Chantal Anne Akerman (; 6 June 19505 October 2015) was a Belgian

film director A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the film crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, pr ...

screenwriter A screenplay writer (also called screenwriter, scriptwriter, scribe or scenarist) is a writer who practices the craft of screenwriting, writing screenplays on which mass media, such as films, television programs and video games, are based. ...

, artist, and film professor at the

City College of New York The City College of the City University of New York (also known as the City College of New York, or simply City College or CCNY) is a public university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, Cit ...

. She is best known for films such as ''

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ''Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'' (, "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels") is a 1975 drama film written and directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It was filmed over five weeks on location in Brussels, ...

'' (1975), '' News from Home'' (1977), and ''

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna ''Les Rendez-vous d'Anna'' (known in English as ''The Meetings of Anna'' and ''Meetings with Anna'') is a 1978 drama film written and directed by Chantal Akerman. Plot Anne Silver, a Belgian filmmaker, is travelling through West Germany, Belgiu ...

'' (1978); the former was ranked the greatest film of all time in '' Sight & Sound'' magazine's 2022 "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time" critics poll. According to film scholar

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. York College of ...

, Akerman's influence on feminist and

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretica ...

cinema is substantial.

Early life and education

Akerman was born in

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

, Belgium, to

Holocaust survivors Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no universally acce ...

from Poland. She was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling. Her mother, Natalia (Nelly), survived years at Auschwitz, where her own parents were murdered. From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and she encouraged her daughter to pursue a career rather than marry young. At age 18, Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film ''Saute ma ville'', funding it by trading diamond shares on the

Antwerp Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504,

stock exchange.

Family

Akerman had an extremely close relationship with her mother, captured in some of her films. In '' News from Home'' (1976), Akerman's mother's letters outlining mundane family activities serve as a soundtrack throughout. Her 2015 film '' No Home Movie'' centers on mother-daughter relationships, largely situated in the kitchen, and is a response to her mother's death in 2014. The film explores issues of metempsychosis, the last shot of the film acting as a memento mori of the mother's apartment. 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 ''Family in Brussels'', Akerman narrates the story, interchanging her own voice with her mother's.

Work

Early work and influences

Akerman said that, at the age of 15, after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's '' Pierrot le fou'' (1965), she decided, that same night, to become a filmmaker. In 1971, Akerman's first short film, ''Saute ma ville'', premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. That year, she moved to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, where she remained until 1972. At

Anthology Film Archives Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

Critical recognition

Her first feature film, ''Hotel Monterey'' (1972), and subsequent short films ''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 Babette Mangolte is a French cinematographer, film director, and photographer who has lived and worked in the United States since 1970. Life and career Mangolte was born and raised in France and moved to New York City in 1970. She attended L'Eco ...

. In 1973 Akerman returned to Belgium, and in 1974 she received critical recognition for her feature ''

Je, Tu, Il, Elle ''Je Tu Il Elle'' (; en, "I You He She") is a 1974 French-Belgian film by the Belgian film director Chantal Akerman. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Teddy Awards, the film was selected to be shown at the 66th Berlin International Film F ...

(I, You, He, She)''. Feminist and queer film scholar

B. Ruby Rich B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar; critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films; and a professor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz. Among her many contributions, she is ...

noted that ''Je Tu Il Elle'' can be seen as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of

female sexuality Human female sexuality encompasses a broad range of behaviors and processes, including female sexual identity and Human sexual activity, sexual behavior, the physiological, psychological, social, cultural, political, and spiritual or religious ...

". Akerman's most significant film, ''

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ''Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles'' (, "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels") is a 1975 drama film written and directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It was filmed over five weeks on location in Brussels, ...

'', was released in 1975. Often considered one of the greatest examples of

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...

filmmaking, 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 ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' called ''Jeanne Dielman'' the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema". 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''. More recently, December 2022 saw the film awarded first place by '' Sight & Sound'' magazine's "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time" list, as voted for by critics, becoming the fourth film to do so after '' Bicycle Thieves'', ''

Citizen Kane ''Citizen Kane'' is a 1941 American drama film produced by, directed by, and starring Orson Welles. He also co-wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz. The picture was Welles' first feature film. ''Citizen Kane'' is frequently cited ...

'', and '' Vertigo''. ''

'' thus became the first film directed by a woman to top the list and, together with ''

Beau Travail ''Beau Travail'' (, French for "good work") is a 1999 French film directed by Claire Denis that is loosely based on Herman Melville's 1888 novella ''Billy Budd''. The story is set in Djibouti, where the protagonists are soldiers in the French Fore ...

