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Chantal Akerman by Marion Schmid. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010

Over four decades, Chantal Akerman has authored a diverse and influential filmography. She has written, directed, and sometimes starred in experimental documentaries, minimalist fiction films, burlesque comedies, musicals, and autobiographical essay films. She is one of the most important directors of her generation, and Marion Schmid’s Chantal Akerman, the author’s recent contribution to Manchester University Press’s series, French Film Directors, is a significant addition to the existing English language scholarship on Akerman’s cinema. Like many of the books of this series, Chantal Akerman is a strong introduction to Akerman’s work for newcomers, and it offers valuable insights and close readings of the films for devotees. Schmid’s book, however, also breaks new ground in its highlighting of historical context and cultural and artistic influences over aesthetics, the area most regularly examined in Akerman scholarship. Without neglecting the formal elements of Akerman’s films, Schmid’s book posits that the director’s Jewish heritage, chiefly her Polish parents’ silence about their experiences during the Holocaust, her own status as an exile in her native Belgium and in France, and her early exposure to European independent and American avant-garde cinemas are equally as important to Akerman’s films as is her hyper-realist style: the immobile camera work and long takes that have kept much of her work outside of the mainstream and that cause viewers and critics alike to focus solely on the difficulty of her films. Schmid’s book moves through Akerman’s career chronologically by decade. Schmid begins with Akerman’s experimental short film Saute ma ville (1968) where the eighteenyear-old director plays a young woman who returns to her apartment, frenetically keeps house, and finally blows up herself, her apartment, and her town by sealing off the kitchen and turning on the gas. The book’s final extended analysis focuses on Tomorrow We Move (2004), a feature-length comedy starring Akerman regulars, Sylvie Testud and Aurore Clément, about a mother and daughter forced to live together in an impossibly cluttered family apartment. Though following such a strict chronology through the director’s career may appear at first glance to be unimaginative, the themes and styles of Akerman’s work lend themselves quite well to this categorization. Akerman’s documentaries and fiction films of the 1970s share a focus on “exile and alterity,” and they are marked by formal experimentation, by a minimalist, hyper-realist style that eschews psychological penetration into the characters’ and subjects’ minds (7). In the 1980s, Akerman turns her attention to comedy: burlesque, musical, and slapstick. While the rigorous formal style that Akerman developed in the ‘70s and that has since become