- Chantal Akerman
-
Chantal Akerman Born 6 June 1950
Brussels, BelgiumOccupation Artist, film director, professor Chantal Anne Akerman (born 6 June 1950) is a Belgian film director, artist, and professor of film at the European Graduate School.[1] Akerman's best-known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), exemplifies a dedication to the ellipses of conventional narrative cinema.[citation needed]
Contents
Early life
Akerman was born to an observant Jewish family in Brussels, Belgium. Her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz; only her mother came back. This is a very important factor in her personal experience, and her mother's anxiety is a recurrent theme in her filmography. Akerman claims that, age the age of 15, after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), she decided to make movies the same night. At 18 she entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. During her first term, however, Akerman chose to leave and make Saute ma ville, a thirteen-minute black-and-white picture in 35mm. Akerman partially subsidized Saute ma ville from shares she sold on the Antwerp diamond exchange, procuring its remaining budget through clerical work. In 1971, Saute ma ville premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival.[2] This same year Akerman moved to New York and remained there until 1972.
At Anthology Film Archives in New York, Akerman became impressed by the work of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, and Andy Warhol. She states that Snow's La Région Centrale introduced her to the relationship between film, time and energy.¹ Her 1972 feature Hotel Monterey and shorts La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2 reveal structural filmmaking's influence through their usage of extended-duration takes. These protracted shots serve to oscillate the films' images between abstraction and figuration. Akerman's films from this period also signify the start of her collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte.
In 1973, Akerman returned to Belgium and, in 1974, received critical recognition for her feature Je tu il elle. In 1991, she was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.[3]
Identity aesthetics
According to the book Images in the Dark by Raymond Murray, Akerman refused to have her work ghettoized, and she denied the New York Gay Film Festival the right to screen Je tu il elle. "I will never permit a film of mine to be shown in a gay film festival."
Filmography
Year Title Length Notes English 1968 Saute ma ville 13 minutes Blow up My Town 1971 L'enfant aimé ou Je joue à être une femme mariée 35 minutes The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being a Married Woman 1972 Hotel Monterey 65 minutes 1972 La Chambre 1 11 minutes The Room, 1 1972 La Chambre 2 11 minutes The Room, 2 1973 Le 15/8 42 minutes co-directed by Samy Szlingerbaum 1973 Hanging Out Yonkers 90 minutes unfinished 1974 Je tu il elle 90 minutes I... You... He... She... 1975 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles 201 minutes 1976 News from Home 85 minutes 1978 Les Rendez-vous d'Anna 127 minutes Meetings with Anna 1980 Dis-moi 127 minutes Tell Me 1982 Toute une nuit 89 minutes All Night Long 1983 Les Années 80 82 minutes The Eighties 1983 Un jour Pina à demandé 57 minutes One Day Pina Asked Me 1983 L'homme à la valise 60 minutes The Man With the Suitcase 1984 J'ai faim, j'ai froid 12 minutes segment for Paris vu par, 20 ans après I'm Hungry, I'm Cold 1984 New York, New York bis 8 minutes lost 1984 Lettre d'un cinéaste 8 minutes Letter from a Filmmaker 1986 Golden Eighties 96 minutes Window Shopping 1986 La paresse 14 minutes segment for Seven Women, Seven Sins Sloth 1986 Le marteau 4 minutes The Hammer 1986 Letters Home 104 minutes 1986 Mallet-Stevens 7 minutes 1989 Histoires d'Amérique 92 minutes Entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival[4] Food, Family, and Philosophy 1989 Les trois dernières sonates de Franz Schubert 49 minutes Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas 1989 Trois strophes sur le nom de Sacher 12 minutes Three Stanzas on the Name Sacher 1991 Nuit et jour 90 minutes Night and Day 1992 Le déménagement 42 minutes Moving In 1992 Contre l'oubli 110 minutes Akerman directed one short segment Against Oblivion 1993 D'Est 107 minutes From the East 1993 Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles 60 minutes Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels 1996 Un divan à New York 108 minutes A Couch in New York 1997 Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman 64 minutes 1999 Sud 71 minutes South 2000 La Captive 118 minutes Collaboration with Eric de Kuyper The Captive 2002 De l'autre côté 103 minutes From the Other Side 2004 Demain on déménage 110 minutes Collaboration with Eric de Kuyper Tomorrow We Move 2006 Là-bas 78 minutes 2007 Tombée de nuit sur Shangaï 60 minutes segment for O Estado do Mundo 2011 La Folie Almayer Almayer's Folly Further reading
- Sultan, Terrie (ed.) Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space. Houston, Tex.: Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston ; New York, N.Y.: Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2008.
- Schenker, Andrew (15 January 2010). "Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies". Slant Magazine. http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/eclipse-series-19-chantal-akerman-in-the-seventies/1651. Retrieved 23 August 2010.
References
- ^ Chantal Akerman Faculty Page at European Graduate School
- ^ Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens. Durham and London: Duke University Press. pp. 2. ISBN 978-0-8223-1723.
- ^ "Berlinale: 1991 Juries". berlinale.de. http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1991/04_jury_1991/04_Jury_1991.html. Retrieved 2011-03-21.
- ^ "Berlinale: 1989 Programme". berlinale.de. http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1989/02_programm_1989/02_Programm_1989.html. Retrieved 2011-03-11.
External links
- Chantal Akerman Faculty Page at European Graduate School (Biography, bibliography and articles)
- http://www.paradisefilms.be
- Chantal Akerman at the Internet Movie Database
- Artist's page in Artfacts.Net with actual major exhibitions.
- Interview with Chantal Akerman
- Screens of Film, Video, Memory, and Smoke by Ana Balona de Oliveira in Fillip
Categories:- 1950 births
- Belgian film directors
- Female film directors
- LGBT directors
- LGBT Jews
- European Graduate School faculty
- Living people
- Women artists
- Belgian Jews
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