'', one of the first two such films to appear in the top 10.

Philosophy

Akerman has acknowledged that her cinematic approach can be explained, in part, through the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari write about the concept of minor literature as being characterized by the following things: #Minor literature is the literature that a minority makes in a major language; the language is affected by a strong coefficient of

deterritorialization In critical theory, deterritorialization is the process by which a social relation, called a ''territory'', has its current organization and context altered, mutated or destroyed. The components then constitute a new territory, which is the proce ...

. #Every individual matter is immediately plugged into political because minor literature exists in a narrow space. #Everything has a collective value: what the solitary writer says already has collective value. Deleuze and Guattari claim that these characteristics describe the revolutionary conditions within the canon of literature. Akerman has referenced Deleuze and Guattari on how, in minor literature, characters assume an immediate, nonhierarchical relation between small individual matters and economic, commercial, juridical, and political ones. While the filmmaker has an interest in multiple deterritorializations, she also considers the feminist demand for the exercise of

identity Identity may refer to: * Identity document * Identity (philosophy) * Identity (social science) * Identity (mathematics) Arts and entertainment Film and television * ''Identity'' (1987 film), an Iranian film * ''Identity'' (2003 film), an ...

, where a borderline status may be undesirable.

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 acts as a domestic theatre. Akerman is often 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". For Akerman, there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals. Marguiles 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". Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public. In ''Jeanne Dielman'', her best-known film, the protagonist does not supply a transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality. Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances. 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".

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

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

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 The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 113,000 works ...

, Princeton, NJ (2006); and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003). Akerman participated in

Documenta ''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural ...

XI (2002) and the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

(2001). In 2011, a film retrospective of Akerman's work was shown at the Austrian Film Museum. The 2015

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. Art curator Kathy Halbreich writes that Akerman "creates a cinema of waiting, of passages, of resolutions deferred". Many of Akerman's films portray the movement of people across distances or their absorption with claustrophobic spaces. 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". 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. She used the boredom of structuralism to generate a bodily feeling in the viewer, accentuating the passage of time. Akerman was influenced by European art cinema as well as structuralist film. Structuralist film used formalist experimentation to propose a reciprocal relationship between image and viewer. 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. Akerman was drawn to the perceived dullness of structuralism because it rejected the dominant cinema's concern for plot. As a teenager in Brussels, Akerman skipped school to see movies, including films from the experimental festival in Knokke-le-Zoute. Art historian Terrie Sultan writes that Akerman's "narrative is marked by an almost Proustian attention to detail and visual grace". 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. Kelly Reichardt,

Gus Van Sant Gus Green Van Sant Jr. (born July 24, 1952) is an American film director, producer, photographer, and musician. He has earned acclaim as both an independent and mainstream filmmaker. His films typically deal with themes of marginalized subcultu ...

, and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as a tribute to Akerman.

Death

65-year old Akerman died on 5 October 2015 in Paris; ''

Le Monde ''Le Monde'' (; ) is a French daily afternoon newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average circulation of 323,039 copies per issue in 2009, about 40,000 of which were sold abroad. It has had its own website si ...

'' reported that she died by

suicide Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety disorders), physical disorders (such as chronic fatigue syndrome), and ...

. 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 been hospitalized for depression and then returned home to Paris ten days before her death.

Filmography

Feature films

Short films

Documentaries

References

External links

chantal-akerman.foundation

paradisefilms.be

by ''

'' *
Artist's page in Artfacts.Net
with actual major exhibitions.
Screens of Film, Video, Memory, and Smoke
by Ana Balona de Oliveira in Fillip {{DEFAULTSORT:Akerman, Chantal 1950 births 2015 deaths 20th-century Belgian women artists 21st-century Belgian women artists Artists from Brussels Artists who committed suicide Belgian contemporary artists Belgian people of Polish-Jewish descent Belgian Jews Belgian expatriates in France Belgian expatriates in Germany Belgian expatriates in Switzerland Belgian expatriates in the United States Belgian experimental filmmakers Belgian screenwriters Belgian women film directors Belgian women film producers City College of New York faculty European Graduate School faculty Female suicides French-language film directors Jewish artists Lesbian artists LGBT film directors LGBT Jews LGBT artists from Belgium LGBT screenwriters Suicides in France Belgian women screenwriters LGBT academics 2015 suicides 21st-century LGBT people