The final piece, Women from Antwerp in November (2007), is the newest. Gone is the mock-doc style—Akerman here reverts to Godard’s cinematic tropes, namely the cool, sexy single female (either wearing a beret or a scarf) smoking a cigarette on a street corner or park bench or twirling on a roundabout. Over five screens on one wall, these womenchain-smoke in black-and-white or sepia tones until the action becomes farcical—the crescendo being a rain-drenched girl futilely relighting her soggy cig. On the opposite wall is one large smoking head, recalling the opening credits to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, except she too puffs away at her nicotine stick, lifting it suggestively to her lips over and over.

Formally at least, it  seems as though nothing much has changed over the past 40 years of Akerman’s glacially paced practice, returning as she does to her claustrophobic, repetitive narrative arcs. In some ways this limited show better addresses her legacy as a feminist filmmaker by revealing how her women were never meant to be perfect or ideal, but neither are they complètement folles. Instead they are complex, emotional creatures not sticking to type. Akerman the cineaste gladly apes the ridiculous blonde waifs of the nouvelle vague, but Akerman the analyst shows how fragile the female psyche can become without something or someone meaningful to complete the picture.

  "Chantal Akerman" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.