Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 Blu-ray

Firstly, a massive thank you to our Patreon supporters. Your generosity touches me deeply. These supporters have become the single biggest contributing factor to the survival of DVDBeaver. Your assistance has become essential.

What do Patrons receive, that you don't?

1) Our weekly Newsletter sent to your Inbox every Monday morning!
2) Patron-only Silent Auctions - so far over 30 Out-of-Print titles have moved to deserved, appreciative, hands!
3) Access to over 50,000 unpublished screen captures in lossless high-resolution format!

Please consider keeping us in existence with a couple of dollars or more each month (your pocket change!) so we can continue to do our best in giving you timely, thorough reviews, calendar updates and detailed comparisons. Thank you very much.

Search DVDBeaver

S E A R C H D V D B e a v e r

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 [3 X Blu-ray]

Saute ma ville (1968) L’enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971)

La chambre (1972) Hotel Monterey (1972) Le 15/8 (1973) Je tu il elle (1975)

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

News from Home (1976) Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978)

In the revolutionary first decade of her filmmaking career, Chantal Akerman devoted herself to nothing less than the total resculpting of cinematic time and space. Journeying between Europe and New York City, Akerman forged a highly personal style that fuses avant-garde influences with deeply human expressions of alienation, desire, and displacement—themes that she would explore in a series of increasingly ambitious shorts, documentaries, and features, including the towering Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. With immersive rhythms that render the most minute details momentous, these landmarks of twentieth-century art continue to reveal new ways of experiencing cinema and framing reality.

Saute ma ville 1968
Made when the director was just eighteen, Chantal Akerman’s debut film is a blistering first expression of what would become one of her major themes: women’s confinement in and rebellion against the domestic sphere. Akerman plays a young woman who, alone in her kitchen, enacts a savaging of traditional domestic rituals that leads to a literally explosive climax.

L’enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée 1971
One of Chantal Akerman’s most rarely seen works is an intimate portrait of a young mother (played by Claire Wauthion) whose day-to-day routines are intercut with her stream-of-consciousness ruminations on her family, sex life, relationships, and body. Though Akerman (who also appears in the film) was later dismissive of her second directorial effort, its patient focus on the tension between domesticity and a woman’s inner life marks L’enfant aimé as an important link in the development of her artistry.

La chambre 1972
Chantal Akerman’s dialogue with the 1960s avant-garde movement of structural cinema begins here, with the first film she made in New York City—a breakthrough in her experiments with the bending of cinematic time and space. As the camera completes a series of circular pans around a small apartment, the interior’s furniture, its clutter, and the filmmaker herself—staring back at us from bed—become the subjects of a moving still life.

Hotel Monterey 1972
Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux. Filmed over the course of fifteen hours, from evening to dawn, with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Babette Mangolte’s carefully controlled camera gradually making its way from the lamplit lobby to the rooftop overlooking an awakening city, this radical, silent experiment in duration stands as one of Akerman’s most arresting formal achievements, collapsing time and charging the quotidian space it surveys with an eerie unreality.

Le 15/8 1973
Shot and directed by Chantal Akerman and Samy Szlingerbaum, this quietly revealing variation on the filmmaker’s recurring themes of dislocation and alienation unfolds on one day—August 15, 1973—in a Paris apartment, where Finnish expat Chris Myllykoski opens up to the camera about her anxieties and uncertainties, her aspirations and ennui, and the sense of vulnerability she feels being a woman alone in an unfamiliar country. As Myllykoski’s voice-over narration shifts between the mundane and the searching, Akerman’s observant camera remains attuned to tiny gestures that tell a story of their own.

Je tu il elle 1975
Chantal Akerman’s first narrative feature is a startlingly vulnerable exploration of alienation and the search for connection. In a performance at once daringly exposed and enigmatic, Akerman plays a young woman who, following a lengthy, self-imposed exile, ventures out into the world, where she has two very different experiences of intimacy: first with a truck driver (Niels Arestrup) who picks her up, and then with a female ex-lover (Claire Wauthion). Culminating in an audacious, real-time carnal encounter that brought lesbian sexuality to the screen with a new frankness, Je tu il elle finds Akerman wielding her radical minimalism with a newfound emotional and psychological precision.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 1975
A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.

News from Home 1976
Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule.

Les rendez-vous d’Anna 1978
Chantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, Jeanne Dielman, is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. While on a tour through Germany, Belgium, and France to promote her latest movie, Anna (Aurore Clément), an accomplished filmmaker, passes through a series of eerie, exquisitely shot brief encounters—with men and women, family and strangers—that gradually reveal her emotional and physical detachment from the world. Mirroring the itinerant Akerman’s own restless wanderings, this quasi self-portrait journeys through a succession of liminal spaces—hotel rooms, railway stations, train cars—toward an indelible encounter with the specter of history.

