CineMasters

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What makes a CineMaster?

Years of experience, global renown, a career of landmark films and a public fascination with every move they make - and that’s just for starters.

Our ongoing season celebrates directors and key figures from filmmaking history, and gives you the opportunity to watch their work on the big screen.

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CineMasters: Chantal Akerman

‘I want people to experience film in their body.’ - Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman is best known for her second feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the minimal masterpiece. But there’s much more to this maverick, as GFT audiences can discover in this special CineMasters season, made possible thanks to the BFI.

‘Where are you Anna?’ drifts a voice out of an answerphone in Akerman’s mesmerising 1978 road trip Les Rendez-vous d’Anna. We could ask the same of the Belgian auteur. For where do we place her cinema? Across 40 films, Anna is one of many stand-ins for the director, who was ahead of her time making introspective odysseys from an innately feminist, queer, and Jewish perspective but who believed ‘all labels have to be thrown away’. Akerman had many deep-rooted obsessions beyond self-portraiture: confinement, mother/daughter relationships, exile, anxiety and loneliness, desire and the impossibility of human connection. But she never repeated herself. Her formally audacious films of the 1970s, exemplified by Jeanne Dielman, reckoned with cinema’s essence – time and space – but her obsessions would go on to surface in comedies, musicals and romances, literary adaptations, documentaries which wander into fiction and more. ‘I don’t belong anywhere’ she famously said. The same is true of her restless, uncategorisable cinema. - Isabel Stevens, BFI season curator

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