This is the second of two Blu-ray box sets released by the BFI featuring the films of Chantal Akerman, long and short, fiction and documentary. The first volume took us from the start of Akerman’s career in the later 1960s to the end of the 1970s, including  Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Carosse 1080 Bruxelles (1975, henceforward Jeanne Dielman), which in 2022 topped Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade poll of the greatest films of all time.  Volume Two covers the rest of it. With eleven features (fiction and documentary) and one short directed by her, it’s a big set by any standards, though not her complete filmography.

In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman took her themes and methods as far as it was likely possible to go. Les rendez-vous d’Anna, her final film of the 1970s, showed her moving towards a more conventional European arthouse film. However, even fêted auteurs need to secure financing to make their films, something Akerman was certainly aware of. In an interview in 1984 on the UK release of Toute une nuit, she said that if she wanted to make more expensive films – at this point she had made Les années 80 (1983) and was preparing Golden Eighties (1986) – “I think inevitably I have to make them for bigger audiences. No one is really interested in financing very low-budget films any more, and there is also less and less of an audience for so-called art films.”* Les rendez-vous d’Anna, on a budget of $600,000, had not made its money back. However, she had just made another low-budget art film.

Toute une nuit (usually translated as All Night Long, though the subtitles on this release call it The Whole Night) takes place in Brussels during one night and the following morning. It’s a hot, sultry summer night. People are out on the streets. Music plays in bars and clubs. Couples meet, unite or fall out. Life goes on. That’s all I’m saying as this isn’t a film that’s easy to synopsise. There’s no plot as such, but a series of fragments involving different characters, different couples, almost but not quite all heterosexual ones. Some scenes are happy, others less so. It’s up to us to speculate what came before and what might happen next to these people. People, not characters. All we have is what we see and hear in these captured moments. For the most part we don’t know their names – I counted just two uttered on screen, once each – who they are, what they did, what brought them to the time and place we see them at. There are no character names in the credits, with the cast simply listed in alphabetical order. (Aurore Clément and Tchéky Karyo are among them. So is Samy Szlingerbaum, who had co-directed Les 15/8 with Akerman.)

While there is music and dance in Akerman’s first film (other than her film-school entrance pieces), Saute ma ville, in the 1970s she was somewhat puritanical in the use of music in films, banning all non-diegetic music as she considered it “pornographic”. Toute une nuit shows her moving away from that stance: while the music is as diegetic as any other sound in the film, just nine minutes in we have a couple dancing in a bar to a song on the jukebox (“Ma révérence” by Véronique Sanson). In the absence of a lot of dialogue, the film’s sound design is alive to the sounds of a busy city at night, with a lot of emphasis on shoes on hard surfaces (pavements, floors), particularly the low click of women’s heels, as the characters move from one place to another. For budgetary reasons, Toute une nuit was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm for cinema release, but the soft and rather grainy image is entirely in keeping with the night-time mood. (Akerman felt the film suffered from its low budget and regretted not shooting it in 35mm. “I wanted it to look like a Hitchcock film, but on 16mm, with no light, the blow-up didn’t give that effect at all.”)

Toute une nuit was released in UK cinemas in 1984 by The Other Cinema, who had handled some of Akerman’s earlier films. It was one of the first of her films to be shown on British television, on 10 September 1984 on Channel 4. (The channel had previously shown Les rendez-vous d’Anna on 2 January year and would also show the 1984 short film J’ai faim, j’ai froid – a segment of the portmanteau film Paris vu par...vingt ans après and not included in this set, but recommended if you can track it down – as part of an episode of Visions: Cinema.**)

Toute une nuit is presented on this disc in a ratio of 1.66:1. The transfer is derived from a 2K scan of a 35mm colour reversal intermediate negative, as the original 16mm negative is lost.

Les années 80 comes across like a lengthy making-of piece for the film Akerman went on to make, namely Golden Eighties. Yet appearances are a little deceptive. We begin with a black screen, and a director (Akerman’s voice) coaching an actress through the line “At your age, heartbreak won’t last.” After two minutes, the picture arrives, shot on video (at the time, quite possibly VHS) with a close up of a woman’s feet on a tiled floor. Over the next fifty-four minutes we see rehearsals for the director’s film in progress, with the director’s voice coming from offscreen, though she briefly appears at one point. Then, a caption comes up – “2eme parties – Projet” and we’re in brightly-coloured 35mm for three musical numbers, during which the film’s title card comes up. Finally, we’re up on the roof and the camera does a double 360º pan round the Brussels skyline. On the second go-round, Akerman’s voice reads out a list of acknowledgements before we cut to the credits.

The film was scripted (by Jean Gruault and Akerman). The musical numbers were shot in a real Brussels shopping mall, rather than the studio sets of the later feature, the numbers there using different actors. Ultimately, Les années 80 demonstrates Akerman’s belief that the line between fiction and documentary is a thin one. Akerman made the film as a dummy run for the film she wanted to make, given that she had never made a musical before, and also to use it a proof of concept for raising the money for the highest-budgeted film (about $2 million) that she had made to that point.

