videoartfall2017: 2017

Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian avant-garde film director whose work combined experimental techniques with feminist ideology.

She was only 24 when her feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1975. More than three hours long and filmed in real time, it followed a single mother’s dire routine of cooking, cleaning and prostitution.

It became an unlikely sensation and Chantal Akerman was pronounced a prodigious talent in the tradition of Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard.

“The film’s time span covers Tuesday (stew and potatoes), Wednesday (wiener schnitzel) and heady Thursday (meat loaf and Jeanne has an orgasm and kills her client with a pair of scissors),” wrote one critic. “This orgasm bit is bound to strike the serious-minded as an unfortunate bow to crass commercialism”.

The New York Times called the film “one of the key artworks of the 20th century”. During the course of the following four decades, however, Chantal Akerman’s talent went largely unrecognised by a broader cinema audience.

Chantal Anne Akerman was born on June 6 1950 in Brussels into a Jewish family. Her father was hidden during the war, but her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz. Only her mother, Natalia, returned, and her family’s experience of the Holocaust would affect much of her work – both directly and abstractly.

Inspired to become a filmmaker after watching Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) when she was 15, three years later she enrolled at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS), a film school in Brussels, but left in her first term to make Saute ma ville, a 13-minute, black and white film in which she played a girl alone in her apartment. To finance the film she reportedly traded diamonds on the Antwerp stock exchange.

In 1971 she moved to New York and made further short films inspired by the work of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. On her return to Belgium she shot her first feature I, You, He, She (1974). Another pared-back and bleak vision of womanhood, it followed the domestic and sexual life of a lesbian called Julie (played by herself).

Jeanne Dielman was released the following year. She shot the film over five weeks with an entirely female crew, an experience she said that “didn’t work that well”.

Her output during the 1980s and 1990s was eclectic: she directed documentaries and dramas, created video installations and even, with Golden Eighties (1983), produced a romantic musical set in a Brussels shopping mall, albeit with a backstory involving the Nazi death camps.

In 1996 she made a rare foray into commercial cinema with A Couch in New York, starring Juliette Binoche as a Manhattan psychiatrist.

It was not a happy experience. “Juliette is all the time laughing but she’s as cold as an ice cube,” recalled Chantal Akerman. She had a critical success, however, a few years later with La Captive (2000), an erotic psycho-drama about a young man’s jealous pursuit of his girlfriend.

In her later years she was best known as an inspiration for emerging innovative filmmakers, including Gus van Sant and Michael Haneke. In 2011, she became a visiting lecturer at the City College of New York.

Her last film, No Home Movie, was a video diary of her mother’s final days (she died in 2014). “She never wanted to speak about Auschwitz. ” Chantal Ackerman said. “We could speak around, or after, or before, but the real moment, never. Not directly.”

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