Posters

Theatrical Release: October 21st, 1994

Reviews More Reviews DVD Reviews

Review: Criterion - Region 'A' - Blu-ray

Box Cover		CLICK to order from: Bonus Captures:
Distribution	Criterion Spine #1203 - Region 'A' - Blu-ray
Runtimes	Saute ma ville: 13:30 L’enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée: 32:34 La chambre: 12:02 Hotel Monterey: 1:03:04 Le 15/8: 43:26 Je tu il elle 1:26:27 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: 3:21:49 News from Home: 19:23 Les rendez-vous d’Anna: 2:08:14
Video	3 X 1080P Dual-layered Blu-rays Disc One Size: 49,374,058,050 bytes Disc Two Size: 48,788,869,325 bytes Disc Three Size: 48,880,486,252 bytes Average Video Bitrate: 30.93 Mbps Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video
	NOTE: The Vertical axis represents the bits transferred per second. The Horizontal is the time in minutes.
Bitrate Sample (Jeanne Dielman) Blu-ray:
Audio	LPCM Audio French 1152 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 1152 kbps / 24-bit News From Home has an optional alternate-English soundtrack option: LPCM Audio French 1152 kbps 1.0 / 48 kHz / 1152 kbps / 24-bit
Subtitles	English, None
Features	Release Information: Studio: Criterion 3 X 1080P Dual-layered Blu-rays Disc One Size: 49,374,058,050 bytes Disc Two Size: 48,788,869,325 bytes Disc Three Size: 48,880,486,252 bytes Average Video Bitrate: 30.93 Mbps Codec: MPEG-4 AVC Video Edition Details: • Hanging Out Yonkers, an unfinished film from 1973 by Chantal Akerman (27:19) • Film-school tests by Akerman (3:18 / 3:25 / 3:02 / 3:03) • New program on Akerman featuring critic B. Ruby Rich (19:52) • New visual essay on Akerman featuring archival interviews (22:42) • Autour de “Jeanne Dielman,” a documentary made during the filming of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, shot by actor Sami Frey and edited by Agnès Ravez and Akerman (2:08:44) • Saute ma ville Introduction by Akerman (1:20) Interviews with Akerman (20:20 / 17:04), cinematographer Babette Mangolte (22:41), actors Aurore Clément (18:10) and Delphine Seyrig (6:51), and Akerman’s mother, Natalia (28:14) • Appreciation by filmmaker Ira Sachs (9:12) PLUS: An essay and notes on the films by critic Beatrice Loayza Blu-ray Release Date: January 23d, 2024 Transparent Blu-ray Cases inside Custom case Chapters 9

Comments:

NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Criterion Blu-ray (January 2024): Criterion have transferred nine Chantal Akerman film from 1968-1978 - to Blu-ray. The films are Saute ma ville (1968), L’enfant aimé, ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (1971), La chambre (1972), Hotel Monterey (1972), Le 15/8 (1973), Je tu il elle (1975), Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News from Home (1976), and Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). The package is cited as "New 4K digital restoration of Les rendez-vous d’Anna and 2K digital restorations of Saute ma ville; L’enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée; La chambre; Hotel Monterey; Le 15/8; Je tu il elle; Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; and News from Home".

In 2007, a label in Europe, Cinéart, put 5 of these films on PAL DVD - Hôtel Monterey (1972), Je, tu, il, elle (1975), Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) , News from Home (1976) and Les rendez- vous d’Anna (1978) - on 2010 Criterion's sub-label Eclipse (Series 19 - 'Chantal Akerman in the Seventies') put four of the films on DVD (minus Saute ma ville that Cinéart included as an extra) and we compared them HERE. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles received its own DVD (2-disc) release from Criterion in 2009 and on Blu-ray in 2017, compared HERE. We have compared some captures below to Criterion's 2024 Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 three Blu-ray package.

Firstly, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in 1080P looks about the same as Criterion's 2017 Blu-ray release. However, Hotel Monterey and Je tu il elle appear quite differently from the image found in Criterion's 2010 Eclipse release, as well as the 2007 Belgian Cinéart DVD package. I can only speculate as why the 1080P is both brighter and much grainer that it came from a different source. Hotel Monterey was shot in 16mm but colors appear quite a bit paler on the BD over both older SD transfers. Most Blu-ray presentations start with a notice that the restorations were by the Cinematek (Royal Film Archive of Belgium.) We will look into this further why the noticeable image disparity exists on these two entries. "The digital restoration of Le 15/8 was carried out in 2013, based on the original 16mm printing elements conserved by the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. A positive print, originally shown at the 1975 edition of the Venice Film Festival and conserved by the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee of the Biennale di Venezia was also used. We warmly thank Chantal Akerman for her precious collaboration in the restoration project." The rest of the films in the set look quite pleasing. News from Home (which I love) and Les rendez-vous d’Anna improve over the previous DVDs with generally deeper, richer colors and more consistent grain.