Golden Eighties is that film, and continuing the theme of the last few films in this set, the credits play over a shot of women’s feet walking back and forth over a tiled floor, the clicking of their heels, the snip of hairdressers’ scissors in time to Marc Hérouet’s music score. Over and above being a musical comedy (Akerman wrote the song lyrics), Golden Eighties revels in its highly-coloured artificiality. If the dry run to this film, Les années 80, was shot in a real shopping mall, Golden Eighties is a product of the studio, a converted warehouse in Ivry-sur-Seine. Only at the very end do we go outside, into a street. Up to then, we have spent an hour and a half indoors and the lives and loves of the employees have loomed very large. Sylvie (Myriam Boyer) is missing her boyfriend, gone abroad to earn money. Eli (John Berry, an American film director exiled in France during the McCarthy era, here in his less common actor mode) meets Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), a Polish Jew who had been his lover in France during World War II. However, she is now married and has a son, Robert (Nicolas Tronc). Hairdresser Pascale (Pascale Salkin) has her eyes on Robert but he has eyes only for salon manager Lili (Fanny Cottençon), but she is after the salon owner Jean (Jean-François Balmer). It’s not quite as airy as this plot summary might suggest and while darker themes are under the surface, they are still there, giving this film some ballast. This does after all have the first mention of the Holocaust in an Akerman film.

The songs are attractive and are well staged by Akerman. While I’m sure the great Hollywood musicals were forefront in her mind (and there are film-buff homages to other films in the sight of film posters on walls, such as Gun Crazy (1950) and the 1966 Batman) there is a Francophone musical tradition, such as the films of Jacques Demy and some 60s Godard such as Une femme est une femme, which Golden Eighties is very much part of. It’s a film which is light on its feet.

Les années 80 was remastered in 2K from the original 35mm negative, which the video footage – most of the film, after all, was transferred to beforehand. It is presented in the ratio of 1.66:1. Golden Eighties is also presented in 1.66:1, derived from a 4K scan of the original 35mm negative. Both films are in mono, rendered as LPCM 1.0. You’d imagine that only a year or so later that Golden Eighties might have had a Dolby Stereo soundtrack, but it didn’t, so mono it remains. As well as subtitles translating the predominantly French dialogue (a few brief exchanges in English and Polish), Golden Eighties has English hard-of-hearing subtitles available. A nod to the subtitler, who has managed to translate the French rhyming couplets into English ones, and also translates continental dress sizes into British ones, so size 12 instead of taille quarante.

That’s it for Disc One. Disc Two begins with...

Shot in 16mm at the Parisian flat of Akerman and her partner the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, this short was part of the portmanteau film Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986). The film was commissioned by West German television and released in cinemas abroad. In it, seven female directors each tackle one of the Seven Deadly Sins. For Akerman, that’s Sloth – which is the actual title at the start, though Portrait d’une paresseuse (Portrait of a Lazy Woman) comes up shortly afterward. A woman (Akerman) wakes up in the early Saturday afternoon but can’t be bothered to get up. She aims to make a film about laziness. She doesn’t dress as she’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes, though she does put her already-laced shoes on. Despite remembering her mother’s cleansing routine (if you don’t follow it, you’ll look old before you’re forty) she doesn’t wash her face. The dishes can wait until later. Vitamin pills and a cigarette follow. By the time she finally gets to work, the film ends.

While this is going on, the woman’s partner (Wieder-Atherton), a cellist, is practising, clearly focussed on her own work. While witty, La paresse is clearly not a portrait of the filmmaker at home on a weekend. Given that she had made Jeanne Dielman, it’s notable that the traditionally female labour of the earlier film – cooking, cleaning – take a back seat to their creative work. As Akerman released two other shorts and two features (Golden Eighties and the TV documentary Letters Home) the same year, her work ethic was clearly nothing like this, or she had ample discipline to overcome any tendency to procrastinate.

La paresse is in a ratio of 1.37:1 and transferred from a projection print. The results are very soft and English subtitles are burned in.

Histoires d’Amérique was shot quickly and on a low budget, in Super 16mm, in New York, specifically the Williamsburg neighbourhood in Brooklyn, in June and July 1988. It was shot almost entirely at night and all on location: even the restaurant sequence late on is open-air. Other than News from Home (1976), which had separate French and English versions, this was Akerman’s first feature-length film in the English language. Well, almost entirely – the opening shots of the city’s harbour have voices mixed low and untranslated in a variety of languages, Polish, Russian, Romanian and Yiddish among them. Migrants no doubt, arriving in the new world, a new city, for a new life. (Akerman’s earlier full-length work, the documentary, Hôtel Monterey (1972), was entirely silent.)

Histoires d’Amérique is a companion piece to News from Home and the Letters Home, and in it Akerman directly addresses her Jewish heritage, her parents being from Poland, her mother having survived Auschwitz. The film is made up of monologues to camera, derived from letters sent to The Jewish Daily Forward, and recreation of well-known Jewish jokes staged as dramatic pieces. Due to the tiny budget and lack of time, many of the cast could only be hired for one day, so there was little or no rehearsal, even for the monologues shot with a fixed camera in single takes. The one delivered by Roy Nathanson (who also appears in some of the dramatic scenes) runs for a full eight minutes. The cast is listed in alphabetical order in the end credits, but among them are Eszter Balint, the female lead in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise (1984). Another is recording star Arthur Tracy, who made few films: he had appeared the same year in Crossing Delancey (directed by Joan Micklin Silver, whose daughter Claudia appears here), which had been his first film for fifty years.

