Passages through Time and Space: In Memory of Chantal Akerman

Abstract

Film historian Giuliana Bruno commemorates celebrated filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015), whose intimate portraits of cities, lands, and homes captured the passing of everyday life and intensified our own sense of time, memory, and space. Akerman's breakthrough film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), exposed the strictures of women's time and space while creating a new cinematic language of observation and duration. She continued to experiment with moving images throughout her life, moving easily between fiction and documentary, cinemas and gallery exhibitions. In the mid-1990s, Akerman began to engage in an expanded field of film-based installation art, at an early stage of the cultural movement that still drives today's filmmakers and artists to work between media. Bruno's personal evocation of Akerman's oeuvre highlights the filmmaker's use of the screen as both filter and threshold, in order to convey a relationship between interiority and exteriority, and physical and mental space, a relationship delicately tailored to Akerman's particular version of empathy.