Chantal Akerman

Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [akɛʁman]; 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.

Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium to Holocaust survivors from Poland. She was the oldest of two children, with only a younger sister, Sylviane Akerman. Her mother Natalia (Nelly) had survived years at Auschwitz, where her own parents had died. 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. 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.

Akerman had an extremely close relationship with her mother, captured in some of her films. In 1976 News From Home, Akerman mother’s letters outlining mundane family activities serve as a soundtrack throughout the film. The 2015 No Home Movie centers on mother-daughter relationships, largely situated in the kitchen, and is a response to her mother’s death. 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.

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 Région Centrale introduced her to the relations between 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), Hôtel 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.

Philosophy

Akerman has acknowledged that her cinematic approach can be explained 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:

• 1. Minor literature is the literature that a minority makes in a major language; the language is effected by a strong co-efficient of deterritorialization.
• 2. Every individual matter is immediately plugged into political because minor literature exists in a narrow space.
• 3. 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, the 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, where a borderline status may be an undesirable position.

Feminism

Akerman has used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity. The kitchens in Akerman’s work provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation and serve the function of 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.

Although Akerman is often grouped within feminist and queer thinking, the filmmaker has articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism. Akerman resists labels relating to her identity like “female”, “Jewish” and “lesbian”, choosing instead to immerse herself in the identity of being a daughter; Akerman has stated that she sees film as a “generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity". The filmmaker has advocated for multiplicity of expression, explaining that “when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves”. The filmmaker asserted that there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals. Writer and scholar Ivone Marguiles notes that Akerman’s resistance to be categorized 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, Akerman’s most well-known film, the main 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 which is 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 City College of New York.

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. The 2015 Venice Biennale included an installation of interspersed parallel screens displaying the landscape-in-motion footage that would appear in "No Home Movie".

Akerman’s cinematography is characterized by the dryness of language, the lack of metaphorical associations, the composition in a series of discontinuous blocks, the interest in putting a poor, withered syntax and reduced vocabulary at the service of a new intensity. Many directors have cited Akerman’s films as an influence on their work. Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as a tribute to Akerman.

Terrie Sultan, art historian, claims 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: the filmmaker creates narrative through filmic syntax instead of plot development.

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 in order to see movies, including films from the experimental festival in Knokke-le-Zoute.

Akerman addresses the voyeurism that is always present within cinematic discourse by often playing a character within her films, thus placing herself on both sides of the camera simultaneously. The filmmaker used the boredom of structuralism in order to generate a bodily feeling in the viewer, accentuating the passage of time.

Akerman’s filming style relies on capturing ordinary life. By encouraging viewers to have patience for a slower pace, her films emphasize the humanity of the everyday. Kathy Halbreich states that the filmmaker “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 states that Akerman’s domestic interiors “conceal gendered labour and violence, secrecy and shame, where traumas both large and small unfold with few, if any witnesses”.

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.