Akerman’s film is fleet-footed, seemingly simple, but more carefully structured than it might appear. For all the humour, there is a dark undertow to much of it. We do find out the meaning of the film’s subtitle, which are apparently the best subjects for men to engage women in conversation. So one man tries it, and receives short shrift. The irony is obvious, and you wonder how many times Akerman might have been on the receiving end of similar chat-up lines.

Histoires d’Amérique is presented in the ratio of 1.66:1, derived from a 2K scan and restoration of the original Super 16mm negative. Other than the opening mélange of voices and some brief Yiddish, the film is entirely in English and hard-of-hearing subtitles are available. Released in mono, the soundtrack is rendered as LPCM 1.0.

As mentioned at the start of this review, licensing and other issues mean that this box set cannot contain Akerman’s complete films. It’s at this point, chronologically, that gaps begin to appear. One such is Nuit et jour (Night and Day), released in 1991. There will be more later. But meanwhile...

D’est (sometimes known as From the East) was Akerman’s response to the fall of the Soviet Union and other regimes in what was the Eastern Bloc. Funded as a television documentary, it was shot in 16mm on a trail from Brussels to Odessa, plus some footage shot in Moscow, from the summer of 1992 to the Spring of 1993. It was also a trip to the lands of her ancestry. Akerman simply observes, does not overtly interpret, provides no commentary. It’s up to us to assess what we see, what came before and what might come after for the people we see. Unless we speak the language in question, we do not understand what people say, as the film is intended to be watched unsubtitled. This harks back to Akerman’s first feature-length documentary Hôtel Monterey in that respect, though unlike that film D’est has a soundtrack. It’s also not unlike the methods of the entirely fictional Toute une nuit, bearing out Akerman’s conviction that fiction and documentary are not as far apart as many think. This was the first documentary that Akerman made centring on a place, one which had been the site of violence in the past: see also Sud, De l’autre côté and Là-bas, also in this set. D’est has also been presented as an art illustration, rather than a projected or televised film of just under two hours. In its long takes, many of those set outside, shot from a moving car, D’est shows itself as much about duration and time as the almost entirely fixed camera of fictional films like Jeanne Dielman.

D’est is restored in 2K resolution from the original 16mm negative and is presented in a ratio of 1.37:1. The menu indicates that the film is meant to be watched without subtitles, yet hard-of-hearing subtitles are available, which translate the brief snatches of dialogue we hear. The mono soundtrack is rendered as LPCM 1.0.

A few more filmographic gaps here. In 1994, Akerman was invited to contribute to Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge (All the Boys and Girls of Their Age), a nine-part series made by ARTE television in France. The brief was for the films to be autobiographically inspired, to centre on an adolescent, and to include a party scene and popular songs from the appropriate time period. The result was Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels). An hour long, the film is a coming-of-age tale centering on fifteen-year-old Michelle, played by Circe Lethem, who physically resembles Akerman at that age. The popular songs (by Leonard Cohen, James Brown and Johnny Hallyday amongst others) were only licensed for the French television broadcasts (and maybe cinema showings) and preclude a release of this film on disc, so it is sadly absent from this set.

In 1996, Akerman made A Couch in New York (Un divan à New York), shot as the title indicates in the USA, mostly in English, with a particularly starry cast led by William Hurt and Juliette Binoche. It did not receive a UK release.

At first sight, Sud (South) seems a variation on the themes and style of D’est, though with standard-definition video instead of 16mm film. We’re again in a place marked by historical violence,. This is Jasper, Texas, site the previous year (1998) of the lynching and murder of James Byrd Jr by white supremacists.

Akerman’s original impulse to make the film was as a reaction to Harmony Korine’s Gummo, which she felt presented its characters as “without a superego, without a culture, without a past”. Then, the Byrd killing happened, and shaped what became Sud. In between stretches of observational work like D’est and earlier films, we have to-camera interviews with people from the town, black and white, male and female, not named on screen though listed in the credits in order of appearance. Another documentary might have included reconstructions of the killing, or included photographs. Akerman doesn’t do this, but still spares us nothing in the verbal descriptions of some of the interviewees. Some of them seem to be in denial as to how much racial hatred is around. Yet, Akerman suggests, it’s all around. Even in peaceful shots of the community going round its business, in church and elsewhere, it’s there. It’s in the air alongside the constant noise of cicadas, in the trees (from which you could hang someone), in the soil. Akerman’s long observational takes once again evoke time and duration, ending by us leaving Jasper by road in a single take of over six minutes. But time does not heal things, and duration shows that hatred is ever present, if under the surface.

Sud is presented from the original standard-def video materials, presented at 30 (actually 29.970628) frames per second, in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The BFI’s transfer begins with an advisory that the film contains racist language and graphic depictions of racist violence.

On to Disc Three.

At the end of the century, Akerman had been open for some time that the need for financing the films she wished to make meant aiming them at bigger audiences. After Jeanne Dielman, from Les rendez-vous d’Anna onwards, you can see her making accommodation with the demands and expectations of the European arthouse film, sometimes with name actors in the lead roles. Another route is the literary adaptation. Whether faithful or not to the source, the presence of a source aids recognition for potential audiences. That’s the case with two of Akerman’s final three dramatic features, the final two in this set, both based on classic French or English literature from the early twentieth or late nineteenth century. So, La captive (2000) is based, loosely, on La prisonnière by Marcel Proust.

