Chantal Akerman
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"News from Home (1976) and Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Meetings with Anna, 1978) exemplify Akerman's continual risk-taking anti-cinema."--Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman (2003) by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster |
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Chantal Anne Akerman (1950 – 2015) was a Belgian film director and artist best-known for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
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Early life and education
Akerman was born to an observant family of Polish Jews in Brussels, Belgium. Her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz; only her mother came back. This was a very important factor in her personal experience. Her mother's anxiety is a recurrent theme in her filmography. 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. At 18, she entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. During her first term, however, Akerman chose to leave and make Saute ma ville, a thirteen-minute black-and-white picture in 35mm. She partially subsidized Saute ma ville by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. That year, she moved to New York City, where she remained until 1972. Akerman was a leading figure in European experimental cinema and feminist film from the early seventies onwards.
Work
Early influences
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
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.
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 | Template:Ill | 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 |
See also