Intérieurs sensibles de Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman is a radical, all-round filmmaker. From fiction films and documentary essays to moving image installations, her art is one of intrepid formal experimentation. This aesthetic of experimental gesture is rooted in a strong ethical commitment. Against all voyeurism, against one gaze opposed to another, Akerman welcomes the other into her own "home", housing them within her own intimacy. The work on intimacy, from the point of view of formal, visual and sound expression, becomes a possible space to be shared and experienced in common.

In Akerman's work, the notions of interior and interiority are intimately linked to the notion of passage: from a fixed exterior to a mixed internal mobility, from a public space to an intimate space, from the artificial neutrality of the frame to the profound upheavals of the body. The transition from film to installation is characterised by the same permeability of boundaries. How does one inhabit a space, invest it with oneself, while preserving one's own intimacy as well as that of the space itself, and that of the Other - of another identity, be it the director's mother in her latest film No Home Movie (2015) or her characters: from Jeanne Dielman to those in Je, tu, il, elle (1974), All Night Long (1982) and American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989)?