Banal or Intellectual?
Singing and Dancing with Chantal Akerman
Responding to a recent Sight & Sound poll declaring Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman to be ‘the greatest film of all time’ — and to news of a major retrospective of Akerman’s work to be held in Bozar in 2024 — Tessel Veneboer asks whether the flood of critical attention risks obscuring the full range of the filmmaker’s interests.
On a hot July day, I make my way through a crowd of pink dresses in the foyer of a Brussels movie theatre to watch a documentary about the feminist activism of the French actress Delphine Seyrig. As the door of the screening room closes on an audience of six and the murmur of the Barbie party fades, a man in the chair next to me points to a film still of Seyrig peeling potatoes. He turns to his date and asks her if she has seen Jeanne Dielman. When she says she hasn’t, he tells her that Aker (…)
