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Chantal Akerman

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Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox person Chantal Anne Akerman ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 6 June 1950Template:Spaced ndash5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York.<ref name="nytobit">Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Akerman is best known for her films {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (1974), {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (1975), and News from Home (1976). The second 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 other two films also appeared in the same poll.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=":0">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=":1">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=":2">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=":3">Template:Cite news</ref>

Early life and educationEdit

Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland.<ref name=nytobit /> 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and her mother encouraged her to pursue a career rather than marry young.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

At age 18, Akerman entered the {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film {{#invoke:Lang|lang}},<ref name="Phaidon Editors">Template:Cite book</ref> funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.<ref name=criterion>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

WorkEdit

Early work and influencesEdit

At age 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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 Mangolte.<ref name="criterion" />

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.<ref name="criterion" />

Critical recognitionEdit

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.<ref name="criterion" /> 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".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref name="criterion" /> Upon the film's release, Le Monde called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema".<ref name=":4">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Scholar Ivonne Margulies says the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting feminism and anti-illusionism.<ref name="criterion" /> The film was named the 19th greatest film of the 20th century by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice.<ref>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.</ref> 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.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" /><ref name=":2" /><ref name=":3" /><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

FeminismEdit

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.<ref name="New York Times">Template:Cite news</ref> In Akerman's work, the kitchen often acts as a domestic theatre.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Akerman is usually grouped within feminist and queer thinking, but she articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism.<ref name="Duke University Press">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> 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".<ref name="ReferenceB">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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".<ref name="Duke University Press" /> For Akerman, there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals.<ref name="ReferenceB" />

Margulies 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".<ref name="Duke University Press" />

Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public.<ref name="Duke University Press" /> In Jeanne Dielman, the protagonist does not supply a transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality.<ref name="Duke University Press" /> Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances.<ref name="Duke University Press" />

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".<ref name="Duke University Press" />

Later careerEdit

Akerman's later films experimented with differing genres and tempos, including the comedy Golden Eighties (1986), and several documentaries.<ref name="criterion" /> Her final film, No Home Movie, was released in 2015.<ref name="nytobit" />

In 1991, Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Akerman was also Professor of Film at The European Graduate School.<ref>https://egs.edu/biography/chantal-akerman/ Chantal Akerman Professor of Film at The European Graduate School / EGS.</ref>

ExhibitionsEdit

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.<ref name="gallery">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In 2018, the Manhattan Jewish Museum presented the installation in the exhibition Scenes from the Collection, and acquired her work for the collection.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featured From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l'installation (2007) in early 2022.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

StyleEdit

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.<ref name="ReferenceC" /> Art curator Kathy Halbreich writes that Akerman "creates a cinema of waiting, of passages, of resolutions deferred".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Many of Akerman's films portray the movement of people across distances or their absorption with claustrophobic spaces.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> 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".<ref name="ReferenceB" /> 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.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> She used the boredom of structuralism to generate a bodily feeling in the viewer, accentuating the passage of time.<ref name="ReferenceB" />

Akerman was influenced by European art cinema as well as structuralist film.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> Structuralist film used formalist experimentation to propose a reciprocal relationship between image and viewer.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> 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.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> Akerman was drawn to the perceived dullness of structuralism because it rejected the dominant cinema's concern for plot.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> As a teenager in Brussels, Akerman skipped school to see movies, including films from the Template:Ill.<ref name="ReferenceB" />

Art historian Terrie Sultan writes that Akerman's "narrative is marked by an almost Proustian attention to detail and visual grace".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Similarly, Akerman's visual language resists easy categorization and summarization: she creates narrative through filmic syntax instead of plot development.<ref name="ReferenceC">Template:Cite book</ref>

Many directors have cited Akerman's directorial style as an influence on their work.<ref name="New York Times" /> Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as a tribute to Akerman.<ref name="New York Times" />

FamilyEdit

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.<ref name="ReferenceA">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref name="ReferenceB" /> The film explores issues of metempsychosis,<ref name="ReferenceB" /> the last shot of the film acting as a memento mori of the mother's apartment.<ref name="ReferenceA" />

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.<ref name="ReferenceA" />

DeathEdit

Akerman died by suicide on 5 October 2015 in Paris, at the age of 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."<ref name="NYT">Template:Citation</ref>

According to Akerman's sister, she had been hospitalized for depression and then returned home to Paris ten days before her death.<ref name=nytobit />

FilmographyEdit

Feature filmsEdit

Year Title Role Notes
1974 Je tu il elle

(I, You, He, She)

1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Director <ref name="newyorker.com">Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>
1978 Les rendez-vous d'Anna

(Meetings with Anna)

1982 Toute une nuit

(All Night Long)

citation CitationClass=web

}}</ref>

1986 Golden Eighties
1986 Letters Home Telefilm
1989 Histoires d'Amérique

(American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy)

Entered into the

39th Berlin International Film Festival<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

CitationClass=web

}}</ref>

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

48th Venice International Film Festival

1996 Un divan à New York

(A Couch in New York)

2000 La captive (The Captive)
2004 Demain on déménage

(Tomorrow We Move)

2011 La folie Almayer

(Almayer's Folly)

Director <ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Short filmsEdit

Year Title Role Notes
1968 Saute ma Ville

(Blow Up My Town)

1971 L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée

(The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman)

1972 La Chambre 1

(The Room 1)

Also editor
1972 La Chambre 2

(The Room 2)

Also editor
1973 Le 15/8 Co-directed by Samy Szlingerbaum
Akerman was also joint cinematographer and film editor
1982 Hôtel des Acacias citation CitationClass=web

}}</ref>

1983 L'homme à la valise

(The Man With the Suitcase)

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

(I'm Hungry, I'm Cold)

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

(Sloth)

Segment of Seven Women, Seven Sins
1986 Le marteau

(The Hammer)

1986 Mallet-Stevens
1992 Le déménagement

(Moving In)

1992 Pour Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador

(For Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador)

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

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

DocumentariesEdit

Year Title Role Notes
1972 Hotel Monterey
1973 Hanging Out Yonkers unfinished
1976 News from Home
1980 Dis-moi (Tell Me)
1983 Les Années 80

(The Eighties)

1983 Un jour Pina à demandé

(One Day Pina Asked Me / On Tour with Pina Bausch)

1984 Lettre d'un cinéaste

(Letter from a Filmmaker)

1989 Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert

(Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas)

1989 Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher (Three Stanzas on the Name Sacher)
1993 D'Est (From the East)
1997 Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman
1999 Sud (South)
2002 De l'autre côté (From the Other Side) Director, Cinematographer <ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
2003 Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton
2006 Là-bas (Down There) Director, Cinematographer
2009 À l'Est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton
2015 No Home Movie Director, Cinematographer citation CitationClass=web

}}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

CitationClass=web

}}</ref>

See alsoEdit

ReferencesEdit

Template:Reflist

Further readingEdit

  • 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.
  • Template:Cite book
  • Template:Cite news
  • Template:Cite news
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  • Template:Cite magazine
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  • 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.

External linksEdit

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