structure of her life.
For those looking to dive even deeper into Akerman’s filmography, BAMcinématek in Brooklyn is also getting in on the Akerman celebration. Her final work, 2015’s “No Home Movie” (whose editing process is seen in Lambert’s doc), will begin its theatrical run on Apr. 1, as a way to kick off a career-spanning 29-film retrospective of her work. This is good news for both new converts, as well as already devoted fans like Lambert, who has too many favorite films to count.
“I think the first film I saw was [1977’s] ‘News From Home.’ And I am still particularly fond of it. However there are other films I admire and/or appreciate: ‘Jeanne Dielman…,’ of course, ‘D’Est’ or ‘Sud,’ ‘Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna,’ ” she lists. “Chantal was a free woman, intuitive and honest. I think her films bear these qualities.”
While her films speak for themselves, and for her, with “I Don’t Belong Anywhere,” Lambert has provided audiences with a valuable document of an artist’s self-examination — revealing that her personal story is just as fascinating as any she chose to tell through her work. For Lambert, who describes a goal of the film as “simply [evoking] the feeling of having met someone and wanting to get to know her better,” it’s been heartening to see positive reactions to her small-scale documentary of a major figure.
“A very young woman came up to me and said, ‘In fact, when you see the life journey of such a woman…you realize that anything is possible,’” she describes of an encounter after a screening. “Chantal was a pioneer, an innovator who wrote her own language. And that is very inspiring.”
“I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman.” runs Mar. 30–Apr. 5 at Film Forum (209 W. Houston St., btw. Varick St. & Sixth Ave.). Free tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis, day of show only. Daily screenings at 1, 2:40, 4:20, 6:10, 7:50 & 9:30 p.m. Call 212-727-8110 or visit filmforum.org.
The “Chantal Akerman: Images Between the Images” retrospective runs Apr. 1–May 1 at BAMcinématek (30 Lafayette Ave., btw. Ashton Pl. & St. Felix St.). Call 718-636-4100 or visit bam.org/BAMcinematek.