Proust’s novel, A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, originally rendered in English as Remembrance of Things Past), published between 1913 and 1927, is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. At over a million words, it is also one of the longest. It was published in seven volumes, of which La prisonnière (translated as The Prisoner) is the fifth. Many of the great modernist novels (such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, from 1922), however unfilmable as they may seem, have been adapted for films and television. Or at least attempted to be. Harold Pinter adapted the whole novel into a screenplay which Joseph Losey was to direct, a film which would have run four hours. The film was never made, but the script was published as The Proust Screenplay. However, parts of the magnum opus have been filmed. Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann, 1984), directed by Volker Schlöndorff and starring Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti and Alain Delon, was based on Volume One. In Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé, 1999), Raúl Ruiz tackled the final volume. And, a year later, came this film by Chantal Akerman. While her previous films had had female protagonists or were ensemble pieces, this was her first with a male lead.

The first thing to note is that, unlike Schlöndorff’s and Ruiz’s films, and presumably Pinter and Losey’s if that had ever been made, La captive does not use a historical setting which would have been appropriate for a film based on a novel published in 1923. That’s immediately apparent at the start as we see Super 8mm film on the screen, the projector whir the only sound. As we settle on a close up of a young woman, we cut to Simon (Stanislas Merhar) standing by the projector, watching the screen. The woman is Ariane (Sylvie Testud), with whom he shares his apartment, along with his grandmother (Françoise Bertin). He is watching Ariane in real life too: following her to see where she is going (more emphasise on the sound of heels on floors and pavements, as we with the camera watch her and other women from behind) and whether she is actually doing what she says she is. He has sex with her when she is asleep, or pretending to be. He becomes jealous of her friends and begins to suspect her of having an affair with another woman, Andrée (Olivia Bonamy).

Coercive control in relationships is a hot topic, more so than it was when Akerman made the film (shot mostly in Paris in August and September 1999). Simon has made Ariane submissive to him, but that isn’t enough. In a conversation in a car, he doesn’t believe love is possible without knowing everything about the beloved, while she is happy to have parts of herself inaccessible to him. La captive is a slow, measured, emotionally tamped-down film, and rather a cold one, no doubt due to its protagonist, towards whom Akerman (who wrote the script with Eric de Kuyper) is unsparing.

La captive is transferred in its intended ratio of 1.66:1, derived from a 4K scan of the 35mm negative. The Dolby Digital soundtrack is rendered as LPCM 2.0 (not the 5.1 as mentioned in the restoration caption).

Shot on video in November and December 2001, De l’autre côté (From the Other Side) is something of a follow-up to Sud in that it visits a site of past conflict and violence. Là-bas (see below) makes it a triptych. Like its predecessor, the film combines meditative shots of the landscape, sometimes still, sometimes shot from a moving vehicle (often right to left), with interviews from both sides of the conflict. In those long landscape shots, it’s as if the passing of time can heal the wounds, or if they’re still there, however tranquil the surface. But instead of lush greenery, we have the sunbaked land close to the border of Mexico to the USA. In the wake of Trump’s presidency and his promises/threats to build a wall between the two countries, shots of walls are particularly disconcerting in hindsight. Akerman’s inspiration for making the film was hearing stories of undocumented migrants from Mexico to the USA, which reminded her of the stories of Holocaust survivors.

In fact, the film has its own wall, dividing itself effectively into two parts. In the first hour or so, we are in Mexico and the interviews with Mexicans are conducted by Akerman in Spanish. Then a road sign appears on screen: Stop the Crimewave! Our Property and Environment is Being Trashed by Invaders! And from this point on, the interviewees are the other side of the border and conducted in English and we hear talk of immigrants bringing disease and a landowner defending his right to shoot any trespassers.  Both Mexicans and Americans are framed in medium shots, not the talking-heads closeups you might expect in another documentary. The two parts of the film are counterpointed. Can there be any resolution?

De l’autre côté was originated on standard-definition video, again at 29.970628 fps, in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. The stereo soundtrack is rendered as LPCM 2.0. Subtitles are available for the Spanish and for Akerman’s voiceover in French at the end, but not for the English speech.

Absent from this set is Akerman’s next feature, Demoin on déménage (Tomorrow We Move, 2004), a comedy which won the Lumière Award for the Best French-Language Film of its year.

Shot between February and April 2005. Là-bas (Down There, which is the onscreen title here) was made while Akerman visited Tel Aviv. As a Jew, she had visited Israel in childhood, though she and her family didn’t settle there, though many others did, a place promised as one free from persecution yet in permanent conflict with its neighbours. Akerman had been asked to make a film about Israel before, as a high-profile Jewish filmmaker, but had refused. However, she was teaching in Tel Aviv, and Là-bas, shot on a camcorder by herself and Robert Fenz, was the result. It is almost entirely shot from inside the apartment she was renting, looking out through the windows, making no effort to disguise the presence of the frames and the blinds, telephoto shots of what was going on outside in the bright sunlight and arid land.

