Chantal Akerman

Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [ʃɑ̃tal akɛʁman]; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York.[1]

Chantal Akerman
Akerman in 2012
Born
Chantal Anne Akerman

(1950-06-06)6 June 1950
Brussels, Belgium
Died5 October 2015(2015-10-05) (aged 65)
Paris, France
Burial placePère Lachaise Cemetery
Occupation(s)Film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor
Years active1968–2015
Notable workJeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Je Tu Il Elle, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, News from Home

She is best known for her films Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News from Home (1977), and Je Tu Il Elle (1974); the first of these was ranked the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 "Greatest Films of All Time" critics poll, making her the first woman to top the poll. The latter two films also rank lower in the same poll.[2][3][4][5][6]

According to multiple critics and film scholars, Akerman's influence on feminist and avant-garde cinema is substantial,[7][8][9][10] with at least one scholar calling her "one of the most significant directors of our times."[11][12][13][14][15][16]

Early life and education

Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland.[1] She was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling. Her mother, Natalia (Nelly), survived for years at Auschwitz, where her own parents were murdered.[17] From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and her mother encouraged her to pursue a career rather than marry young.[18]

At age 18, Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville,[19] funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.[20]

Work

Early work and influences

At the age of 15, Akerman's viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) inspired her to become a filmmaker. Akerman's first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1971.[21] That year, she moved to New York City, where she would stay until 1972. She considered her time there to be a formative experience, becoming exposed to the works of Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Michael Snow, with the latter's film La région centrale leading to her view of "time as the most important thing in film." Also during this period, she would begin her long collaboration with cinematographer Babette Magnolte.[20]

Her first feature film, the documentary Hotel Monterey (1972), along with the short films La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2, use long takes and structuralist techniques that would become trademarks of her style.[20]

Critical recognition

Akerman then returned to Belgium, and in 1974 received critical recognition for her first fiction feature Je, Tu, Il, Elle (I, You, He, She), notable for its depiction of women's sexuality, a theme which would appear again in several of her films.[20] Feminist and queer film scholar B. Ruby Rich believed that Je Tu Il Elle can be seen as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality".[22]

Akerman's most critically-acclaimed film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was released in 1975, and presents a largely real-time study of a middle-aged widow's routine of domestic chores and prostitution.[20] Upon the film's release, Le Monde called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema".[11] Scholar Ivone Margulies says the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting feminism and anti-illusionism.[20] The film was named the 19th greatest film of the 20th century by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice.[23] In December 2022, Jeanne Dielman was awarded first place by Sight & Sound magazine's "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time" list, as voted by critics, becoming the fourth film to do so after Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles thus became the first film directed by a woman to top the list and, together with Beau Travail, one of the first two such films to appear in the top 10.[3][4][5][6][24][25]

Feminism

Akerman has used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity. The kitchens in her work provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation, functioning as a backdrop to the dramas of daily life. The kitchens, alongside other domestic spaces, act as self-confining prisons under patriarchal conditions.[26] In Akerman's work, the kitchen often acts as a domestic theatre.[27]

Akerman is usually grouped within feminist and queer thinking, but she articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism.[28][29] Akerman resisted labels relating to her identity like "female", "Jewish" and "lesbian", choosing instead to immerse herself in the identity of being a daughter; she said she saw film as a "generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity".[30] She advocated for multiplicity of expression, explaining, "when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves".[28] For Akerman, there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals.[30]

Marguiles argues that Akerman's resistance to categorization is in response to the rigidity of cinema's earlier essentialist realism and "indicates an awareness of the project of a transhistorical and transcultural feminist aesthetics of the cinema".[28]

Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public.[28] In Jeanne Dielman, the protagonist does not supply a transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality.[28] Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances.[28]

Akerman engages with realist representations, a form historically grounded to act as a feminist gesture and simultaneously as an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman".[28]

Later career

Akerman's later films experimented with differing genres and tempos, including the comedy Golden Eighties (1986), and several documentaries.[20] Her final film, No Home Movie, was released in 2015.[1]

In 1991, Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.[31] In 2011, she joined the full-time faculty of the MFA Program in Media Arts Production at the City College of New York as a distinguished lecturer and the first Michael & Irene Ross Visiting Professor of Film/Video & Jewish Studies.[32] Akerman was also Professor of Film at The European Graduate School.[33]

Exhibitions

Important solo exhibitions of Akerman's work have been held at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium (2012), MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts (2008), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2006); Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ (2006); and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003). Akerman participated in Documenta XI (2002) and the Venice Biennale (2001).

