On its face, Criterion’s Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978 is an essential set for offering key early works, some more obscure than others, from the career of one of the great film artists. But the pleasures here run deeper. Akerman used each of her initial films as a springboard to the next, and watching them in chronological order sees her consolidating and complicating her aesthetic and thematic preoccupations with each successive project.

Consider Akerman’s first film, 1968’s Saute ma ville. Akerman made this 13-minute short at the age of 18, and its debt to the antic energy and seriocomic political inclinations of the French New Wave makes it an outlier in a body of work fixated on structuralism and more meditative atmospheres. Yet in the film’s depiction of a young woman (Akerman herself) trashing her apartment emerges an outlandish expression of what will become a more somberly explored theme in upcoming shorts,...