Akerman does not appear on screen but provides a voiceover, mostly in English. Sometimes she is heard talking on a telephone. One call is from her mother, checking up on her after hearing news of a suicide bombing nearby (not included in the film). Some of her musings touch upon suicide, which will give viewers pause in hindsight, knowing that Akerman would take her own life ten years after this film was made. One of the discussions involves her aunt Ruth, who had given Akerman her first books to read, and the Israeli writer Amos Oz, whose mother had killed herself on the same day that Aunt Ruth did. Meanwhile, we see people outside (or in some sequences, on a beach) as time passes. Her Jewish identity is inevitably to the fore, noting that as she has had her (Belgian) passport stamped with evidence of her visit to Israel, not quite as she says a yellow star, she will be unable to visit several other countries – she mentions Syria – unless she buys a new passport. That would cost her 280 euros, so that is the price of her Jewishness.

Like Sud and De l’autre côté, Là-bas was originated on standard-definition video, and is also transferred in 1.78:1 at 29.970628 fps, with a LPCM 2.0 stereo soundtrack. There are hard-of-hearing English subtitles available for this mostly English-language film. Fixed English subtitles appear when Akerman speaks in French or Hebrew.

That’s it for Disc Three. Disc Four has two more films.

Akerman’s final dramatic feature was another rather free literary adaptation, also starring Stanislas Merhar. La folie Almayer (Almayer’s Folly) is based on Joseph Conrad’s first novel, published in 1895, though the film – again possibly to reduce the budget – isn’t set in the same period, but updates the action to the 1950s, though this is a little hazily conveyed. The novel is set in Borneo, but the film was shot in Cambodia. In a music bar, a singer, Daïn (Zac Andrianasolo) is miming to Dean Martin’s “Sway” when a man comes on stage and stabs him to death. The camera picks out Nina (Aurora Marion), one of Daïn’s backing singers and dancers, who, face on to the camera, sings Mozart’s “Ave Maria”. We then move into flashback, when Nina is a child, mixed-race from mother Zahira (Sakhna Oum) and father Gaspard Almayer (Merhar). Nina is sent to Europe to receive a European (and white) education, over her and Zahira’s objections. When she returns as an adult, she is resentful, feeling at home in neither culture. There are incestuous overtones to Almayer’s relationship with his daughter, which are exacerbated when she elopes with Daïn.

If La captive felt impacted and hermetic, La folie Almayer is even more so. Akerman felt an affinity with Conrad, like herself of Polish origins, and dealing with many of the same themes, of alienation and otherness. According to Akerman, she read the novel and saw F.W. Murnau’s film Tabu (1931) around the same time, which was the spur to make this film, her first dramatic feature in seven years, with only documentary and installation work in between. Akerman also stated that her own education (as a Jewish child in a Roman Catholic school) was akin to Nina’s. For all the clear identification, La folie Almayer is a measured, rather distanced work, with the plot taking second place to mood, atmosphere and nuance. There were comments of inaccuracies in reviews at the time, with some pointing out that although there are references to Malaysia, the film doesn’t disguise that it was filmed in Cambodia, with people in Phnom Penh speaking Khmer (as they would) rather than Malaysian. The film wasn’t picked up for UK cinema distribution, so this Blu-ray is its first commercial appearance here.

La folie Almayer is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 from a 2K remastering. The Dolby Digital soundtrack is rendered as DTS-HD MA 5.1 and English subtitles for the French dialogue (there are some exchanges in English and Khmer) are optionally available. The transfer begins with an advisory from the BFI that the film contains racist dialogue and sentiments.

Throughout her life, Akerman was especially close to her mother, Natalia, who had been born in Poland and had survived Auschwitz before emigrating to Belgium, where Akerman and her sister Sylviane were born. No Home Movie was shot mostly in Natalia’s apartment, as she, now in her eighties, is clearly ailing. As well as Akerman, who mostly but not entirely stays behind the camera, Sylviane is often in attendance. When not together in person, they talk over Skype. As a portrait of Natalia, No Home Movie doesn’t tell us a lot. This isn’t a biography, although we do hear brief details of the past. For much of the time, Akerman is content simply to observe. Yet the film is not as simple and free-form as it might seem. We begin with a lengthy shot of a desert tree whipped by the wind, and at the halfway point of this two-hour film we leave the Akerman family for an extended shot from a moving vehicle, shot as so often before moving right to left. So shots of desert and windblown fields would seem to be the end. Except it isn’t. We leave Akerman sitting on a bed in the apartment, putting on her shoes and drawing the curtains. And then we have a shot of the interior of the apartment, in a symmetrical composition harking back to Akerman’s early work. A human life might have left this place, but the place remains. Cut to black, and the final credits.

Akerman was aware No Home Movie would likely be her final film, and there is a sense of a summing up as Natalia prepares to leave her life, with nods back to themes and tropes (transience, time passing, the nature of home and exile, Jewishness among others) that had marked Akerman’s work from the outset. The film was shot on video, Akerman and her regular editor Claire Atherton shaping the film from some forty hours of footage shot.

No Home Movie is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, which is appropriate given its video origins, although unlike many of the other documentaries she made, it was intended for and received cinema distribution, hence the transfer speed of 24 fps. It was remastered from the existing standard-definition materials.

