Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman (born June 6, 1950, Brussels, Belgium—died October 5, 2015, Paris, France) was a Belgian filmmaker who explored the mundane details of ordinary life with a clear eye and a strong feminist sensibility. She directed over 40 films and created several art installations. Her best-known work is the avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

Akerman’s Jewish father, Jacques Akerman, spent World War II in hiding, while her mother, Natalia Liebel, was the only member of her Jewish family to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the director readily acknowledged that she was influenced by their experiences during and after the war.

When Akerman was 15, she decided to become a filmmaker after seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965). She briefly studied at a film school in Brussels, but she dropped out to make a short film, Saute ma ville (1968; “Blow Up My City”), in which she starred.

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Akerman then briefly lived in New York City, where she encountered the work of experimental filmmakers; Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971) was a strong influence that she later said had revealed to her the possibilities of non-narrative film.  While in New York, she made a short, La chambre (1972), set in her apartment, and a documentary Hôtel Monterey (1973). After Akerman’s return to Belgium, she made her first narrative feature, Je tu il elle (1974), in which she plays a young woman who has affairs with a truck driver and her ex-girlfriend.

Akerman burst onto the international scene at the 1975 Cannes film festival with Jeanne Dielman. The film, which runs 201 minutes, follows the daily minutiae, depicted in long unedited takes, in the life of a widowed mother (Delphine Seyrig) as she cooks, cleans, and engages in part-time prostitution to help pay the bills—with tragic results. Akerman felt that traditionally feminine household chores had been “devalued” by not being depicted on film. She made the film with a crew of mostly women. The film proved enormously influential, and in 2022 the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound’s decadal poll of more than 1,600 film critics and historians worldwide voted Jeanne Dielman as the best film of all time.

In News from Home (1976), scenes of New York City form the backdrop to Akerman’s narration of letters from her mother. The semi-autobiographical Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978; The Meetings of Anna) concerns a film director and her lonely journey through Europe promoting her latest film.

Toute une nuit (1982; “A Whole Night”) consists of brief vignettes of romantic connections and partings during a summer night in Brussels. Akerman subsequently made a musical, Golden Eighties (1986), about three young hairstylists working in a mall who are all in love with the same man.

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D’Est (1993; From the East) studied life in postcommunist Eastern Europe through long tracking shots of everyday life. Akerman looked back at her youth in Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 a Bruxelles (1994; “Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels”), made for Belgian television. A Couch in New York (1996) was a rare commercial venture, a romantic comedy in which a New York psychologist (William Hurt) switches apartments with a Parisian free spirit (Juliette Binoche). La Captive (2000) was a loose adaptation of Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière (1923).

Akerman’s final work, No Home Movie (2015), consisted of conversations with her mother recorded shortly before the latter’s death in 2014. Akerman had long struggled with depression, and she committed suicide in 2015.