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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. (Criterion)
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This minimalist portrait of a single room draws attention to its own form and duration while blurring the distinctions between animate and inanimate objects. Chantal Akerman thus merges with her surroundings while lying in bed. The character’s sense of belonging to the environment around her is taken to the extreme in the director’s three-hour opus Jeanne Dielman. Like that film, La chambre benefits from the surprises brought about by the variation of regular rhythm and the disruption of a seemingly imperturbable order. The film’s biggest twist comes when the camera starts panning from left to right instead of tracing a circle. Thanks to the runtime, this is a tolerably long variation on Michael Snow’s La Région centrale, though it will be appreciated especially by lovers of parametric narration.
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