Natalia Akerman died in April 2014 at the age of eighty-six. A year later, Akerman was interviewed in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman and said that she realised how much her mother was at the heart of her work. “That’s why now I’m afraid. I think that now my mother is no longer there, there’s nothing left.” No Home Movie premiered at the Locarno Film Festival on 10 August 2015 and had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 15 September. At this point, Akerman had been hospitalised for depression and at the end of the month she returned to her home in Paris. On 5 October, she took her own life. She was sixty-five years old.

Chantal Akerman Volume 2 is released by the BFI on five Blu-ray discs encoded for Region B only. The twelve films are on the first four discs in the above chronological order, with most of the extras on Disc Five. The box has a 15 certificate, which is due to La captive, which bore that certificate on its cinema release and retains it on disc. Of the other films in the set, Toute une nuit was originally released without a BBFC cinema certificate but it’s a PG on disc. Golden Eighties, originally a 15 (there was no 12 or 12A certificate available at the time of its UK cinema release), is now a 12. La paresse is a U. Histoires d’Amérique is a 12 as are Sud and La folie Almayer. Les années 80, D’est, De l’autre côté, Là-bas and No Home Movie, as documentaries are exempted from certification, though the last-named was a PG in cinemas. However, be advised that Là-bas contains references to suicide. Among the extras, Hôtel des Acacias is a 12.

The films in this set were originated in a variety of media (16mm, 35mm, video) and are presented in their original aspect ratios. I have given details on specific films at the end of each section of the reviews above, to avoid clutter here.

The soundtracks are mono (rendered as LPCM 1.0) up to and including D’Est. The films after that have stereo/surround tracks in LPCM 2.0, except La folie Almayer, which is in DTS-HD MA 5.1. English subtitles, including some hard-of-hearing tracks, are available as noted for each film above, and are on by default on Discs One, Three and Four, off by default on Disc Two. They are also on by default on Disc Five, though the only item with subtitles available is Autour de La folie Almayer, due to the other extras being conducted in English.

Hôtel des Acacias (43:07)
The only extra on Disc One, which is where it comes chronologically, is this short film made at INSAS (Institut Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle) in Brussels. Akerman had enrolled at INSAS in 1967. (Four of her short application films are included in Volume One.) However, she had been dissatisfied and left after a term, going on to make the short film Saute la ville. However, in 1982 as a now-celebrated alumna, she was invited back to lead a directing workshop, and Hôtel des Acacias, shot in 16mm in February and March, was the result.

Hôtel des Acacias is a collective effort on both sides of the camera. The script is credited to Akerman and Michèle Blondeel but there are four directors, seven cinematographers, a seven-person sound crew and four editors. Akerman and Blondeel are credited as two of nine associate professors. The cast were acting students, with a couple of teachers added. Given the number of people involved, it’s notable about how unified the end product is, though that may well have had something to do with Akerman’s supervision. It was shot at the actual Hôtel des Acacias in Brussels. Along with Toute une nuit (which had mostly been shot in September and October the previous year), this shows Akerman moving on from her films centred mainly on one woman (her first three dramatic features) to films with multiple storylines, most of them to do with young women and men looking for love in their lives. The result is an engaging confection, certainly lighthearted if a little lightweight. It ends with dance, a ball.

Commentary on Histoires d’Amérique by Marc David Jacobs
The one commentary in this set is on Disc Two. A very scene-specific commentary on this film is obviously a non-starter and that’s not what Jacobs provides. He begins by talking about Akerman contacting Isaac Bashevis Singer with a view to adapting his novels The Manor and The Estate. She was an admirer of his having read his works, in French translation from the original Yiddish. Singer did not think novels, and certainly not his, translated well to the screen – and he was particularly scathing about Barbra Streisand’s film Yentl, to the point where he specified to Akerman that she was not to include songs – they appeared to get on well. However, Akerman’s film – either to be in two parts lasting four hours or a nine- or ten-hour miniseries – never went ahead due to its necessary high budget being unable to be raised. (She also considered filming Enemies, A Love Story, which was eventually done by Paul Mazursky in 1989.) Jacobs goes through the inception and production of the film, the preparation for which was covered by Amy Taubin in The Village Voice. Most of the dramatised jokes came from Leo Rosten’s book The Joys of Yiddish. Jacobs also mentions some of people involved who went on to greater things, such as future cinematographer and director Ellen Kuras, who worked as an assistant here. From having spoken to several of the cast, it was clear that they held Akerman in high esteem, even if they were only on the film for a short time, in some cases with just a single line of dialogue. There’s a touching story that he relates which came from Sharon Diskin: a drunk Akerman at the after-shoot party passed her ring to her saying that she had just broken up with her girlfriend and wanted her to have it. Shortly afterwards, she met Akerman for lunch and wanted to hand the ring back, but Akerman (sober) insisted she keep it. Diskin wears it to this day. As much of this film might escape non-Jewish viewers, this is a very informative commentary well worth listening to.

The remaining extras are on Disc Five.

