Between home and flight: interior space, time and desire in the films of Chantal Akerman

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article sets out to review the films of Chantal Akerman, mainly those that she made in the 1970s and 1980s, observing how her filmmaking formulates a journey to and from the home against the background of the historical scene post 1968. Through a selection of examples, I will argue that the singularities of her filmmaking—the exploration of suspended time, the preference for a frontal gaze at the female body, or the inclination to autobiography, being the most noteworthy traits—have their basis in her critical observation of the life of women in social spaces, and also in a commitment to their emancipation through desire. Seen in perspective, the path that Akerman takes is one of unstable—though coherent—movement through the rejection of domesticity as the place from which the oppression of women originates, the flight from this (in other words, nomadism), and a search for other interiors that function as the opposite of the family home. These other interiors are empty and anonymous rooms where time and the rules that govern society are suspended, where Akerman herself, or other characters who are her alter ego, go from one corporeal state to another, carrying out the basic activities of the body, such as eating, sleeping or having sex.