Chantal Akerman

Chantal Anne Akerman (; 6 June 19505 October 2015) was a Belgian filmmaker, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York (2011–2015).

Akerman is best known for her films (1974), (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.

Early life and education Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Polish-Jewish parents and émigres, both were Holocaust survivors from Nazi Germany. From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and her mother encouraged her to pursue a career rather than marry young.

At age 18, Akerman entered the , a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film , funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.

Work

Early work and influences 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. 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.

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. Scholar Ivonne Margulies says the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting feminism and anti-illusionism. 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.

Feminism

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. In Akerman's work, the kitchen often acts as a domestic theatre.

Akerman is usually grouped within feminist and queer thinking, but she articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism. 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". 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". It was published in English, translated by Daniella Shreir, in 2019. Her final film, No Home Movie, was released in 2015. 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. Akerman was also Professor of Film at The European Graduate School.

Exhibitions 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.

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. In 2018, the Manhattan Jewish Museum presented the installation in the exhibition Scenes from the Collection, and acquired her work for the collection. Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featured From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l'installation (2007) in early 2022.

Style 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.

Many of Akerman's films portray the movement of people across distances or their absorption with claustrophobic spaces. Similarly, Akerman's visual language resists easy categorization and summarization: she creates narrative through filmic syntax instead of plot development.

Many directors have cited Akerman's directorial style as an influence on their work.

Family

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. 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.

According to Akerman's sister, she had been hospitalized for depression and then returned home to Paris ten days before her death.

Meetings with Anna

All Night Long

Telefilm

American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy

39th Berlin International Film Festival

Night and Day

48th Venice International Film Festival

A Couch in New York

The Captive

Tomorrow We Move

Almayer's Folly

Short films (Blow Up My Town) 1971L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée (The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman) 1972La Chambre 1 (Moving In) 1992Pour Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador (For Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador) Segment of Contre l'oubli (Lest We Forget)1994Portrait 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...)2007Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï Segment of O Estado do Mundo

Documentaries (The Eighties) 1983Un jour Pina à demandé (One Day Pina Asked Me / On Tour with Pina Bausch) 1984Lettre d'un cinéaste (Letter from a Filmmaker) 1989Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert