In Blow Up My Town (1968), the young Chantal Akerman upsets domestic life and skilfully disrupts it. As she is the only actor in this debut short, we see her rushing up a staircase, entering a tiny kitchen and, by quick, nervous gestures, simultaneously humming and moaning, endeavouring with great tenacity to dismember daily life, to destroy it, to break it down and, ultimately, to make it explode. This is not hysterical violence, but rather a manifestation of feverish obsessions about daily life, a pathological goofiness. The kitchen in Blow Up My Town becomes a sort of laboratory, where destructive impulses proliferate, thus emphasising the intolerable situation, the hermetically sealed anonymity in which endlessly repeated chores ensnare individuals. The film brings to mind the words of Maurice Blanchot:

Blow Up My Town stages what could be called reversed domesticity; the point is to overthrow the established order, to get rid of the tasks imposed by daily life and thus to throw everything into chaos. Through gentle madness and charming unsteadiness, the I rebels against space, against objects, against anything that implies and symbolises domestic repetition. This urge to put an end to domestic seclusion borrows from comedic aesthetics and philosophy: that is, according to Petr Kràl, that the only interesting world is ‘a world that doesn’t quite work right, a world where things and people refuse to do their jobs, where they destroy one another, where they rebel, where they go on strike’. By reversing the order of things, by destroying household items and kitchen utensils, Chantal Akerman emphasises the alienating, devitalising dimension of daily existence. Just like a comic hero shows ‘his inability to adapt’, the filmmaker/actor uses concrete acts to destroy the unbearably material burdens of daily life.

As Bruce Bégout points out, everyday life is about ‘the regular flow of things. It is what happens usually, it is that which poses no problem at all and for this reason is accepted without question.’ Yet, because the screenplay of Blow Up My Town does not bother with psychological dross, it reverses this proposition.