In 2011, a film retrospective of Akerman's work was shown at the Austrian Film Museum.[34]

The 2015 Venice Biennale included her final video installation, Now, an installation of interspersed parallel screens displaying the landscape-in-motion footage that would appear in No Home Movie.[35] In 2018, the Manhattan Jewish Museum presented the installation in the exhibition Scenes from the Collection, and acquired her work for the collection.[36] Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featured From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l'installation (2007) in early 2022.[37]

Style

Akerman's filming style relies on capturing ordinary life. By encouraging viewers to have patience with a slow pace, her films emphasize the humanity of the everyday.[38] Art curator Kathy Halbreich writes that Akerman "creates a cinema of waiting, of passages, of resolutions deferred".[39]

Many of Akerman's films portray the movement of people across distances or their absorption with claustrophobic spaces.[30] Curator Jon Davies writes that her domestic interiors "conceal gendered labour and violence, secrecy and shame, where traumas both large and small unfold with few if any witnesses".[30] Akerman addresses the voyeurism that is always present within cinematic discourse by often playing a character within her films, placing herself on both sides of the camera simultaneously.[30] She used the boredom of structuralism to generate a bodily feeling in the viewer, accentuating the passage of time.[30]

Akerman was influenced by European art cinema as well as structuralist film.[30] Structuralist film used formalist experimentation to propose a reciprocal relationship between image and viewer.[30] Akerman cites Michael Snow as a structuralist inspiration, especially his film Wavelength, which is composed of a single shot of a photograph of a sea on a loft wall, with the camera slowly zooming in.[30] Akerman was drawn to the perceived dullness of structuralism because it rejected the dominant cinema's concern for plot.[30] As a teenager in Brussels, Akerman skipped school to see movies, including films from the experimental festival in Knokke-le-Zoute.[30]

Art historian Terrie Sultan writes that Akerman's "narrative is marked by an almost Proustian attention to detail and visual grace".[40] Similarly, Akerman's visual language resists easy categorization and summarization: she creates narrative through filmic syntax instead of plot development.[38]

Many directors have cited Akerman's directorial style as an influence on their work.[26] Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as a tribute to Akerman.[26]

Family

Akerman had an extremely close relationship with her mother, which was captured in several of her films. In News from Home (1976), Akerman's mother's letters outlining mundane family activities play throughout the film.[41] Her 2015 film No Home Movie centers on mother-daughter relationships, is largely situated in her mother's kitchen, and was filmed in the final months before her mother's death in 2014.[30] The film explores issues of metempsychosis,[30] the last shot of the film acting as a memento mori of the mother's apartment.[41]

Akerman acknowledged that her mother was at the center of her work and admitted to feeling directionless after her death. The maternal imagery can be found throughout all of Akerman's films as an homage and an attempt to reconstitute the image and voice of the mother. In her autobiographical book Family in Brussels, Akerman narrates the story, interchanging her own voice with her mother's.[41]

Death

65-year-old Akerman died on 5 October 2015 in Paris; Le Monde reported that she died by suicide. Her last film was the documentary No Home Movie, a series of conversations with her mother shortly before her mother's death; of the film, she said: "I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn't have dared to do it."[42]

According to Akerman's sister, she had been hospitalized for depression and then returned home to Paris ten days before her death.[1]

Filmography

Feature films
YearTitle RoleNotes
1974Je tu il elle

(I, You, He, She)
1975Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Director[43][44]
1978Les rendez-vous d'Anna

(Meetings with Anna)
1982Toute une nuit

(All Night Long)

 [45]
1986Golden Eighties
1986Letters Home Telefilm
1989Histoires d'Amérique

(American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy)

 Entered into the

39th Berlin International Film Festival[46]

1991Nuit et jour (Night and Day) Entered into the

48th Venice International Film Festival

1996Un divan à New York

(A Couch in New York)
2000La captive (The Captive)
2004Demain on déménage

(Tomorrow We Move)
2011La folie Almayer

(Almayer's Folly)

 Director[47]

Short films
YearTitle RoleNotes
1968Saute ma Ville

(Blow Up My Town)
1971L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée

(The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman)
1972La Chambre 1

(The Room 1)

 Also editor
1972La Chambre 2

(The Room 2)

 Also editor
1973Le 15/8 Co-directed by Samy Szlingerbaum
Akerman was also joint cinematographer and film editor
1983L'homme à la valise

(The Man With the Suitcase)

 Episode of Télévision de chambre
1984J'ai faim, j'ai froid

(I'm Hungry, I'm Cold)

 Segment of Paris vu par, 20 ans après
1984New York, New York bis Lost film
1986La paresse

(Sloth)

 Segment of Seven Women, Seven Sins
1986Le marteau

(The Hammer)
1986Mallet-Stevens
1992Le déménagement

(Moving In)
1992Pour Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador

(For Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador)

 Segment of Contre l'oubli (Lest We Forget)
1994Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 á Bruxelles

(Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels)

 Episode of Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge...

