PARIS — The densely layered retrospective Chantal Akerman: Travelling at the Jeu de Paume spans the career of the influential Belgian filmmaker from her early beginnings in Brussels — including Super 8 footage she submitted for admission to the art institute INSAS in 1967 and her first short, the 1968 manic tragicomedy Saute ma ville (“Blow Up My Town”) — to her genre-defying documentary A Voice in the Desert (2002), which traces the plight of Mexican immigrants at the US-Mexico border.
As a filmmaker, writer, and visual artist, the late Akerman nimbly navigated styles and genres, with her work relentlessly insisting on the porosity between fiction and documentary, interior and exterior, tragedy and comedy, the personal and the political. She was also one of the first filmmakers to make the leap from cinema to museum spaces, a move that — according to her longtime editor Claire Atherton — allowed her greater freedom and the pleasure of demanding more active participation from the viewer. It is precisely Akerman’s video installation work that is the focus of this exhibition.
“Woman Sitting after Killing” (2001) is the first work to greet the spectator: A seven-monitor installation playing the final shot of Akerman’s cinematic landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was recently voted the “greatest film of all time” by the British Film Institute’s influential Sight and Sound Poll. But the seven-minute loop of the static shot of the titular character Jeanne sitting at a table in the dark, staring blankly ahead, feels muted — now isolated from the preceding murder scene, it falters in conveying a sense of heightened tension, leaving one craving the radical, mesmerizing, 210-minute masterpiece. (Fortunately, the film is included in the screening program that accompanies the show.)
The exhibition privileges Akerman’s first installation “D’Est, au bord de la fiction” (“From the East: Bordering on Fiction”) (1995) in particular. Occupying the central room of the upper galleries, the 25-channel adaptation of her 16mm film D’Est (1992) is a formidable visual meditation on a crumbling Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Throughout the maze of monitors, slow tracking shots glide through crowds — mostly waiting in lines and suffused with winter light — in the streets of East Germany, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.
Set up as a room of archives, the last gallery is anchored by a large table displaying a myriad of documents, many shown for the first time to the public — annotated screenplays, administrative correspondence, and press clippings — alongside excerpts from TV interviews for the visitors to peruse. On the walls, production stills, location scouting photos, maps, and footage from Akerman’s defining time in New York in the early ’70s, as well as documentation of her travels to the Southern United States and Mexico, are shown alongside projections of films Akerman produced during the ’80s. The rewarding display is worth spending time with, as it creates an affective travelogue that charts Akerman’s trajectory. In addition to shedding light on her creative process, it maps her rich network of longstanding friends and collaborators such as the cellist and her longtime partner and musical collaborator Sonia Wieder-Atherton; her cameraman Luc Benhamou; and Jan Decorte, who plays Sylvain in Jeanne Dielman, among other films. Witnessing the animated engagement of the 20-something audience that crowded the galleries during my visit, it was apparent that the exhibition is contributing to a renewed interest in the groundbreaking filmmaker’s oeuvre among new generations.
Chantal Akerman: Travelling continues at the Jeu de Paume (1 Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France) through January 19, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Laurence Rassel and Marta Ponsa.
