Chantal Akerman

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Chantal Akerman (b. 1950, Brussels, Belgium–d. 2015, Paris, France) was a Belgian film director who made over forty films, including features, documentaries, and shorts, many of which were created for French television. She also made over ten video art installations and wrote two autobiographical novellas and one play. Akerman’s desire to become a filmmaker was inspired by seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) when she was fifteen. Her first film, the thirteen-minute Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town, 1968) was made shortly after leaving the Belgian film school INSAS, which she attended briefly in 1967. She also briefly attended the Université Internationale du Théâtre in Paris, leaving to pursue her own projects. After completing a second film in 1971, Akerman left Europe for New York, where she discovered the structuralist cinema of Michael Snow and the experimental autobiographical films of Jonas Mekas at the Anthology Film Archives. Both of these were lasting influences, informing her commitment to alternative ways of telling stories without using conventional narrative. She also met Babette Mangolte, who became her cinematographer for her New York films, as well as for the films she made between her two trips to the city in the early 1970s: Je tu il elle (1974) and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). The latter film promoted her to auteur status and heralded her as a feminist director, its release coinciding with heated debates about women’s cinema and feminist film theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, Akerman drew on the clichés and tropes of genres such as romance, melodrama, comedy, and the musical, subjecting them all to her signature hyperreal, deconstructive style. While many of these films evidenced permutational narrative structures, her films are more generally associated with static camera shots and durational tracking sequences, making her foray into installation art in 1995 a logical extension of her work. Akerman’s documentaries, located in different corners of the world, extend the nomadic dimension of her cinema. From the late 1980s onward, themes of the Holocaust and Jewish diaspora became more overt in her work. Her final film, No Home Movie (2015), was an autobiographical documentary about her mother’s illness and death, the mother-daughter relationship being a predominant theme throughout her oeuvre. While Akerman is well regarded as a European/French cineaste, exhibitions of her installations and related feature films became an important form of distribution. A major touring US survey of Akerman’s installations was organized in 2009 by Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, MAC@MAM, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. A major UK exhibition of her installation works was held at Ambika P3, London, in 2015 as a finale to a unique year-long screening of all of her films at the ICA, London, organized with film collective A Nos Amours.