Born in Brussels in 1950, the Belgian filmmaker was deeply influenced by New York, where she created numerous films, including the fabulous News from Home (long documentary sequence shots of the city with the director’s voice reading her mother’s letters), but also Paris, where she lived until her death in 2015. Chantal Akerman traveled the world and filmed Russia, Israel and the Mexican-American border, but she remained faithful to Brussels all her life, where she constantly returned.
The Palais des Beaux-Arts (Bozar) is dedicating an immersive exhibition to him until July 21 which will then travel, in a reduced version, to the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris. The journey begins with the short film Skip my town, where a young woman (Chantal Akerman herself) returns home, creates a mess in her small kitchen before turning on the gas and blowing up the apartment. After this introduction, it’s time to move forward into the rooms with creaky parquet floors which offer glimpses into the filmmaker’s work, like these silent rushes (Hanging Out Yonkersfilmed in a rehabilitation center for young drug addicts and delinquents), this fixed shot of one minute and thirty-eight seconds in which Chantal laughs with her New York friends or the impressive installation From the East whose twenty-four televisions broadcast people in the snow in Moscow, shortly after the fall of the USSR.
From interviews to filming photos, from scenarios to notes of intent, we progress in the thoughts of this experimental filmmaker with a major influence. Akerman manipulated time, choreographed the bodies, let the silences settle and deployed the tracking shots. It expressed loneliness, desire, fantasy or despair. Outside Bozar, this Art Deco building built by Victor Horta in 1929, it is time for a suggestive stroll through confusing Brussels where clues from Akerman’s films are hidden.
Most Akermanian address
Going down towards the Grand-Place, whose splendor the influx of tourists cannot extinguish, we pass by the Place Vieille-Halle-aux-Blés, which has changed a lot since then. The whole night (1982), where the characters met in a Brussels crushed by heat. It has become a pretty crossroads with terraces and a statue of Jacques Brel (the singer’s foundation is located on the square). On Avenue de la Toison-d’Or, we walk in the footsteps of the teenage couple from Portrait of a young girl from the late 60s in Brussels (1994). Here begins the shopping arcade known as “de la Toison d’Or”, where Chantal Akerman’s parents had a shop and which inspired the filmmaker to Golden Eighties (1986). The Gare du Midi, where the Eurostar arrives, is the place of Aurore Clément’s wanderings in Anna’s Meetings (1978). The actress reunites with her fictional mother after a long train journey through Germany and Belgium. Brussels is still crossed by trains, by history, by languages. “Chantal found Paris too round, she liked the red bricks here like in New York, the geometry, the heterogeneous and chaotic side of this city”remembers Marilyn Watelet, her lifelong friend and producer.
You have 44.99% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.