Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman (June 6th 1950, Brussels, Belgium) is a Belgian Cinéaste which lives with Paris.

She is resulting from a Jewish family Polish. His/her grandparents and his mother were off-set with Auschwitz, from where the latter returned.

The chronic anguish of his/her mother is a major topic of its work. With the ratios sex/love/money, the trouble and the existential vacuum, sad humor and loneliness. It analyzes the human behaviors by raising the question of happiness.

It is Pierrot insane the of Jean-Luc Godard which caused its vocation. Formally, Michael Snow will be her second deep influence. Chantal Akerman declared on June 5th, 2004 with the Center Pompidou: Godard gave me energy and the formal ones released me . Its work is contemporary of that of the Wim Wenders of the beginnings.

André Delvaux supported it as of its first Short-measuring ( Saute my city, 1968), a film pre Punk where the teenager expressed in an explosive way her vital need of release.

New York

After a short passage to INSAS and the realization in 1971 of the loved child or I play to be a married woman , a second film (for a long time invisible, as public affairs of Robert Bresson) that the scenario writer estimates missed because not built enough, precise, directed, Chantal Akerman left with Samy Szlingerbaum to New York where she attended assiduously the Anthology Film Files (cineclub). She discovered there the experimental Cinéma American (Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, etc). They opened the eyes to me on many things: the relationship between a film and its own body, time like the essential thing of a film, time and energy. It is by looking at their films which I found courage to try another thing . Living odd jobs, she managed to make several films. In 1972, the room , a short-measuring containing slow a Panoramic horizontal which sweeps space with 360 degrees several times and Hôtel Monterey , 63 minutes, a succession of precisely tallied fixed plans and slow Travelling S in the corridors, the music appearing when one leaves the building by the roof where panoramic sweeps the urban horizon. Then, in 1973, Hanging Out Yonkers , its first test of documentary (on teenagers with problems attending a social center), unfinished. The rushes are sometimes projected in cineclub or at the time of retrospective. Chantal Akerman then lived in Paris. She will go back to New York in 1976, after her international recognition, to carry out News from home (89 minutes), a reading of the letters worry and plaintive that sent its mom to him during her stay, accompanied by monumental plans (frontages, streets, subway) by the mégapole. The film is closed by a very long back dolly, the camera posed on a boat moving away from the turns which will be destroyed by the Attentats of September 11th, 2001. The scenario writer will return in this city to turn Histoires of America in 1988 and a couch to New York in 1996.

Jeanne Dielman and international recognition

I was turned over in my bed, anxious. And abruptly, in only one minute, I have all considering Jeanne Dielman… (Chantal Akerman, in the Nouvel Observateur in September 1989)

Among films of its long career, most important are Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) (its masterpiece), a description meticulous person, in illusion of real-time (near to the Hyperréalisme) of alienation, with Delphine Seyrig ( It is a film over space and time and the way of organizing its life not to have any spare time, not to let themselves submerge by the anguish and the obsession of dead) ; appointments of Anna (1978) with Dawn Clement, one very autobiographical Road movie in the train (of Germany in Paris while passing by Leuwen and Brussels); the musical comedy Golden delicious Eighties (1986) (a variation with the Jacques Demy of its usual topics with Lio); its attempt at romantic comedy American to the Ernst Lubitsch (or the Woody Allen) a couch in New York (1996, with William Hurt and Juliette Binoche) and the prisoner (2000, with Sylvie Testud and Stanislas Merhar), her adaptation, written with Eric de Kuyper, of captive the of Marcel Proust, influenced by Vertigo of Alfred Hitchcock and morbid melodramas of Yevgeni Bauer.

In 2006, Chantal Akerman diverts an order (a documentary on Israel) to return to a work more personal, her more close friend since the years 1970 (autobiographical Voice-over accompanying by the hyperrealists fixed plans turned in video), carried out with Tel-Aviv and assembled in Paris, on the exile, the exile of the others, the exile of oneself, the return to oneself, mental imbalance, time, space and the pieces of housework which become “heroic acts of the daily life”. The conclusion of this film, heading Over there , is “the paradise does not exist”.

Documentary

The scenario writer carried out documentary ( One day Pina asked… , 1983; Of Is , 1993; Southern , 1998; On other side , 2003) which is characterized by a plastic and formal research rare in this kind and an attentive humanistic listening ( I am like a sponge who listen to in a floating way .)

Contemporary art

Chantal Akerman presented a filmic installation entitled Woman sitting after killer to the Biennale de Venise 2001 and another, From the other side with Documenta 11 (2002).

Professeure

It is professeure with the European Graduate School of Saas-Fairy (Suisse) where it directs a workshop of cinema during the summer.

References

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