Chantal Akerman

Biography

In the autumn of 2022 the critics polled by Sight & Sound magazine named “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” the greatest film of all time. It was the first time a woman had topped the list. The film’s director would by then have been in her seventies, but she had been dead for seven years.

Chantal Akerman was born on 6 June 1950 in Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels, into a family of Polish Jews. Her mother, Natalia, survived Auschwitz, where her own parents were murdered. This bond with her mother runs through many of Akerman’s films. There is a younger sister, Sylviane.

At fifteen she saw Godard’s “Pierrot le fou” and decided she would make films; she said later that the decision came that same evening. At eighteen she enrolled at INSAS, a Belgian film school in Brussels, but left during her first term. The money for the short “Saute ma ville” (1968) she raised, by some accounts, by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. It was shot in her mother’s kitchen, with Akerman herself in the lead: a girl sings, wrecks the room, and at the end the screen goes black and an explosion is heard. André Delvaux approved of the film, and in 1971 it was shown at the Oberhausen festival.

That same year, 1971, she moved to New York. She lived on odd jobs and spent her evenings at Jonas Mekas’s Anthology Film Archives, watching American experimental cinema: Michael Snow, Andy Warhol. Snow, in her words, taught her to see time as the most important thing in a film. There she also met the cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who shot her films for many years. In 1972 came “Hotel Monterey”, a silent documentary made of still shots of corridors and elevators, and the short “La Chambre”, with its slow circular pan. Long takes and an almost motionless camera remained her hallmarks.

Back in Belgium, in 1974 she made “Je, Tu, Il, Elle”, in which she plays the lead; the film was noticed, among other things, for its treatment of women’s sexuality. Then, in 1975, came “Jeanne Dielman”. Akerman was twenty-five. The film runs more than three hours and shows, almost in real time, three days in the life of a middle-aged widow: she cooks, peels potatoes, receives clients. The title role was played by Delphine Seyrig. Le Monde called the picture “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema”. Akerman herself rejected the label “feminist cinema” and did not accept that there is a single women’s film language.

After that, genres followed one another. “News from Home” (1977) is built on her mother’s letters, read in voice-over across shots of New York. “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna” (1978) is a road movie with Aurore Clément. “Golden Eighties” (1986) is a musical. “Un divan à New York” (1996) is a comedy with William Hurt and Juliette Binoche. “La Captive” (2000) is after Proust. “La folie Almayer” (2011) is after Conrad. In 1993 she made “D’Est” (“From the East”), about life on the streets of Eastern Europe soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by “Sud” and “De l’autre côté” (“From the Other Side”); she later regarded this turn to a documentary manner as decisive. “Là-bas” (2006) grew out of a commission for a documentary about Israel, which she reworked into a personal statement of her own.

Her work for museums also grew out of “D’Est”: at the invitation of Kathy Halbreich, then head of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Akerman and her editor Claire Atherton turned the footage into the installation “D’Est, au bord de la fiction” (1995). After that she made more than fifteen video installations. “Woman Sitting after Killing” was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001, “From the Other Side” at Documenta 11 (the international exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel) in 2002. Her installations were exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (2003), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2006), the Princeton University Art Museum (2006) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (2012). At the 2015 Venice Biennale she showed “Now”, a five-screen installation of landscapes filmed from a moving camera.

Akerman taught at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and, from 2011, at the City College of New York. She sat on the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 1986 and of the Berlin festival in 1991. Her books include “Une famille à Bruxelles” (“Family in Brussels”, 1998), “Autoportrait en cinéaste” (2004) and “Ma mère rit” (“My Mother Laughs”, 2013), about her mother’s last years. She was a Commander of the Order of Leopold I.

Her last film, “No Home Movie” (2015), was shot almost entirely in her mother’s apartment and consists of conversations with her mother shortly before her death in 2014. Of it Akerman said that had she known in advance she would do this, she would not have dared. She died on 5 October 2015 in Paris, in the 20th arrondissement, at the age of 65. She is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery.