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Warning: The following piece was written without regard to the presence of “spoilers.”

We see the interior of a quiet apartment. It is lit with the waning diffuseness of a grey afternoon, and there is a woman moving about its hallways with a steadiness of purpose. The camera which affords us this look into her living space is fixated at an angle perpendicular to the front door, gazing at eye level down the main hallway toward a closed door. The woman greets the man who walks in the front door with indifferent familiarity, with silence. She takes his coat, hangs it on a hook somewhere beyond the purview of the frame, and they both continue quietly toward the far door, completing the introduction to an encounter they have engaged in many times before. The camera remains motionless as they close the door, and we never see what happens once it shuts.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a thriller. It’s as claustrophobic, psychologically penetrating, and exactingly-directed an apartment film as anything Roman Polanski has made. That it takes 200 minutes to watch is almost besides the point. The more you give yourself over to it – shutting out distractions, not breaking it into sections – the tighter its hold. I’ve seen the film three times now, twice at home with all the intrusions that comes with that, and once in a theater with all the peace it suggests. Except, peace for this film means an acute focus on its inner torment.

Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) is a widow raising her teenage son in a single-bedroom apartment (he sleeps in the pull-out couch in the living room). Over the course of three non-consecutive days, we see Jeanne cook, clean, run errands, knit, read letters, and cook some more (there’s a lot of...

Last night, at the end of a busy week at work when I was just in the mood to hang out at home and unwind a little, I decided that it was a good time for me to wrap up my viewing of Criterion ’68 by ingesting an assortment of short films that had accumulated, like the last crumbs of cereal at the bottom of the bag, in my chronological checklist of films that I’ve been blogging about over the years. It was a suitable occasion for me to fully immerse myself into what turned out to be a festival of random weirdness. My wife, recovering from a bout with illness, was feeling a bit better but wanted to find a productive use of her time with the resurgence of energy, so she kept herself busy by working on a new quilting project. That left me free to indulge without...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)

As we await Paul Thomas Anderson‘s next film later this year, one now has the chance to see his sprawling second feature about the world of pornography in a 70s and 80s Los Angeles on Netflix. Boogie Nights, which features much of the ensemble — including Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Heather Graham — at their best,...

This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this episode, David and Trevor are joined by Lady P from the FlixWise podcast to discuss Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies.

About the films:

Over the past four decades, Belgian director Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) has created one of cinema’s most distinctive bodies of work—formally daring, often autobiographical films about people and places, time and space. In this collection, we present the early films that put her on the map: intensely personal, modernist investigations of cities, history, family, and sexuality, made in the 1970s in the United States and Europe and strongly influenced by the New York experimental film scene. Bold and iconoclastic, these five films pushed...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

The “Old School Kung Fu Fest” comes to the Lower East Side this weekend, offering the likes of Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Tsui Hark, among others.

A print of My Neighbor Totoro screens on Saturday morning.

Frederick Wiseman‘s Hospital begins a week-long run.

A restoration of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari screens this Monday.

The alarm clock cries in my bedside table. 8am. Right, here we go. Grab clothes for yet another day, don’t forget the body soap, the moisturizer and the black mascara and off I go to start my daily ritual lively practiced inside my tiny toilet. Repetitive motions are evoked…teeth are washed, hair is brushed, boot laces are entwined around my unreliable feet, eggs are scrambled in the tormented pan, coffee is brewed, lights are shut, doors are locked, and a cigarette is delightedly lit—all as if I was skimming through the prologue of a novel I have lazily read too many times before. My feet move to the rhythm of the rain incessantly falling on the grey pavement and my bones fear the unpredictability of what may come in the following hours, but I never stop. I never do. (…) The ritual has somehow turned into tradition and...

Chantal Akerman By Chantal Akerman

In memory of Chantal Akerman, the New York Film Festival has scheduled two free screenings of her films for today, October 9. Chantal Akerman By Chantal Akerman and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles join the World Premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun, Laurie Anderson’s Heart Of A Dog, Jake Paltrow and Noah Baumbach's De Palma, and László Nemes’s Son Of Saul (Saul Fia), the Film Comment Presents selection in the Special Events program.

Son of Saul (Saul Fia) director László Nemes with Géza Röhrig (Saul) Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Je Tu Il Elle (I, You, He, She), Saute Ma Ville and Jeanne Dielman will be screened in November at the Museum of Modern Art in the 13th annual edition of To Save and Project, curated by Josh Siegel and Dave Kehr.

Josh wrote me: "One thing too often overlooked, and well worth mentioning,...

Chantal Akerman’s first short film was called Saute Ma Ville, which means, roughly, “blow up my town.” She made it when she was 18. She began that year of her life in a Belgian film school, but dropped out after a few months, figuring she could make better films on her own. She was not wrong. The precocious teenage Akerman financed that debut short herself, according to the film scholar Ivone Margulies, partially by “selling three-dollar shares on the diamond exchange in Antwerp.” And she starred in it, too: The 13-minute Saute Ma Ville follows a clownishly charismatic Akerman as she performs a number of domestic tasks with a sloppy, chaotic glee — Chaplin as madwoman in the attic. She’s electrifying to watch, but the film has a disturbing undertone that builds as it progresses. By the end, she has taped up the doors to her apartment, a task she...

Film-maker pushed boundaries with her experimental, female-focused films.

Belgian-born experimental film-maker and artist Chantal Akerman has died at the age of 65.

Her long-time producer Patrick Quinet of Brussels-based Artemis Film confirmed Akerman’s death.

“She was a hugely important cineaste who by her singularity revolutionised parts of international cinema,” he told Afp.

Quinet did not give the cause of Akerman’s death but French newspaper Le Monde reported that the Paris-based film-maker committed suicide on Monday evening (Oct 5).

