Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman in 2012
Born Chantal Anne Akerman
(1950-06-06)6 June 1950
Brussels, Belgium
Died 5 October 2015(2015-10-05) (aged 65)
Paris, France
Cause of death Suicide
Nationality Belgian
Occupation Artist, film director, professor, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer
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.[1] 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.[2]

Early life and education

Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium to Holocaust survivors from Poland.[3] Her mother Natalia (Nelly) had survived years at Auschwitz, where her own parents had died.[4] From a young age, Akerman and her mother were incredibly close, and she encouraged her daughter to pursue a career rather than marry young.[5] At age 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.[6]

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.[7] 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.[6] The film was named the 19th-greatest film of the 20th century by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice.[8]

Later career

In 1991, Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.[9] 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

Akerman avoided labels and refused to have her work featured in LGBT film festivals, saying she found them ghettoizing.[10] About her film Je Tu Il Elle, Akerman 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.[11] 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."[12]

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.[13] The 2015 Venice Biennale included an installation of interspersed parallel screens displaying the landscape-in-motion footage that would appear in "No Home Movie".

Death

Akerman died on 5 October 2015 in Paris. Le Monde reported that she committed suicide.[14] She was 65.[3][15][16] 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."[17] According to Akerman's sister, she had recently been hospitalized for depression, returning home to Paris 10 days before her death.[3]

Filmography

Year Title Length NotesEnglish
1968Saute ma ville13 minutes Blow up My Town
1971L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée35 minutes The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman
1972Hotel Monterey65 minutes
1972La Chambre 111 minutes The Room 1
1972La Chambre 211 minutes The Room 2
1973Le 15/842 minutes co-directed by Samy Szlingerbaum
1973Hanging Out Yonkers90 minutes unfinished
1975Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles201 minutes
1976News from Home85 minutes
1976I, You, He, She90 minutes
1978Les Rendez-vous d'Anna127 minutes Meetings with Anna
1980Dis-moi127 minutes Tell Me
1982Toute une nuit89 minutes All Night Long[18]
1983Les Années 8082 minutes The Eighties
1983Un jour Pina à demandé57 minutes One Day Pina Asked Me
1983L'homme à la valise60 minutes The Man With the Suitcase
1984J'ai faim, j'ai froid12 minutes segment for Paris vu par, 20 ans aprèsI'm Hungry, I'm Cold
1984New York, New York bis8 minutes lost
1984Lettre d'un cinéaste8 minutes Letter from a Filmmaker
1986Golden Eighties96 minutes Window Shopping
1986La paresse14 minutes segment for Seven Women, Seven SinsSloth
1986Le marteau4 minutes The Hammer
1986Letters Home104 minutes
1986Mallet-Stevens7 minutes
1989Histoires d'Amérique92 minutes Entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival[19]Food, Family, and Philosophy
1989Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert49 minutes Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas
1989Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher12 minutes Three Stanzas on the Name Sacher
1991Nuit et jour90 minutes Entered into the 48th Venice International Film FestivalNight and Day
1992Le déménagement42 minutes Moving In
1992Contre l'oubli110 minutes Akerman directed one short segmentAgainst Oblivion
1993D'Est107 minutes From the East
1993Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles60 minutes Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels
1996Un divan à New York108 minutes A Couch in New York
1997Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman64 minutes
1999Sud71 minutes South
2000La Captive118 minutes Collaboration with Eric de KuyperThe Captive
2002De l'autre côté103 minutes From the Other Side
2004Demain on déménage110 minutes Collaboration with Eric de KuyperTomorrow We Move
2006Là-bas78 minutes
2007Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï60 minutes segment for O Estado do Mundo
2011La Folie Almayer 127 minutes Almayer's Folly
2015No Home Movie 115 minutes

References

  1. ↑ "Chantal Akerman, Whose Films Examined Women's Inner Lives, Dies at 65". The New York Times.
  2. ↑ Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, ed. (2003). Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. SIU Press. p. 204. ISBN 978-0809325139.
  3. 1 2 3 Donadio, Rachel; Buckley, Clara (6 October 2015). "Chantal Akerman, Pioneering Belgian Filmmaker, Dies at 65". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  4. ↑ Romney, Jonathan. "Chantal Akerman obituary". the Guardian. Retrieved 2015-10-10.
  5. ↑ "Chantal Akerman: My family and other dark materials". www.thejc.com. Retrieved 2016-02-27.
  6. 1 2 Margulies, Ivone. "A Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 18 August 2009.
  7. ↑ Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's hyperrealist everyday. Durham: Duke University Press. p. 2. ISBN 0-8223-1723-0.
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ "Berlinale: 1991 Juries". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2011-03-21.
  10. ↑ Bendix, Trish (2015-10-06). "Lesbian filmmaker Chantal Akerman dies at 65". AfterEllen. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  11. ↑ Smith, Dinitia (1998-04-26). "FILM - Chantal Akerman And the Point Of Point of View". NYTimes.com. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  12. ↑ Murray, Raymond. Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video. Titan Books. p. 2. ISBN 9781840230338.
  13. ↑ Isabelle Regnier (6 October 2015). "La cinéaste Chantal Akerman est morte". Le Monde. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  14. ↑ Julien Gester (6 October 2015). "Mort de la cinéaste Chantal Akerman". Libération. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  15. ↑ Catherine Shoard (6 October 2015). "Chantal Akerman, pioneering Belgian film director and theorist, dies aged 65". Guardian. Retrieved 6 October 2015.
  16. ↑ Rapold, Nicolas (5 August 2015), Chantal Akerman Takes Emotional Path in Film About 'Maman', The New York Times, retrieved 24 November 2015
  17. ↑ "Paradise Films - Movies". Paradisefilms.be. 2014-01-30. Archived from the original on 2014-11-05. Retrieved 2016-02-21.
  18. ↑ "Berlinale: 1989 Programme". berlinale.de. Retrieved 2011-03-11.

Further reading

Media related to Chantal Akerman at Wikimedia Commons

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