These four short films were made by Chantal Akerman in the summer of 1967, in standard 8mm format, in black and white and without sound, as part of her entrance exams to the Institut Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle (INSAS) in Brussels, where she was admitted in 1967, and where she stayed for only a few months before abandoning her studies.

Chantal Akerman filmed La Foire de Midi in Brussels, which takes place every summer in the southern districts of the city, as well as the courtyard of the Hôtel de Clèves-Ravenstein, where by chance, 50 years later, the Chantal Akerman Foundation was created. On the Belgian coast, Marilyn Watelet — her childhood friend with whom she founded the production company Paradise Films in the 1970s — and her own mother Natalia Akerman, are the protagonists of a short fiction in two parts that takes place in the shops of the seaside resort.

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Suburbs of Brussels: a young lady in her apartment’s kitchen mops the floors, polishes her shoes, dances, cooks, drinks wine, then she duct-tapes the door, opens the gas and blows everything up – humming all along.

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Akerman’s static camera seizes upon the head-on format to frame the entrance, certain corridor, the interior of the lift – to frame, fix in a frame, shots composed of lines, volumes and voids, objects of architectural fascination/documentation. Finally, there is a long tracking shot which sweeps across a landscape – not at ground level but where the tops of the buildings meet the sky.

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Two 360° travelling shots describe the space of a room as a succession of still lifes: a chair, some fruit on a table, solitary, waiting objects. Glimpsed within these movements, one sole presence: a young women sitting on a bed. The third shot stops in mid-course, to reverse its movement and reframe the young woman who is eating an apple.

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Hanging Out Yonkers was originally intended as a commission for a social services agency dealing with the reintegration of young offenders and drug addicts in New York. The film was never finished so the only footage available is this 27-minute soundless reel.

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Mid-August in Paris (the title is a date: August 15) in a sunny, quiet apartment a young woman talks, thinks, reflects about herself, everyday life and little events in a long, uninterrupted monologue. The camera pictures her and her gestures in long, fixed shots moving around the rooms, the space, the light and shadows of a summer day.

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A young girl leaves her town after a difficult love affair and takes refuge in a room in another town. Later she leaves this room, stops a truck on the side of the highway and spends most of the night with the truck driver, a man who could have been a friend.

At the end of the road, she finds, probably for a short time, the girl she really loves.

Je, tu, il, elle tells the story of the last three moments of a young girl’s adolescence, painfully approaching adulthood, and who will have to give up something of herself to conform to it.

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We almost break into the daily household routine of a woman, of which is almost always hidden, stifled. We meet Jeanne for the first time although her story began long ago. Married at 20, birth of a son and a few years later the death of her husband. Jeanne has a perfectly organized life, meticulously ritualistic, which leaves no room for improvisation. The rhythm and rites of the immutable, an energy daily renewed whose effects are being daily wrecked. The apparent triviality of the action disappearing in favor of its abstraction. This work, played out in silent isolation with no sense of reality, which nevertheless seems as it must be accomplished, and which only appears as a piddling means of survival.

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News from Home comes through as « love letters » to the filmmaker in New York from her mother in Europe. This text paints an intimate picture of family life, with its catalogue of minor illnesses, domestic routines, betrothals and financial anxieties. The elegiac emotionalism of the text is counterpointed not only by the flat monotone of Akerman’s recitation but also by the images of Manhattan as an alien, urban ghost-town, its streets preternaturally empty.

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