Saute Ma Ville
(Blow Up, Town!)
Chantal Akerman's first film prefigures some of the most progressive aspects of her later work. Akerman herself plays a young woman who lives among hundreds of others in a giant high-rise; years before Jeanne Dielman she finds a unique solution to the problem of housework. The whimsical nature of the story is rendered serious by the quality of the claustrophobic framing and the oblique camera angles.
• Directed by Chantal Akerman. (1968, 13 mins, In French with English titles, 35mm)

La Chambre
(The Room)
In La Chambre (shot by Babette Mangolte), the camera takes in a room in 360-degree pans; a woman (Akerman) lies eating an apple. Offscreen voices reflect, in a kind of verbal counterpoint, the “mirror” into which the young woman informs us she is looking. A film of enclosure and repetition.
• Directed and Written by Chantal Akerman. Photographed by Babette Mangolte. (1972, 11 mins, In French with English titles, Color)

Hotel Monterey
In 1971 Akerman came to New York where she was particularly influenced by the work of Michael Snow. That influence is evident in La Chambre and decisive in Hotel Monterey, which consists of several single shot segments: city views through windows, a long tracking shot down a corridor, a stationary shot of an elevator, and the inhabitants of the Hotel Monterey as they come and go. “Shot by Babette Mangolte; warm, warm colors in such restricted spaces” (Christina Creveling, Camera Obscura #1)
• Directed by Chantal Akerman. Photographed by Babette Mangolte. (1972, 60 mins, Silent, Color)