(All the Boys and Girls of their Time...)

2007Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï Segment of O Estado do Mundo

Documentaries
YearTitle RoleNotes
1972Hotel Monterey
1973Hanging Out Yonkers unfinished
1977News from Home
1980Dis-moi (Tell Me)
1983Les Années 80

(The Eighties)
1983Un jour Pina à demandé

(One Day Pina Asked Me / On Tour with Pina Bausch)
1984Lettre d'un cinéaste

(Letter from a Filmmaker)
1989Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert

(Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas)
1989Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher (Three Stanzas on the Name Sacher)
1993D'Est (From the East)
1997Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman
1999Sud (South)
2002De l'autre côté (From the Other Side) Director, Cinematographer[48]
2003Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton
2006Là-bas (Down There) Director, Cinematographer
2009À l'Est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton
2015No Home Movie Director, Cinematographer[49][50]

See also

References
  1. Donadio, Rachel; Buckley, Clara (6 October 2015). "Chantal Akerman, Pioneering Belgian Filmmaker, Dies at 65". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  2. "The Greatest Films of All Time". BFI. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  3. Ugwu, Reggie (1 December 2022). "Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne Dielman' Named Greatest Film of All Time in Sight and Sound Poll". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2 December 2022.
  4. "Brilliant and radical, Chantal Akerman deserves to top Sight and Sound's greatest films poll". the Guardian. 1 December 2022. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  5. "Chantal Akerman first woman to top Sight and Sound's greatest all-time films poll". the Guardian. 1 December 2022. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  6. Ritman, Alex (1 December 2022). "Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne Dielman' Becomes First Female-Directed Film to Top BFI-Backed Critics' Poll of Greatest Films of All Time". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  7. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, ed. (2003). Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. SIU Press. p. 204. ISBN 978-0809325139.
  8. Donadio, Rachel (25 March 2016). "The Director's Director: Chantal Akerman". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  9. "Chantal Akerman: a director with a rare creative vision". the Guardian. 6 October 2015. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  10. "Chantal Akerman: extraordinary artist of the everyday who we will miss for ever". the Guardian. 8 October 2015. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  11. Atkinson, Nathalie. "How Chantal Akerman's modernist masterpiece changed cinema". www.bbc.com. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  12. Schmid, Marion; Wilson, Emma (2019). Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Legenda/Modern Humanities Research Association. ISBN 978-1-78188-639-7.
  13. Hoberman, J. (6 October 2015). "Chantal Akerman, Resolutely Upending the Ordinary". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  14. Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-1723-4.
  15. White, Patricia (10 May 2019). On Chantal Akerman. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-4780-0491-2.
  16. Liptay, Fabienne; Tröhler, Margrit (2017). Chantal Akerman (in German). ET+K, Edition Text + Kritik. ISBN 978-3-86916-589-9.
  17. Romney, Jonathan (8 October 2015). "Chantal Akerman obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
  18. "Chantal Akerman: My family and other dark materials". www.thejc.com. Archived from the original on 3 February 2016. Retrieved 27 February 2016.
  19. Great Women Artists. Phaidon Press. 2019. p. 27. ISBN 978-0714878775.
  20. Margulies, Ivone. "A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 18 August 2009.
  21. Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's hyperrealist everyday. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 2. ISBN 0-8223-1723-0.
  22. "The Museum of Fine Arts Boston presents The Films of Chantal Akerman: Je Tu Il Elle (1974, 90min.) | MIT List Visual Arts Center". listart.mit.edu. 13 January 2022. Retrieved 20 May 2023.
  23. Hoberman, J. (2001) [4 January 2000]. "100 Best Films of the 20th Century: Village Voice Critics' Poll". The Village Voice (reprint ed.). Reprinted by AMC.
  24. "Chantal Akerman first woman to top Sight and Sound's greatest all-time films poll". the Guardian. 1 December 2022. Retrieved 2 December 2022.
  25. December 01, Christian Holub; EST, 2022 at 08:00 PM. "'Jeanne Dielman' surpasses 'Citizen Kane,' 'Vertigo' as critics' choice for best movie ever". EW.com. Retrieved 2 December 2022.
  26. Donadio, Rachel (25 March 2016). "The Director's Director: Chantal Akerman". The New York Times.
  27. Akerman, Chantal; Sultan, Terrie (2008). Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space. Bluffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston: Distributed Art Publishers. p. 7.
  28. Marguilles, Ivonne (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 32. ISBN 9780822317265.
  29. Forde, John (2006). "Chantal Akerman". In Gerstner, David A. (ed.). Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (1 ed.). Routledge. p. 35. ISBN 9780415306515. Retrieved 5 July 2022.
  30. Davies, Jon (2016). "Every Home A Heartache: Chantal Akerman". C: International Contemporary Art (130).
  31. "Berlinale: 1991 Juries". berlinale.de. Retrieved 21 March 2011.
  32. "Chantal Akerman feature is tapped for New York Film Festival | The City College of New York". www.ccny.cuny.edu. 18 September 2015.
  33. https://egs.edu/biography/chantal-akerman/ Chantal Akerman Professor of Film at The European Graduate School / EGS.
  34. Searle, Adrian (4 November 2015). "The last picture show: how Chantal Akerman's suicide alters her final artwork". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 March 2021.
  35. "Scenes from the Collection". The Jewish Museum. Retrieved 11 March 2018.
  36. "Chantal Akerman: From the Other Side". Marian Goodman Gallery. Retrieved 11 August 2022.
  37. Akerman, Chantal; David, Catherine; Michael, Tarantino (1995). Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est. Minneapolis, Walker Art Center: New York: Distributed Art Publishers. p. 54.
  38. Akerman, Chantal; David, Catherine; Michael, Tarantino (1995). Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est. Minneapolis, Walker Art Center: New York: Distribured Art Publishers. p. 26.
  39. Akerman, Chantal; Sultan, Terrie (2008). Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space. Bluffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston: Distributed Art Publishers. p. 26.
  40. Lebow, Alisa (2016). "Identity Slips: The Autobiographical Register in the Work of Chantal Akerman" (PDF). Film Quarterly. 1 (70): 54–60. doi:10.1525/fq.2016.70.1.54.
  41. Rapold, Nicolas (5 August 2015), "Chantal Akerman Takes Emotional Path in Film About 'Maman'", The New York Times, retrieved 24 November 2015
  42. "The Revelatory Tedium of the New "Greatest Film of All Time"". The New Yorker. 5 December 2022. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  43. "Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles". The New Yorker. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  44. "Paradise Films - Movies". Paradisefilms.be. 30 January 2014. Archived from the original on 5 November 2014. Retrieved 21 February 2016.
  45. "Berlinale: 1989 Programme". berlinale.de. Retrieved 11 March 2011.
  46. Rapold, Nicolas (9 August 2012). "Trapped in a Jungle and a State of Mind". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  47. Kehr, Dave (20 February 2003). "FILM REVIEW; Inching Toward America, So Near but So Far". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  48. Linden, Sheri (22 April 2016). "Review: Documentaries 'No Home Movie' and 'I Don't Belong Anywhere' provide moving portraits of the late filmmaker Chantal Akerman". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 10 January 2023.
  49. Debruge, Peter (10 August 2015). "Film Review: 'No Home Movie'". Variety. Retrieved 10 January 2023.