Career

Akerman was born in Brussels in 1950 to Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivors.

Her mother’s experiences in Auschwitz during World War Two, where she lost both her parents, would haunt Akerman all her life and permeate many of her works including the recent No Home Movie, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival over the summer.

Akerman made her first film, Saute Ma Ville, in 1968 at age 17, having dropped out of film school in Belgium after just one term.

The...

Film-maker pushed boundaries with her experimental, female-focused films.

Belgian-born experimental film-maker and artist Chantal Akerman has died at the age of 65.

Her long-time producer Patrick Quinet of Brussels-based Artemis Film confirmed Akerman’s death.

“She was a hugely important cineaste who by her singularity revolutionised parts of international cinema,” he told Afp.

Quinet did not give the cause of Akerman’s death but French newspaper Le Monde reported that the Paris-based film-maker committed suicide on Monday evening (Oct 5).

Career

Akerman was born in Brussels in 1950 to Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivors.

Her mother’s experiences in Auschwitz during World War Two, where she lost both her parents, would haunt Akerman all her life and permeate many of her works including the recent No Home Movie, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival over the summer.

Akerman made her first film, Saute Ma Ville, in 1968 at age 17, having dropped out of film school in Belgium after just one term.

The...

Film-maker pushed boundaries with her experimental, female-focused films.

Belgian-born experimental film-maker and artist Chantal Akerman has died at the age of 65.

Her long-time producer Patrick Quinet of Brussels-based Artemis Film confirmed Akerman’s death.

“She was a hugely important cineaste who by her singularity revolutionised parts of international cinema,” he told Afp.

Quinet did not give the cause of Akerman’s death but French newspaper Le Monde reported that the Paris-based film-maker committed suicide on Monday evening (Oct 5).

Career

Akerman was born in Brussels in 1950 to Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivors.

Her mother’s experiences in Auschwitz during World War Two, where she lost both her parents, would haunt Akerman all her life and permeate many of her works including the recent No Home Movie, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival over the summer.

Akerman made her first film, Saute Ma Ville, in 1968 at age 17, having dropped out of film school in Belgium after just one term.

The...

Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman has reportedly passed away in her home in Paris at the age of 65, according to multiple news sources. Akerman was at the forefront of the avant-garde film movement in Europe in the 1970s, pushing the boundaries between fiction and autobiography and exploring space and place within film. Her final film, No Home Movie, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival just last month.Akerman was born and raised in in a Jewish family in Brussels; her mother was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, and this would have a profound effect on Akerman and her work. She went to film school at 18, but soon dropped out to make her first short, Saute ma ville. After spending...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

A director, cinematographer, writer, editor and sometime actress, Belgian-born filmmaker Chantal Akerman has died. The death was confirmed by French film industry organization Arp. Le Monde has reported that Akerman committed suicide Monday night. She was 65. Akerman began making movies at age 17 with her first short, 1968’s Saute Ma Ville. Among her oeuvre are such films as Je, Tu, Il, Elle in which she starred with Niels Arestrup; Les Rendez-Vous D’Anna and The Captive…...

Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman has died of an apparent suicide at the age of 65, Le Monde reports. However, Nicola Mazzanti, the director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive told the New York Times that the cause and date of her death were unknown. Akerman had recently completed the film No Home Movie, which featured lengthy conversations between herself and her ailing mother, a survivor of Auschwitz. She recently said the film took a heavy emotional toll on her: "I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn’t have dared to do it." The Times also reports that, according to her friends, she had been in a "dark place."Akerman, a giant within the worlds of avant-garde and feminist cinema, completed her first film, Saute ma ville, at the age of 18, dropping out of film school to finance it herself. Her work explores the feeling of...

So impressive was the output and so titanic was the presence of Chantal Akerman that news of her death, despite being about as current as any such notice could get, has already sent peals of shock, sadness, condolences, and tributes across the film world. How to come to terms with her absence? How to contextualize a force that’s absolutely unprecedented? Born to Auschwitz survivor Natalia Akerman — whose experiences would be a key influence on several efforts, including this year’s No Home Movie — she was, at only 15, inspired to enter the filmmaking fray after a viewing of Pierrot le Fou. Regardless of the extent to which Godard’s film feels like a siren for those who wish to think differently about the form, any influence is hard to comprehend when the art she would go on to create didn’t — still doesn’t; will never — feel like anyone’s predecessor or equal.

Read More: With 'No Home Movie,' Chantal Akerman Chronicles the End of a Life, and a Search for Where She Belongs Belgian filmmaker and theorist Chantal Akerman has passed away at the age of 65. Falling in love with Godard and his crime drama "Pierrot Le Fou" at an early age, Akerman made her debut at age 18 with a 1968 short film titled "Saute ma ville," and she continued experimenting with shorts and narrative features for a career that spanned over four decades.  The director is most well-regarded for her 1975 masterwork "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," which The New York Times famously hailed as "the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema." The drama unfolds over three hours and slowly follows the mundane life of a housewife as she performs her daily chores and engages in casual prostitution so that she can provide for herself and her son.

Chantal Akerman's groundbreaking film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

The Belgian filmmaker, artist and academic Chantal Akerman has died at the age of 65. Known for singular woks like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and A Couch In New York, she carved out a place in the industry at a time when it was exceedingly difficult for women and for experimental directors alike, and she has been cited as a major influence by the likes of Gus Van Sant.

Having lost her grandparents and come close to losing her mother in Auschwitz, Akerman faced significant barriers in her early life, but she managed to study at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion and made her first film, Saute Ma Ville, at the age of 18. She produced her most famous works in the Seventies while living in New York, where she was...