CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/20/2026

Collier Schorr’s fascinating take on Chantal Akerman’s ‘Je, tu, il, elle’

“I first saw Chantal Akerman’s film Je tu il elle in the early 1980s. It was the first time I saw two women having sex. It was the first time I saw a lesbian artist. I forgot about it until ten years ago when I started feeling the urge to perform with my subjects. Those impulses brought me back to Akerman, who was both a director and an object of her work. What I saw 40 years later was that the film was a dance. [. . .] I had always felt that female artists who inhabited their work were beautiful and female-presenting and that I was forever locked out of being able to exist as a spectacle. Akerman’s body, unlike an actress’, was awkward and performative, vulnerable and powerful in its ordinariness.” So essayist Peggy Phelan quotes photographer and now choreographer and dancer Collier Schorr in Writing a Letter: Akerman Ballet, Act 1, in which Schorr documents her exploration of Akerman’s game-changing 1974 film. Out now from The Song Cave, it features 180 black-and-white images by Schorr, as in this collection translating the third movement, Sugar Duet.