Sorry again for the late post ! Today, after talking about my favourite poet (Renée Vivien), I'm gonna talk about on of my favourite filmmaker ;
Chantal Akerman was a Belgian filmmaker who was born in Belgium in 1950 and died in Paris in 2015.
She has had an absolutely insane influence on cinema, most recently when her film "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles", was named best film of all time (which honestly is very fair, this movie is a damn masterpiece).
She was a lesbian, though she didn't talk about it much and didn't want to be reduced to a "lesbian filmmaker". She was married to Sonia Wieder-Atherton, a cellist. Female homosexuality is a recurring theme in her movies - with sometimes long and explicit sex scenes between women, not at all created for the male gaze.
Chantal Akerman comes from a Polish Jewish family. Her grandparents and her mother, Natalia, were deported to Auschwitz, and only her mother returned. Her relationship with Judaism has had a profound influence on her cinema.
She studied briefly at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle in Paris, before going to New York, meeting some other filmmakers, and making some short movies, movies and documentaries. But her huge international success came in 1975, with Jeanne Dielman.
"I was tossing and turning in bed, worried. And suddenly, in a single minute, I saw the whole of Jeanne Dielman..."
I'm going to try and keep it professional when I talk about Jeanne Dielman, but it's going to be hard, because I LOVE this film.
It's a three-hour film that follows three days in the life of a widowed housewife, Jeanne Dielman, who lives with her son, spends her time doing household chores and prostitutes herself to survive. The film is shot in the illusion of real time: if Jeanne spends 30 minutes cleaning her living room, you'll be watching her do it for 30 minutes. (Obviously none of the scenes are that long and there are ellipses but that's to illustrate my point). It's revolutionary. A poignant film about the condition of housewives, alienation, the way we make sure we're busy all the time so we don't have to think about life or death. The tension escalates little by little until the deeply disturbing end of the film, when everything comes crashing down. A masterpiece. Everyone should watch it. It's long but it's worth it! (Plus the main actress is incredible, both as an actress and as a person).
This film was a huge success, and she continued to make others, with recurring themes of the status of women, mother-daughter relationships, lesbianism, death, mental health, alienation, boredom, the need for freedom, solitude, the passage of time, inner suffocation...
More generally, women are at the heart of his work. Women, their inner lives, their identity as women, their experiences...
Chantal was also a great feminist. She defended women's rights in her words, her actions and her films, and was keen to put women in the spotlight. She even surrounded herself almost exclusively with women to create her films.
Suffering from manic-depressive psychological disorders and deeply affected by the death of her mother Natalia a year and a half earlier, she decided to end her life at the age of 65 on 5 October 2015 in Paris.
She is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery.
She is remembered today as an extraordinary filmmaker and a true innovator. Her films, long, emotionally chanllenging, psychologically and philosophically profound, are quite simply splendid. Check her work!!!
Chantal had a unique and magnificent style, and many more people should watch her films and documentaries.
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