Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman
200px Chantal Akerman in 2012
Born	Chantal Anne Akerman (1950-06-06)6 June 1950 Brussels, Belgium
Died	Paris, France
Nationality	Belgian
Occupation	Artist, film director, professor, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, film editor
Years active	1968–2015
Notable work	Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [akɛʁman]; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, artist and professor of film at the City College of New York. Her best-known film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). According to film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Akerman's influence on feminist filmmaking and avant-garde cinema has been substantial.

Early life and education

Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium to Holocaust survivors from Poland. Her mother Natalia (Nelly) had survived Auschwitz, where her own parents had died. At 18, Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. Akerman dropped out during her first term to make the film Saute ma ville, subsidizing the film's costs by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.

Work

Early work and influences

Akerman claimed that, at the age of 15, after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), she decided, that same night, to make movies. In 1971, Akerman's first film Saute ma ville premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival. That year, she moved to New York City, where she remained until 1972.

At Anthology Film Archives in New York, Akerman was impressed with the work of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer and Andy Warhol. She stated that Snow's La Région Centrale introduced her to the relations among film, time and energy.

Critical recognition

Her feature Hotel Monterey (1972) and shorts La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2 reveal the influence of structural filmmaking through these films' usage of long takes. These protracted shots serve to oscillate images between abstraction and figuration. Akerman's films from this period also signify the start of her collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, the director of photography on La chambre (1972), Hôtel Monterey (1972), Hanging Out Yonkers (1973), Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and News from Home (1977). In 1973, Akerman returned to Belgium and in 1974 received critical recognition for her feature I, You, He, She.

Akerman's most significant film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was released in 1975. Often considered one of the great feminist films, the film makes a hypnotic, real-time study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine of domestic chores and prostitution. Upon the film's release, The New York Times called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema". Chantal Akerman scholar Ivone Margulies says the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting feminism and anti-illusionism. The film was named the 19th-greatest film of the 20th century by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice.

Later career

In 1991, Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. In 2011, she joined the full-time faculty of the MFA Program in Media Arts Production at the City College of New York.

Identity aesthetics

Though Akerman was a lesbian filmmaker, she avoided labels and refused to have her work featured in LGBT film festivals, saying she found them ghettoizing. About her film Je Tu Il Elle, Ackerman said: I wrote a story that I liked. Everybody thought it was political. But it was a normal love story. It's not a feminist movie. I'm not saying it's a gay movie. If I did, then you go to it with preconceived notions. According to the book Images in the Dark by Raymond Murray, Akerman refused to have her work ghettoized and denied the New York Gay Film Festival the right to screen I, You, He, She. "I will never permit a film of mine to be shown in a gay film festival."

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 has 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.

Death

Akerman died on 5 October 2015 in Paris. Le Monde reported that she committed suicide. She was 65. 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." According to Akerman's sister, she had recently been hospitalized for depression, returning home to Paris 10 days before her death.

Filmography

Year	Title	Length	Notes	English
1968	Saute ma ville	13 minutes		Blow up My Town
1971	L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée	35 minutes		The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman
1972	Hotel Monterey	65 minutes
1972	La Chambre 1	11 minutes		The Room, 1
1972	La Chambre 2	11 minutes		The Room, 2
1973	Le 15/8	42 minutes	co-directed by Samy Szlingerbaum
1973	Hanging Out Yonkers	90 minutes	unfinished
1975	Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles	201 minutes
1976	News from Home	85 minutes
1976	I, You, He, She	90 minutes
1978	fr	127 minutes		Meetings with Anna
1980	Dis-moi	127 minutes		Tell Me
1982	Toute une nuit	89 minutes		All Night Long
1983	Les Années 80	82 minutes		The Eighties
1983	Un jour Pina à demandé	57 minutes		One Day Pina Asked Me
1983	L'homme à la valise	60 minutes		The Man With the Suitcase
1984	J'ai faim, j'ai froid	12 minutes	segment for Paris vu par, 20 ans après	I'm Hungry, I'm Cold
1984	New York, New York bis	8 minutes	lost
1984	Lettre d'un cinéaste	8 minutes		Letter from a Filmmaker
1986	Golden Eighties	96 minutes		Window Shopping
1986	La paresse	14 minutes	segment for Seven Women, Seven Sins	Sloth
1986	Le marteau	4 minutes		The Hammer
1986	Letters Home	104 minutes
1986	Mallet-Stevens	7 minutes
1989	Histoires d'Amérique	92 minutes	Entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival	Food, Family, and Philosophy
1989	Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert	49 minutes		Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas
1989	Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher	12 minutes		Three Stanzas on the Name Sacher
1991	Nuit et jour	90 minutes		Night and Day
1992	Le déménagement	42 minutes		Moving In
1992	Contre l'oubli	110 minutes	Akerman directed one short segment	Against Oblivion
1993	D'Est	107 minutes		From the East
1993	Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles	60 minutes		Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels
1996	Un divan à New York	108 minutes		A Couch in New York
1997	Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman	64 minutes
1999	Sud	71 minutes		South
2000	La Captive	118 minutes	Collaboration with Eric de Kuyper	The Captive
2002	De l'autre côté	103 minutes		From the Other Side
2004	Demain on déménage	110 minutes	Collaboration with Eric de Kuyper	Tomorrow We Move
2006	Là-bas	78 minutes
2007	Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï	60 minutes	segment for O Estado do Mundo
2011	La Folie Almayer	127 minutes		Almayer's Folly
2015	No Home Movie	115 minutes

Further reading

• 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.

External links

• http://www.paradisefilms.be
• Chantal Akerman at the Internet Movie Database
• Artist's page in Artfacts.Net with actual major exhibitions.
• Screens of Film, Video, Memory, and Smoke by Ana Balona de Oliveira in Fillip