Toute une nuit

No Home But Cinema: The Spaces of Chantal Akerman (13:37)
This is a newly-created video essay by writer and critic Jessica McGoff, with her comments appearing on screen as captions over appropriate film clips. There is a brief preamble and a summary at the end, but otherwise the piece is divided into five sections: Inside, Stage, City, Borders and Absence. McGoff tackles Akerman’s engagement with and delineation of feminine space, evident from her first film, Saute de ville, onwards. Public spaces are seen as stages, a place where “melodrama” can enter – such as the nighttime of Toute une nuit, a surreal space before the ordinary business of the day begins again. The city becomes a living, breathing entity, illustrated by an Akerman quote about Hôtel Monterey: “The dimly lit beige-yellow corridors resemeble the arteries of a diseased body whose heart barely functions, gasping for air yet unable to die.” In this film in particular, there is no narrative, just the spending of time. Borders concentrates on the Akerman feature which involves more crossing of them, Les rendez-vous d’Anna, however the trains, hotel rooms and the like are much the same. Her films are full of people waiting, often sitting still. Absence deals with No Home Movie, and the ways that Akerman destabilises the idea of a home. The film’s title has a double meaning – it’s not a home movie and it’s a film about not a home.

Le rendez-vous de Chantal Akerman (66:59)
This panel discussion took place at the BFI Southbank on 3 February 2025, as part of its Akerman retrospective. (I attended, but as there are no shots of the audience, you won’t see me.) Isabel Stevens (managing editor of Sight & Sound and curator of the season) moderates and on the panel were Sonia Wieder-Atherton (classical cellist and Akerman’s partner), Adam Roberts (who co-founded the film-screening collective A nos amours with Joanna Hogg), Lynda Myles (writer and former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival) and Céline Brouwez of Fondation Chantal Akerman. They all give their stories of how they became aware of Akerman and her work. For Myles, it was seeing Jeanne Dielman at Cannes, and she went on to have it shown twice in Edinburgh. (A copy of the programme is shown.) Roberts says that the first time he saw an Akerman film was Toute une nuit in a ropey print in Amsterdam with no subtitles. Needless to say it was a confusing experience with the comings and goings of the audience reflecting those on screen. When he and Hogg founded A nos amours, they had a concern to showcase female directors, and so they put on a complete retrospective of Akerman’s films over two years, with her involvement. Hunting down rare prints was a full-time task, and they were able to return some films to Akerman that she hadn’t seen since she finished making them. (With the 2025 retrospective, including some films not included in the BFI’s Blu-ray sets, almost all being from digital restorations, today’s audiences don’t know they were born, and Roberts returns to this at the end.) We also see a letter from Akerman to the International Underground Film Festival (which took place in the same building, then called the National Film Theatre) about its showing of her La chambre and Hôtel Monterey, modestly ending with “I don’t know how to finish a letter in English”.

Often with recordings of items like this from the BFI Southbank or the NFT before it, film clips are shown but have to be cut out of what’s released on disc for licensing reasons. However, we do have many such clips here, introduced by the panel participants, or at least from films which have been licensed to appear on the BFI’s Blu-ray sets. At the end, we have two questions from the audience, presented as captions before being followed by the response from the panellists.

Marilyn Watelet in Conversation (25:59)
This interview took place on 12 March 2025, during the BFI Southbank’s two-month Akerman retrospective. It followed a screening of Tomorrow We Move. Watelet, interviewed by Isabel Stevens, had an association with Akerman going back to childhood, as they had met and become friends. They often sneaked off from school to watch films, and it was with Watelet that Akerman saw Godard’s Pierrot le fou, a film which changed her life and made her want to become a filmmaker herself. Watelet can be glimpsed in the INSAS entry films which are included on the BFI’s first Blu-ray set. She became Akerman’s producer for most of the forty-three (her number) that she made.

Sud

Watelet talks about Jeanne Dielman topping Sight & Sound’s poll, seven years after Akerman’s death. She says that Akerman would have been very pleased and may even have seen it as a form of revenge, as Watelet quotes a contemporary review which described it as “The most boring film in Belgian cinema history”. She also discusses the themes of travel, borders and exile in Akerman’s work, citing her move to New York: a then shabby, often dangerous city but one in which she felt freedom. Questions from the audience appear as onscreen captions before we hear Watelet’s response. (The book with this release – or at least the PDF copy provided for review – incorrectly lists this item as being 67 minutes long. The actual running time is as above.)

Sonia Wieder-Atherton Q & A (14:13)
This interview is from 3 February 2025, following a showing of Golden Eighties, later in the same evening as the Le rendez-vous panel discussion above. Isabel Stevens is again on interview duties, here with Sonia Wieder-Atherton, classical cellist and composer and Akerman’s partner. Golden Eighties was indeed the film where they met, where Wieder-Atherton contributed to the soundtrack and watched the film being made. She and Stevens find the film more subversive than it first appears, given that some original reviewers thought it an inconsequential piece compared to Akerman’s more overtly experimental and minimalist earlier work. Wieder-Atherton speaks about Akerman’s working methods that she observed on set, and how many elements there are of musical comedy in Akerman’s other works. Again, there are questions from the audience, appearing as captions on screen.

Proust and Signs (21:27)
The middle of three video essays on this disc features Cristina Álvarez López on La captive, and in particular its relation to Proust’s original novel. Like Sarah Wood but unlike Jessica McGoff,  Álvarez López provides a voiceover rather than captions, though there is onscreen text to be had as well, not least in the essay’s division into five chapters. Akerman and co-writer Eric de Kuyper have as well as relocating the story to the present day removed everything extraneous from their stories, though the prologue with the Super 8mm images evokes another part of Proust’s novel, the second volume, Within a Budding Grove. As Simon watches, he isolates Ariane from the other girls he sees on screen. Álvarez López draws on the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his use of “signs” and the way they appear in the novel and film. Álvarez López also discusses the use of space in Akerman’s film and in the last chapter, “Gomorrah”, the homosexual elements of Proust’s novel in this gay woman’s film of a gay man’s novel about a straight man. Reading Proust as a young woman, she was struck by how many gay characters there were in the novel, almost all of them in fact, something she wasn’t aware had been done before.

