In 1965 Chantal Akerman saw Pierrot Le Fou and decided that night she was going to be a filmmaker so it comes as no real surprise that her first short feels very inspired by Godard's work in the sixties. It's a little frantic in a way and Akerman almost personifies a Karina-esque character toiling away in her kitchen for the night. Where it gets a little weird and distant from those early Godard inspirations is where it takes up some of the same themes that are visible in second wave feminist filmmaking in this time period. It almost recalls Daisies brash feminism without the visual circus of Chytilova's picture. She would toil away in her kitchen, rebelling more and more…

CW: feminism, suicide, mental health

It's sad knowing that there are still people who would argue against this film's sentiment. Second wave defiance that eats a poor kitty along with it, a disorderly breakdown of urban European domesticity, this film gradually but not slowly, loudly but not violently peels away normality, each new chore shedding yet more reason until she is taping up the doors, no longer bearing any resemblance to household chores. This breakdown is less a depiction of mental distress and more a gob of spit in the eye of expectation, ending in darkness. My main objection is the use of the Plathian exit; it feels like a cheap shock. At its time, perhaps an opening cinematic salvo…

There is a fact of utmost importance that must be addressed before stating anything: Akerman, featuring herself in her first short film as she would in many subsequent features, made this statement at the age of 18. Akerman died at the age of 65, reportedly comitting suicide. This is one of the frightening cases where the protagonist and director of a debut film, short or feature-length, announces the future death of the auteur, just like Yukio Mishima's Patriotism (1966).

Akerman is a direct product of the Nouvelle Vague. Her singing of the theme of Truffaut's feature-film debut and the editing and visual aesthetics of Godard and Truffaut are there for the opening three minutes as a homage of respect. The…

I'd never seen anything by Chantal Akerman before - I'd been put off by her difficult reputation, which is what happens when your signature film is nearly three and a half hours long. From what I understand of Jeanne Dielman, this twelve-minute short is an early exploration of the same idea; the use of apparently banal, unremarkable scenes from a woman's life to create a cumulative portrait of her despair.

After watching Blow Up My Town I watched this 2011 interview with Akerman. I could identify with a lot of what she said, particularly when I learned she got into film as a teenager. When you get into films as a teenager rather than a kid, your tastes follow a…

Akerman's debut short is truly disturbing. It is a suffocating picture of the limited scope for femininity, an incendiary exploration of themes that would be perfected in her later masterwork, Jeanne Dielman.

All we see is Akerman playing a woman in her tiny apartment. We see her atonally take on domestic chores, echoing evident themes about the space for (and expectations of) women, through jerky camera angles and harsh cuts. The style is abrasive, with a syncopated soundscape in which we frequently hear humming and hysterical laughing, but it is not actually matched up to the visual. It is a chilling portrayal of forced hysteria in which we feel locked into a characters head.

The ending moments are alarming, but…