1968: Saute ma vie (Blow up My Town). 1971: L'Enfant aim? (The Beloved Child). 1972: Hotel Monterey; La Chambre. 1973: Le 15/18 (co-director); Hanging Out Yonkers (unfinished). 1974: Je tu il elle (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role as Julie). 1975: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (+scenarist/scriptwriter, voice of neighbor). 1977: News from Home (+scenarist/scriptwriter, voice). 1978: Les Rendez-vous director'Anna (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1980: Dis-moi (Tell Me). 1982: Toute une nuit (All Night Long) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1983: Les Ann?es 80 (The Golden Eighties) (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter); Un jour Pina m'a demand? (One Day Pina Asked Me). 1984: L'Homme ? la valise (The Man with the Suitcase); J'ai faim, j'ai froid (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold) (episode in Paris vu par ... 20 ans apr?s) (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter); Family Business; New York, New York Bis; Lettre director'un cin?aste (Letter from a Filmmaker). 1986: La Paresse (The Sloth); Le Marteau (The Hammer); Mallet-Stevens; Letters Home. 1987: Seven Women, Seven Sins (co-director). 1988: Histoires director'Am?rique: Food, Family and Philosophy/American Stories. 1989: Trois strophes sur la nom de Sacher (Three Stanzas on the Name Sacher); Les Trois demieres sonates de Franz Schubert (Franz Schubert's Last Three Sonatas). 1991: Nuit et jour (Night and Day) (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1992: Contre I'ubli (Against Oblivion). 1993: D'est (From the East) (+scenarist/scriptwriter); Le D?m?nagement (Moving In). 1994: Portrait director'une jeune fille de la fin designer ann?es 60 ? Bruxelles (Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 1996: Un Divan ? New York (A Couch in New York) (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1999: Sud (South) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 2000: La captive (The Captive). 2002: De l'autre c?t? (From the Other Side) (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 2004: Demain on director?m?nage (Tomorrow We Move) (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 2006: L?-bas (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 2007: O Estado do Mundo (State of the World) (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 2008: Women from Antwerp in November (+scenarist/scriptwriter). 2009: La folie Almaye
1985: Elle ? passe tant director'heures sous les sunlights (role as self).
Saute ma vie entered in Oberhausen festival, 1971; lived in New York, 1972; returned to France, 1973; instructor, Harvard University, 1997.
Brussels, 6 June 1950.
INSAS film school, Brussels, 1967-68; studied at Universit? Internationale du Th??tre, Paris, 1968-69.
At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity.
During a self-administered apprenticeship in New York (1972-73) shooting short films on very low budgets, Akerman notes that she learned much from the work of innovators Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. She was encouraged to explore organic techniques for her personal subject matter. In her deliberately paced films there are long takes, scenes shot with stationary camera, and a play of light in relation to subjects and their space. (In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, as Jeanne rides up or down in the elevator, diagonals of light from each floor cut across her face in a regular rhythm.) Her films feature vistas down long corridors, acting with characters? backs to the camera, and scenes concluded with several seconds of darkness. In Akerman films there are hotels and journeys, little conversation. Windows are opened and sounds let in, doors opened and closed; we hear a doorbell, a radio, voices on the telephone answering machine, footsteps, city noises. Each frame is carefully composed, each gesture the precise result of Akerman?s directions. A frequent collaborator is her sensitive cameraperson, Babette Manaolte, who has worked with Akerman on such works as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, News from Home, and Toute une nuit. Mangolte has also worked with avant guardists Yvonne Rainer, Marcel Hanoun, and Michael Snow.
Plotting is minimal or non-existent in Akerman films. Old welfare clients come and go amid the impressive architecture of a once splendid hotel on New York's Upper West Side in Hotel Monterey. New York City plays its busy, noisy self for the camera as Akerman's voice on the sound track reads concerned letters from her mother in Belgium in News from Home. A young filmmaker travels to Germany to appear at a screening of her latest film, meets people who distress her, and her mother who delights her, and returns home in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna. Jeanne Dielman, super-efficient housewife, earns money as a prostitute to support herself and her son. Her routine breaks down by chance, and she murders one of her customers.
The films (some of which are semi-autobiographical) are not dramatic in the conventional sense, nor are they glamorized or eroticized; the excitement is inside the characters. In a film that Akerman has called a love letter to her mother, Jeanne Dielman is seen facing the steady camera as members of a cooking class might see her, and she prepares a meatloaf-in real time. Later she gives herself a thorough scrubbing in the bathtub; only her head and the motion of her arms are visible. Her straightening and arranging and smoothing are seen as a child would see and remember them.
In Toute une nuit Akerman displays her precision and control as she stages the separate, audience-involving adventures of a huge cast of all ages that wanders out into Brussels byways on a hot, stormy night. In this film, reminiscent of Wim Wenders and his wanderers and Marguerite Duras's inventive sound tracks, choreography, and sense of place, Akerman continues to explore her medium using no conventional plot, few spoken words, many sounds, people who leave the frame to a lingering camera, and appealing images. A little girl asks a man to dance with her, and he does. The filmmaker's feeling for the child and the child's independence can't be mistaken.
Akerman's Moving In, meanwhile, centers on a monologue delivered by a man who has just moved into a modern apartment. A film of ?memory and loss,? according to Film Comment, he has left behind ?a melancholy space of relations, relations dominated by his former neighbors, a trio of female 'social science students.'??LILLIAN SCHIFF