Everyone Has Their Own Life (11:10)
On Volume 1, Sarah Wood provided a video essay on News from Home, a documentary structured around letters from Akerman’s mother while Akerman was living and making ends meet in New York. Now Wood provides another essay on another film about Akerman’s relationship with her mother, No Home Movie. It begins with a quote from Susan Sontag: “To photograph is to appropriate the things photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation in the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” As a filmmaker, this is something Akerman has tackled throughout her career, particularly in her documentaries – and as mentioned before for her the two forms of drama and documentary are closer than many might think. Here the thing photographed is the central other person in her life, shortly before that life ended, her mother. (There are quotes appearing as captions as well from Jane Welsh Carlyle and Jean-Luc Godard.)

In her voiceover, Wood directly addresses Akerman, relating the story of her seeing Pierrot le fou, a film unlike any other she had seen up to that point. One of her first actions on picking up a camera was to film her mother. As No Home Movie is a film record of Akerman’s mother shortly before the end of her life, Wood in empathy tells a story that when her own mother died, she took a photo of her mother’s body at her father’s request. He kept the photo though never looked at it. She has also never looked at it but cannot bring herself to throw it away. In this film as others of Akerman’s, she says, we have a partial perspective. We can never see the whole picture.

Là-bas

Autour de La folie Almayer (49:22)
Back in 1975, Sami Frey shot a documentary, Autour de Jeanne Dielman, about the making of Akerman’s most celebrated film. Thirty-five years later, Cambodian filmmaker Sopheak Sao did the same during the location shoot of Akerman’s final dramatic feature: he is “caméraman making-of” in the end credits. The footage was put away until 2021 when it was digitised, then edited by Marwan Montel, the result (copyrighted 2022) now being “a film by” both of them. The two films have quite a lot in common, other than their similar titles. Both feature Akerman on set (or on location), interacting with her cast and crew, directing the film. The differences are those of the passing of time: Akerman was twenty-four when she made the earlier film, and she’s sixty here. Akerman played the lead roles in her early films Saute ma ville and Je tu il elle but tended to keep herself offscreen in the years since, being more often heard than seen, occasionally glimpsed in her documentaries. Yet here she is centre stage, not so much showing her age: this is what a sixty-year-old woman looks like. Another difference is technical, from analogue video in black and white, to digital in colour and widescreen, with extracts from the film itself in 4:3 with letterboxing, as they would be as seen through the 35mm camera, though with Akerman’s voice on the soundtrack guiding the cast. She is clearly committed and focussed, but we see a lighter side too, dancing along as they film the song and dance number featuring Dean Martin’s “Sway”.

The BFI’s transfer begins with an advisory that the film contains comments which make light of blackface, towards the end of the film.

Book
The BFI’s book with this limited-edition release runs to sixty-eight pages plus credits. Following a spoiler warning, the lead essay is “Musical cues” by Cristina Álvarez López. As this indicates, there is a lot of music in Akerman’s films: most obviously in Golden Eighties, but Álvarez López gives as her first example, the scene in La captive where Ariane and another woman have an a capella duet from their respective balconies. For someone who once thought the use in music was “pornographic” Akerman clearly changed her mind in a big way in the part of her career covered by this set. As Álvarez López points out it’s not just in song and dance but in the sound design, the rhythms of diegetic sounds, such as the keys of typewriters and the heels of women’s shoes. It’s also there in those earlier films which contain no music: the sounds of Jeanne Dielman’s domestic work, for example. Akerman’s partner, Sonia Wieder-Atherton, was a musician herself, so you wonder if she had any influence in this.

The rest of the book is, like its equivalent for Volume 1, made up of essays on the films in the set. So, in order, we hear from Erin Nunoda on Toute une nuit, two of the directors, Yves Hanchar and Pierre Charles Rochette, on their film Hôtel des acacias, Daniella Shreir with one piece on both Les années 80 and Golden Eighties, Rachel Pronger on La paresse, Ivone Margulies on Les histoires d’Amérique, Elena Gorfinkel on D’est, Blair McClendon on Sud, Catherine Wheatley on La captive, Ivan A Ramos on De l’autre côté, Adam Roberts on Là-bas, Marion Schmid on La folie Almayer and Alisa Lebow on No Home Movie. As with the essays in the Volume 1 book, not only are listed the cast and crew but also whether each was shot on film or video (though that for Toute une nuit says 35mm when it should be 16mm), and shooting locations and dates. There are also notes on and credits for the extras and plenty of stills.

Even if her film hadn’t topped the Sight & Sound poll three years ago (and who knows where it will be when the magazine reconvenes its voters in 2032), Chantal Akerman is clearly one of the most considerable filmmakers of the last half-century, and a very influential one by any measure. While unavoidably not a complete retrospective, the BFI’s Volume 2 set ably covers the second part of her career and both volumes are essential.