Restored in 2023 by Cinémathèque royale de Belgique (CINEMATEK) and the Chantal Akerman Foundation, with the support of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and the European Union - NextGeneration EU. Under the supervision of the director of photography, Babette Mangolte.

The Room

La Chambre

Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1972, 11’

Panning shots in a repeating full-circle movement show a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. When the camera first passes the bedroom, there is no one there, but each time it returns to the frame, filmmaker Chantal Akerman herself is sitting on the bed, motionless at first, then busy with an apple. When she is last seen, she yawns.

Bio Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a Belgian filmmaker, artist, and writer born in Brussels. At the age of 15, she discovered Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), which inspired her to take up filmmaking. She almost immediately left the Brussels film school (INSAS), rejecting its rigid framework. The following year, she made her debut short film, Saute ma ville (1968), the first expression of a free and radical cinema. Akerman moved to New York in the early 1970s, where she discovered the experimental cinema of Jonas Mekas and Michael Snow, which had a profound influence on the films she made there, such as La Chambre (1972) and Hotel Monte …

The problematic relation between a woman’s daily routine and her creative everyday is dramatically highlighted through the flight into a secluded room–in which the stakes of her art will be proven. It is in this room, apart, that Akerman performs rituals of order and disorder, as if conducting a continuous aesthetic experiment. This room is especially charged with an obsessive quality that points to a central problematic in her films: the autonomous person.

Ivone Margulies