Biography

Chantal Akerman

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Chantal Akerman was born on June 6, 1950 in Brussels, Belgium. She was a director and writer, known for Meetings with Anna (1978), I, You, He, She (1974) and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton. She died on October 5, 2015 in Paris, France.

Her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz; only her mother came back. This was a very important factor in her personal experience.
In 1975, Akerman released her most notable film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Widely considered one of the great feminist films, the film makes a hypnotic, real-time study of a middle-aged widow's stifling routine of domestic chores and prostitution. Upon the film's release, The New York Times called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema".
She was the youngest of all the directors featured in the Sight & Sound Top 100 - she was just 24 when she made Jeanne Dielman, younger even than Orson Welles (25 when he made Citizen Kane), Sergei Eisenstein and François Truffaut (both 27 when they made Battleship Potemkin and Les Quatre Cents Coups respectively).
Her mother's anxiety is a recurrent theme in her filmography.
On asking Chantal Akerman how she had edited Hotel Monterey (1973) her silent color film about a Lower Manhattan hotel: "She said, 'I was breathing, and then at one point I understood it was the time to cut. It was my breathing that decided the length of my shots,' "[New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015].

[on Delphine Seyrig] The French film establishment never forgave her for her outspokenness. If she had not been so beautiful, so aristocratic, it might not have been so bad. But the incongruity between their fantasy of her and what she was- a total feminist activist to the end of her life- they couldn't tolerate that. She was as much of a force in our lives as on the screen, and that's something very rare.
The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work... Sometimes not very frontally. And the jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.

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