Further reading
  • Gatti, Ilaria Chantal Akerman. Uno schermo nel deserto Roma, Fefè Editore, 2019.
  • Sultan, Terrie (ed.) Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space. Houston, Tex.: Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston ; New York, N.Y.: Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008.
  • Fabienne Liptay, Margrit Tröhler (ed.): Chantal Akerman. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2017.
  • White, Jerry (2005). "Chantal Akerman's Revisionist Aesthetic". In Jean Petrolle & Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.). Women & Experimental Filmmaking. Urbana: University of Illinois. ISBN 0252030060.
  • Smith, Dinitia (26 April 1998). "Chantal Akerman and the Point of Point of View". The New York Times.
  • Searle, Adrian (15 July 2008). "Smoke and mirror-images". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 14 May 2015.
  • Gandert, Sean (28 August 2009). "Salute Your Shorts: Chantal Akerman's Saute ma ville". Paste. Retrieved 14 May 2015.
  • Schenker, Andrew (15 January 2010). "Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies". Slant Magazine. Retrieved 23 August 2010.
  • McGill, Hannah (4 November 2012). "Leading the Way for the Flair Ladies". The Sunday Herald. Washington, D.C. Archived from the original on 9 April 2016. Retrieved 14 May 2015.
  • Holly Rogers and Jeremy Barham (ed.): The Music and Sound of Experimental Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
  • Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond (ed.): Chantal Akerman: Passages. Amsterdam: Eye Filmmuseum, 2020.

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