Programmed June 2020

Directed by Chantal Akerman

Featuring a 2015 program on Akerman’s work One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past half century, Chantal Akerman—who would have turned seventy this June—took a profoundly personal, aesthetically radical approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and alienation. Influenced by the structuralist cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, exploring the possibilities of long takes and formal repetition in audacious and personal works like Hotel Monterey , Je tu il elle , and Les rendez-vous d’Anna . Her towering achievement, however, remains Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , a domestic epic that…