La Chambre (Chantal Akerman, 1972)

A Room of Her Own

Chantal Akerman’s La Chambre

article by

17.11.2024

In the beginning is the Movement: a tranquil, balanced motion sweeping horizontally across the narrow space of a New York apartment. A kitchen, a living room, a bedroom, where each section the camera lingers on simultaneously transforms into solemn, impersonal still lifes that contain vivid, palpable, humane traces of someone inhabiting the place—a black strap bag slung over a wooden chair with red upholstery, the leftovers of an unfinished meal, and finally, the much-anticipated tenant, Akerman herself, coming into view.

Lounging on a small bed, Akerman’s posture seems casual and relaxed at first glance, but the repetitive tilts of her head—to the left and then back to center—contrasting with the smooth glide of the camera suggest otherwise. Restlessness is in the air, yet before we can discern it, the image is already on the move, retracing its steps for a second time. The chair, the kitchen table, the kettle: everything is in its place, both as alive and as dead as possible.

We are caught in this pleasant, satisfactory harmony until the figure in bed reappears, now lying under the sheets, repetitively fidgeting her body. There is no time to ask ourselves what’s going on, for she’s already out of shot. The camera moves on to the slat-back chair, the messy desk, the sink, the upholstered chair, the kitchen table, and the kettle. Everything is still in its place. Again.

But Akerman, who has straightened herself up a bit, is not. She keeps rubbing an apple in her hands. Her restlessness takes over the Movement, breaking the cycle of camera movements and syncing it to her own ruminations—physical and mental—forcing it to go back and forth. The disruption occurs during the third camera rotation, as if the very structure of the film were foretelling the turmoil that would ensue on the third day in Jeanne Dielman, made three years later.

In Akerman’s cinema, chaos has always been the real owner of the domestic space, while her characters and the director herself are mere temporary dwellers. Akerman never stopped looking for ‘a room of one’s own’—in Brussels, Paris, or New York, but also in her films, alongside other drifting, uprooted, or displaced individuals across Eastern Europe and Mexico, like the elusive travelers in D’Est, waiting stoically for the first cold and unsettling winds of post-Wall Europe to pass, or the resilient Mexican migrants in De l’autre côté, who are forced to live in a perpetual state of incarceration even when they are on the move: fellow lost souls bound to remain behind and beyond walls made of violence and cruelty, never those of a home.

La Chambre is one of the many illustrations of this pursuit, which we see with other eyes today. Many viewers have rested their gaze upon Akerman’s interiors, decorating them with their own interpretations and mental projections. We invited other guests and even went so far as to attribute them ownership—Michael Snow, for instance, who has often been credited as the main influence behind the structuralist style of the film, would be the perfect candidate.

I, too, with every new reiteration of the film, felt both more familiar and stranger to what occurs (and what doesn’t) in that cramped space. So many times, I’ve been there, venturing initially as a naive teenage film enthusiast, then pacing inside relentlessly for an undergraduate film analysis assignment, and later, on rare occasions, stumbling upon it within a short film programme. After watching La Chambre and writing and reading about it again and again, the question of who these images belong to still remains unanswered for me. Yet one thing I’m sure of is that there has always been, and will always be, enough room for all of us in Akerman’s images.

watch now

The Room

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. There is the presence of a young woman: filmmaker Chantal Akerman herself, sitting on the bed eating an apple.

Bio Öykü Sofuoğlu

Öykü Sofuoğlu is a Turkish film critic and journalist based in Paris. Her film-related writings have been published in various outlets, including International Documentary Magazine, Screen Slate, and Letterboxd Journal. She is also one of the co-editors of Outskirts Film Magazine.