The Meetings of Anna

Chantal Akerman made Les Rendez-vous d'Anna three years after Jeanne Dielman, with a proper budget, a professional crew and Aurore Clément in the lead — the closest she came in that decade to a conventional production, and still one of the most austere films of the European 1970s.

Anna is a filmmaker touring her latest picture through West German and Belgian cities. The film consists almost entirely of encounters in transitional spaces: a man in Essen who describes his divorce, a friend of her mother's, a former lover in Brussels, her mother in a Brussels hotel bed, a man in Paris. Each speaks at length; Anna mostly listens, frontally framed, the camera fixed. What accumulates is a portrait of post-war Europe as a place people talk about leaving — Germany after the war, Poland before it, marriages, jobs, children — narrated to a woman passing through.

Akerman's own displacement is the subject underneath it: the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, moving through the countries where that happened, unable to stay anywhere. The film had almost no distribution for decades and now anchors the middle of her retrospectives, alongside Jeanne Dielman and News from Home. Sit with its rhythm and it becomes one of the most quietly devastating films in the catalogue.