Akerman – Examen d’entrée INSAS – Bruxelles 1967 (Films 1–2). 1967. Belgium. DCP courtesy Janus Films. Silent. 7 min.
Akerman – Examen d’entrée INSAS – Knokke 1967 (Films 1–2). 1967. Belgium. DCP courtesy Janus Films. Silent. 4 min.
Seeking acceptance to film school in Brussels, Chantal Akerman made four 8mm studies in the spring of 1967. Edited in brief, bursting sequences that occasionally repeat themselves in slight variation, these silent black-and-white images capture ordinary life in perpetual motion: young Belgians caught in the nighttime glow of whirling amusement park rides at the celebrated Midi Fair in Knokke; Chantal’s childhood friend Marilyn Watelet, later to become her producer, who with her sister Claudine and mother Nicole perform ritualized acts of combing their hair, washing the dishes, and going about their day; Marilyn window shopping at seaside boutiques and trying on shoes and hats with Chantal’s own mother Natalia; and Akerman herself appearing fleetingly as she admires a stylish convertible. Although she dropped out of film school after a few months (“They paid attention only to the young boys…not to a girl like me”), these early studies contain the seeds of Jeanne Dielman, Golden Eighties, and other mature work to follow.
L’Enfant aimé, ou je joue à être une femme mariée (The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman). 1971. Belgium. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. With Claire Wauthion, Akerman, Daphna Merzer. 2K restoration by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman; DCP courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 32 min.
Chantal Akerman somewhat disowned this unfinished film, in which the beautiful, lithe Claire Wauthion plays the mother of a sweet young girl, Daphné, with whom she reads Babar, prepares lunch, and tries on dresses. Privately, with Akerman as a kind of mute but receptive presence, Wauthion confides her own sense of jealousy and disappointment toward her husband (“He really is such a baby”) and casts a critical eye on her body, citing a litany of physical shortcomings in a nearly five-minute single take that Akerman would repurpose for her 2007 video installation In the Mirror.
Le 15/8. 1973. Belgium. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman and Samy Szlingerbaum. With Chris Myllykoski. 2K restoration by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium — CINEMATEK and Fondation Chantal Akerman; DCP courtesy Janus Films. 43 min.
A young Finnish woman delivers a monologue in a mirror and, in a somewhat comical allusion to Mrs. Dalloway, throughout a sunlit apartment in Paris over the course of a single summer day, August 15, 1973. In a halting voice, as if reenacting her lines from a scripted interview with Chantal Akerman, she recounts her life in an unfamiliar and sometimes alienating city, speaking of fearful encounters with dogs and strange men as well as the pleasures of thunderstorms. Her calm, measured movements and warm, peaceful expression suggest a different story altogether. Samy Szlingerbaum, the film’s co-director, was a Belgian Jew of Polish descent whose parents survived the Shoah. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1986.
Program 86 min.