Chantal Akerman

Les rendez-vous d’Anna

Les rendez-vous d’Anna

Chantal Akerman’s narrative follow-up to her international breakthrough, Jeanne Dielman, is a penetrating portrait of a woman’s soul-deep malaise and a mesmerizing odyssey through a haunted Europe. While on a tour through Germany, Belgium, and France to promote her latest movie, Anna (Aurore Clément), an accomplished filmmaker, passes through a series of eerie, exquisitely shot brief encounters—with men and women, family and strangers—that gradually reveal her emotional and physical detachment from the world. Mirroring the itinerant Akerman’s own restless wanderings, this quasi self-portrait journeys through a succession of liminal spaces—hotel rooms, railway stations, train cars—toward an indelible encounter with the specter of history.

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Film Info

  • Belgium, Germany, France
  • 1978
  • 127 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$79.96

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies

Chantal Akerman in the Seventies

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$35.96

Out Of Print
Les rendez-vous d’Anna
Cast
Aurore Clément
Anna Silver
Helmut Griem
Heinrich Schneider
Magali Noël
Ida
Hanns Zischler
Hans
Lea Massari
Anna’s mother
Jean-Pierre Cassel
Daniel
Credits
Director
Chantal Akerman
Written by
Chantal Akerman
Producer
Alain Dahan
Cinematography
Jean Penzer
Editor
Francine Sandberg
Production designer
Philippe Graff
Sound
Henri Morelle

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Chantal Akerman

Director, Writer

Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion. Influenced by the structural cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, at age twenty (work by artists like Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol), Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, playing with long takes and formal repetition in her films, which include the architectural meditation Hotel Monterey (1972), the obsessive portrait of estrangement Je tu il elle (1975), the autobiographical New York elegy News from Home (1976), and the austere antiromance Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Her greatest achievement, however, is her epic 1975 experiment Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a hypnotic study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine widely considered one of the great feminist films. Such later Akerman films as the Proust adaptation La captive (2000) and the documentary on Mexican-to-U.S. immigration From the Other Side (2002) retain her daring, vital voice.

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