Chantal Akerman
| Chantal Akerman | |
|---|---|
Chantal Akerman in 2012
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| Born |
Chantal Anne Akerman 6 June 1950 Brussels, Belgium |
| Died | 5 October 2015 (aged 65) Paris, France |
| Cause of death | Suicide |
| Nationality | Belgian |
| Occupation | Artist, film director, professor, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer |
| Years active | 1968–2015 |
| Notable work | Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles |
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 incredibly 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.
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