The time of our lives: Tacita Dean on Chantal Akerman

The first film I saw by the Belgian director Chantal Akerman was Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. I remember the slow unravelling of the narrative being punctuated by the departure of most of the cinematheque audience at the ICA. Later, I had the opportunity to introduce the film, and the intimacy of the small audience allowed me to challenge them all to stay until the end of this three hour, 20 minute film. The end is extraordinary, but the manner in which we are taken there is what makes it the most subtly dramatic film I have ever seen.

Jeanne Dielman lives with her son in her apartment on Quai du Commerce. He goes to school in the morning and returns at night. She gets up and makes him breakfast. She folds away the bed, washes up, puts things away, puts on her coat and leaves her apartment to go shopping. An hour of the film has passed. We have been with her while she has washed every plate, wiped clean every surface, folded every blanket. We are not given a moment's relief from the increasing monotony and claustrophobia of her life.

She waits for the shops to pull up their shutters in the morning. We sit with her having her scheduled cup of coffee. She puts the chocolate in her bag to keep for her son. We return to her apartment. The doorbell rings and she takes her middle-aged male guest down a corridor to the only room we don't know about. We are jolted into realising she is working as a prostitute. He leaves, and we are with her again as she methodically washes herself.

She is back in the kitchen preparing the supper.

We are with her while she peels every potato. Her son returns, slouching, morose, taciturn. This is day one. When she drops her potato peeler on day two, you jump out of your skin.

By day three, you can no longer bear the fragile grip she has on her life. When the man in the room takes too long and the potatoes get ruined, she is panicked, flustered, disturbed and has to run out of the apartment to get more. She puts her coat on over her apron, and the fine choreography of her life is shattered.

Chantal Akerman told me that every moment, every gesture and especially every pause of the film had been worked out beforehand, even down to Jeanne distractedly playing with sugar lumps on her Formica tabletop, which comes over as a rare spontaneous action in her day. Akerman made the film in 1975 when she was 25. She filmed it on 35mm with Delphine Seyrig playing Jeanne.

I told her that it felt like a very brave thing to have done, and she said that it wasn't really - it was just that things were easier in the seventies. And I think she is probably right. Jeanne Dielman has its roots in happenings and performance, and these in turn were connected with the wider use of video and 'real time'. Akerman has taken the characteristics of real-time recording but chosen to work in film.

She has used with total effectiveness cinema's greatest tool, the edit. The result is that Jeanne Dielmann has very specific time qualities: we know we are not spending every minute of the day with her in a real time event, yet it feels like we are. It is so finely edited that we can no longer differentiate our real time from her real time. What is fictional time? What is time? Akerman's 1993 film D'Est traces a journey from the end of summer to the depths of winter, from East Germany to Moscow.

It is an epic film, documentary in its observation but quieter, slower and conveying as much by the rhythm of its ambient sound as by its extended sequences. Sometimes her camera is static and we watch a man sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette, or a woman on stage playing her cello. Each sequence is as long as it takes for the moment to pass, for the whole cigarette to be smoked or for the music to be played.

At other times the camera moves and we pass along queues of people, standing singly. The camera does not pause, but it does study these people one by one. We get to a packed railway station reminiscent of Ellis Island. The stillness of the camera and of the waiting people has the quality of a painting.

Edited extracts from D'Est and Jeanne Dielman appear in Akerman's new installation. It is a departure from her single-screen work, and a transition hard to bear for those hard-line lovers of her films. Over six video monitors in a gallery space, she shows part of four of her films (the other two are Toute Une Nuit and Hotel Monterey).

They are united by Akerman's voice reading a text she has written herself called A Family In Brussels - written in the first person but speaking as her mother. It is about the death of her husband, Akerman's father, and its attention to detail through the eyes of a widow is reminiscent of Jeanne Dielman.

As you listen to her voice and watch moments from her films, is easy to understand the importance of autobiography in her work. She has called the piece Self-portrait/Autobiography: A Work In Progress. It is a very personal work, and making installations in art galleries has become the means for her to negotiate a new territory for herself, as well as find a new audience.

I have never been so affected by a film as I was by Jeanne Dielman. After my introduction to Akerman's work I sought out her films but they are not easy to find, being rarely screened in this country. I once tried to see her 1991 film Nuit De Jour but got stuck on a bus in London's Walworth Road with a friend for nearly the duration of the film. Now, thinking back, it somehow feels very appropriate and in keeping with Akerman's documentary style and extraordinary relationship to time.

Chantal Akerman's installation Self-Portrait/ An Autobiography is at the Frith Street Gallery, London W1 (0171-494 1550), till next Thursday. Tacita Dean's work is part of the Turner prize show at the Tate, London SW1, till Sunday.