Chantal Akerman: Director whose visionary work examined modern woman in a capitalist world

Her work includes critically acclaimed adaptations of Proust's La Prisonnière and Conrad's Aylmer's Folly

Akerman in 2011: some of her films sit as well in galleries as cinemas, and she mounted several installations (AP)

Chantal Akerman, the pioneering feminist film-maker and artist, created a series of daring, finely controlled, compelling and moving studies of women. Her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1970) is both avant-garde and accessible, a landmark contribution to burgeoning feminist film-making.

Akerman's Polish Jewish grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz but only her mother returned. That, and her mother's emotional turmoil, were recurring themes in her work.

Akerman decided to be a film-maker when she was 15 after seeing Godard's Pierrot le fou, and at 18 she entered a Brussels film school, but left in the first term to make the short Saute ma ville (“Blow Up My Town”), in which a young woman, alone in her kitchen, overturns domestic conventions but finally destroys herself. Akerman described it as “the opposite image of Jeanne Dielman: that was resignation. Here is rage and death.” Yet she claimed to be attempting to create something Chaplinesque, perhaps hinting at life's tragicomic aspects. In the light of her analyses of capitalism, it is odd that Akerman funded Saute ma ville by trading diamond shares.

In 1972 Akerman moved to New York, immersing herself in Anthology Film Archives' avant-garde collection. Saute ma ville includes some long takes, but seeing the technique in extremis in the films of Warhol, Snow and others, encouraged her to go further. Hotel Monterey (1972) comprises long-held, beautifully composed Hopperesque empty rooms or slow prowlings down ill-lit silent corridors. Its companion piece, La chambre (1972) is a series of slow 360-degree pans around an apartment. Initially the camera does not pause to study the woman on the bed, who alternates between regarding it warily and ignoring it, but eventually it swings, pendulum-like, back and forth, increasingly transfixed by her, before continuing on its way.

Je, tu, il, elle (1974) continued her fascination with unregarded quotidian female life. A young woman (played by Akerman), trying to cope with a break-up, behaves increasingly erratically before a couple of sexual encounters. The second, a long, unblinking lesbian scene, was ground-breaking in its non-exploitative, uneroticised depiction of the topic. Nevertheless, Akerman refused to be ghettoised and was reluctant to have her films shown at gay film festivals, just as she denied being a feminist film-maker.

Akerman's long takes align real time with “film time”, not in an empty, formalist way, but rather to involve the audience with the characters' lives while allowing them to see how apparently small incidents can signify huge transformations or coalesce to bring about change. This is intensified by the often static, observational camerawork which avoids closes-ups, and the naturalistic sound.

The success of Je, tu, il, elle allowed Akerman to gain a grant to make her masterpiece. Over the three days of Jeanne Dielman's life, little seems to prepare us for the crisis at the end, yet in retrospect we can see how a dropped spoon or a spoiled meal are all parts of a jigsaw – a jigsaw in reverse as the pieces eventually shatter apart.

Dielman is a middle-aged widow keeping house and looking after her son, partially funding it by working as a prostitute. Unlike Belle de jour, Buñuel's 1967 surreal housewife/prostitute fantasy, the mundanity of Jeanne's life, as grippingly as Akerman presents it, gives no hint of the shocking climax. The long dénouement, in which Jeanne sits at the kitchen table doing absolutely nothing, relentlessly forces the audience to consider the horror they have just witnessed.

Several of Akerman's films are at least semi-autobiographical, particularly relating to her mother. On the soundtrack of News from Home (1977), Akerman reads letters her concerned mother sent to New York, using them to both tell the story and to undercut the conventions of cinema voice-over. Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978) is about a film-maker's relationship with her audience and her mother. Akerman even described Jeanne Dielman as a love-letter to her mother. Not all of her films focus on women: Moving In (1993) centres on a monologue from a man moving into a new apartment, clearly in part to escape painful previous relationships.

Alongside this serious work are lighter moments such as Les années 80 (“The Golden Eighties”, 1986) a Jacques Demy-like musical set in a Parisian shopping mall and starring Delphine Seyrig, who had played Jeanne Dielman. An even more unexpected turn is Un divan à New York (“A Couch in New York”, 1996) starring Juliette Binoche and William Hurt in a gender-inverting film that was promoted as a romantic comedy and dances on the edge of being commercial, though it was not a hit.

Her later work includes critically acclaimed adaptations of Proust's La Prisonnière (La captive, 2000) and Conrad's Aylmer's Folly (2011). Despite its title, her last film, No Home Movie (2015) is another contemplation of her relationship with her mother, who died two years ago.

Some of Akerman's films sit as well in galleries as in cinemas, and she mounted installations at the Pompidou Centre, museums in Antwerp and Tel Aviv, at MIT, Princeton and at festivals including the Venice Biennale and Documenta. Reports suggested that she had taken her own life.

Chantal Akerman: NOW, a major exhibition of her installation work, will open at Ambika P3, University of Westminster, on 29 October. NOW is curated by Ambika P3 (Michael Mazière) and A Nos Amours (Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts) and presented in association with Marian Goodman Gallery. The retrospective organised by A Nos Amours at the ICA will conclude with No Home Movie at Regent Street Cinema on 30 October.

Chantal Anne Akerman. film-maker: born Brussels 6 June 1950; died Paris 5 October 2015.