Nationality Belgian Name Chantal Akerman Parents Natalia Akerman | Years active 1968–2015 Role Film director Period Contemporary art | |
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Full Name Chantal Anne Akerman Books Chantal Akerman, Family in Brussels, Un divan a New York Movies Jeanne Dielman - 23 quai d, No Home Movie, I - You - He - She, News from Home, Blow Up My Town Similar People Delphine Seyrig, Aurore Clement, Sylvie Testud, Jean‑Luc Godard, Stanislas Merhar | ||
I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman Official Trailer 1 (2016) - Documentary HD
Chantal Anne Akerman ([akeʁman]; 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.
Contents
- I Dont Belong Anywhere The Cinema of Chantal Akerman Official Trailer 1 2016 Documentary HD
- Chantal akerman catherine breillat film theory 2001 1 7
- Early life and education
- Early work and influences
- Critical recognition
- Later career
- Identity aesthetics
- Exhibitions
- Death
- References
Chantal akerman catherine breillat film theory 2001 1 7
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 Superieur 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.
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 Region 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), Hotel 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.