What is the Jeu de Paume in Paris? A Look at the Chantal Akerman Exhibit

Once upon a time, the Musée d’Orsay did not exist. The Gare d’Orsay was a huge, derelict train station taking forever to convert into a museum. Eventually it became a magnificent repository of Impressionist and other 19th-century painting. Pre-Orsay, the Jeu de Paume museum, located in the Tuileries Garden, was the go-to place to view Impressionist masterpieces.

After the inauguration of the Orsay Museum, the Jeu de Paume required a make-over as radical as Netflix changing from an outfit mailing you rented DVDs to the video-by-Internet behemoth it became. Today the Jeu de Paume is dedicated to the “image” in the modern sense: photo, film, video, multimedia installations. Ironically, it was the ethos of Impressionism that led in great part to our newfangled concept of imagery and perception. The museum itself embodies this: Outside it’s a classical, elegant but stolid building. Inside, the space is dynamic, airy, bright, fragmented into various sub-spaces, utterly contemporary.

Transformation of the space goes back to the beginnings of the Jeu de Paume in the 19th century. It was originally a sports center — jeu de paume was a game resembling tennis. A previous site of jeu de paume courts had been demolished when the Palais Garnier (aka Opera) went up, and Napoléon III authorized the new construction. In 1909, after that sports complex was then transferred elsewhere, the Jeu de Paume became the site of art exhibitions. During the Occupation, the Jeu de Paume became a target of cultural pillage by the Nazis, followed by a search for looted art by the French government and conservationists.

The Jeu de Paume is especially contemporary in its content. One of the current exhibits best illustrates this ethos: Chantal Akerman: Traveling (until January 19).

The filmmaker was originally from Belgium, but inextricably tied to France, like other Belgian artists and writers, from René Magritte and Georges Simenon to Jacques Brel to the Dardennes Brothers (even French icon Johnny Hallyday was of Belgian extraction). Long a footnote of experimental cinema (though she also made narrative features), Akerman’s stature has been steadily growing since her death: Sight and Sound called her most famous work, Jeanne Dielman, the greatest film of all time.

The exhibit isn’t overwhelming, but it’s a revelation, showing how multifaceted an artist Akerman was. I’d known a little about her, gave her last feature, Almayer’s Folly (2011) a so-so review. Now I feel downright intimate with both her life and oeuvre. The exhibit consists of film projections, TV screens looping videos, photos, and archival materials such as letters, scripts, stills, project notes and reviews. Unfortunately screenings of her features were limited and sold out.

 

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The exhibit describes her roots in Belgium and the transplanting of those roots to Paris, where she met other experimental film people. But we also learn that she was an intrepid globetrotter who had a rootless aspect to her character. She sojourned in New York, Arizona, Texas, California, Mexico, and Eastern Europe as the Cold War was ending. In every place she stayed she’d film, casting an eye on the various societies that could be engaging but also coldly truth-seeking.

She was Jewish, with family-members who were killed in the Holocaust. This seems to have haunted her throughout her life. Her interest in her Jewish heritage is reflected in her unrealized projects to make films of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories.

 

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Akerman wasn’t an overt ideological feminist, though her most notable films depict women being ground down by the everyday details of humdrum life, until there’s some disturbance or explosion. One reason her films could be long, and slow, was perhaps to put the viewer through the ordeal, if only vicariously. In her personal life she was extraordinarily attached to her mother, and her mother’s death certainly contributed to the depression that led to her own death by suicide. She was gay, and surrounded herself with women in her career: actresses, collaborators, film crews. One lover who was a musician got her interested in integrating music into her work.

At the same time, she had numerous male friends and mentors in Paris and New York. She wasn’t given to easy binary oppositions. In her documentaries we sometimes see the subjects looking at the camera or the filmmakers, something she didn’t try to prevent or edit out: that this was a film with someone — Akerman herself — intervening, was the point. It wasn’t so much about voyeurism as the messy subject-and-object roles people play in life. She occasionally put herself into her feature films as a minor presence.

 

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While Akerman moved from experimental films to feature movies (with many unmade projects), she also expanded to installations, video and multimedia, in collaboration with museums worldwide. At the same time that she seemed to have become more artsy, she also moved from everyday life’s oppressiveness to social and political subjects which seemed further afield from her personal experience: migrants in Arizona, the murder of a black man in Texas, the situation of Eastern Europeans as Communism fell. Yet all of these strongly echo her family’s experience during the cataclysms of the 20th century.

Any life is a kind of voyage, but Chantal Akerman’s especially so. History and geography, artistic genres, personal ups and downs, and myriad relationships make Traveling both emotional roller-coaster and a tour through a postmodern labyrinth. She was an Alice who never came back out of the rabbit-hole, but fortunately we can. Taking in Chantal Akerman: Traveling the visitor is immersed in both a brilliant, obsessive artist and in a jewel of a venue.

Also currently featured at the Jeu de Paume museum: Letizia Battaglia (until May 18, 2025), Tina Barney (until January 19, 2025), Quasi-Things Simulator (until February 28, 2025)

Visit jeudepaume.org for information on these and other events at the museum.