NOTE: We have added 60 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Criterion use linear PCM mono tracks (24-bit) in the original French languages (and some German in Les rendez-vous d’Anna.) News from Home is presented with its original French soundtrack and an alternate English-language track option. There are almost no scores in Akerman's films - often with only brief music interludes, ex. Marguerite Monnot's Les Amants d'un Jour performed by Aurore Clément in Les rendez-vous d’Anna, but generally the film have extensive pauses / reflections / limited dialogue - and some outdoor noise noticeable in films like Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The uncompressed mono does its job without issue. Criterion offer optional English subtitles on their Region 'A' Blu-ray.

Criterion offer many extras although no commentaries. Quite a few of these were available on their 2017 Blu-ray of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles reviewed HERE and the Cinéart DVD set. Firstly Saute ma ville has a brief introduction by Akerman. The supplements include excerpted footage from Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (Chantal on Chantal,) a 1997 episode of the French television program Cinéma, de notre temps. Included are four 'Film-school tests' in 1967 shot by Akerman, each running about 3-minutes. They were part of her application to Belgium's INSAS film school. Though she dropped out shortly after enrolling, the exercises offer insight into some of the director's earliest cinematic instincts. In a new 20-minute interview, conducted by the Criterion Collection in 2023, critic B. Ruby Rich offers a comprehensive primer to Chantal Akerman's prodigious first decade of filmmaking. Rich believes that Je Tu Il Elle can be viewed as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality". In Her Own Words is a new 23-minute visual essay that builds upon rare radio interviews that Chantal Akerman gave in 1975 and 1977, in which she reflects on her films and her ascendance to critical success. I enjoyed listening to her. Hanging Out Yonkers is an unfinished 1/2 hour documentary film from 1973 by Chantal Akerman in a juvenile rehabilitation center in Yonkers, New York, with cinematographer Babette Mangolte. After the sound rushes were lost, the film was never finished. Its most complete version is presented here and there is no audio. Autour de “Jeanne Dielman,” is a 2-hour documentary made during the filming of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, shot by actor Sami Frey and edited by Agnès Ravez and Akerman. This long documentary looks at the on-set relationships among Akerman, actor Delphine Seyrig, and the crew. Included are a number of interviews. Conducted for the Criterion Collection in April 2009, this features cinematographer and longtime Akerman collaborator Babette Mangolte discussing Jeanne Dielman - running almost 23-minutes. Chantal Akerman conducted an 18-minute interview with actor Aurore Clément, the star of Les rendez-vous d'Anna, at Clément's home in 2007. There is a 7-minute segment from the French television program Les rendez-vous du dimanche, hosted by Michel Drucker, featuring director Chantal Akerman and actor Delphine Seyrig discussing their work together on Jeanne Dielman. It originally aired on February 15th, 1976. Part of these interviews is a 2007, an off-camera 1/2 hour interview of Natalia Akerman Chantal Akerman's mother, discussing her daughter's films. The producers of the interview intended to edit out Chantal's questions but ultimately decided to preserve the candid mother-daughter rapport. Lastly is a 10-minute "Appreciation by Filmmaker Ira Sachs". In this 2019 installment of the Criterion Channel series Under the Influence, Sachs discusses the place that Chantal Akerman's provocative movie occupies in his personal canon and analyzes the minimalist, durational style that she achieved with her first feature-length work. The package has a liner notes booklet with an essay and notes on the films by critic Beatrice Loayza.

Chantal Akerman had an immense influence on feminist and avant-garde filmmaking, although isolating rigidly to just that cinema is unnecessarily limiting, imo. She is best known for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News from Home (1977), and Je Tu Il Elle (1974) all included here in Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978. I remain very keen on the latter two. Jeanne Dielman was ranked #1 in Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 "Greatest Films of All Time" critics poll, followed by, #2, Hitchcock's Vertigo and, #3, Orson Welles Citizen Kane. This was the first time that a woman was to top the poll. Paul Schrader questioned the 2022 listing stating that "The sudden appearance of Jeanne Dielman in the number one slot undermines the S&S poll's credibility" considering the positioning a "politically correct rejiggering," while still, personally, considering Akerman's film a favorite. Jeanne Dielman was ranked 4th in the "Director's Poll' that same year. I find it difficult putting my finger on why Akerman's cinema is so deeply resonating - while fully accepting that it truly exists - every time I watch her work. It's quite an amazing awareness. This is surely considered pure filmmaking and rightfully recognized as such. I have felt the same way of other directors; Bresson, the Dardennes etc. I was not at all deterred by the image quality of Hotel Monterey and Je tu il elle via Criterion's Blu-ray transfers, but we will investigate. Overall this set is such a keepsake - films capturing ordinary existence that you can watch for the rest of your life. Two other favorite directors, Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff) and Gus Van Sant (Gerry, Paranoid Park), cite Akerman as highly influential. It shows in their work. Chantal moved on - October 2015 in Paris at age 65 - reportedly she committed suicide.