Acclaimed Filmmaker Chantal Akerman Dead at 65
Chantal Akerman (@Getty Images)
By Beatrice Verhoeven, The Wrap
Chantal Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who developed a reputation as a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking, died in Paris. She was 65.
Sylviane Akerman, her sister, and Nicola Mazzanti, the director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive, confirmed the death. According to the New York Times, Mazzanti said the cause and precise date of her death are still unknown.
Akerman was born in Brussels to Polish Holocaust survivors in 1950. At 25, she made her groundbreaking film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, about a housewife in real time over the course of three hours while she prepares food, does chores and welcomes clients who pay her for sex.
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“Jeanne Dielman is a film that created, overnight, a new way of making films, a new way of telling stories, a new way of telling time,” Mazzanti told the New York Times. “There are filmmakers who are good, filmmakers who are great, filmmakers who are in film history. And then there are a few filmmakers who change film history.”
The film, which the New York Times once hailed as “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema,” was regarded as one of the best movies of all time in a recent Sight & Sound poll. Akerman earned the highest spot on the list for a female filmmaker.
During her career, Akerman made over 40 films — a common theme throughout them was the element of angst and alienation. In recent years, she began exploring the Holocaust and her own Jewish identity.
Other notable films include I, You, He, She (1976), News from Home (1993), The Captive (2000) and Over There (2006). Her most commercial film is 1996’s A Couch in New York, starring William Hurt and Juliette Binoche.
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Her latest film, titled No Home Movie, features conversations between Akerman and her mother, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 2014. While telling the New York Times in a recent interview that the film took an emotional toll on her as she witnessed her mother’s difficulty to talk about her experiences, the film is now showing at New York Film Festival.
The film premiered at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland this past August, but many people disliked the film, saying it was too dark.
Friends of hers had told the New York Times that they were worried for Akerman after the negative response to the film, as she had “previously suffered breakdowns” and was “devastated” by the reception.
Akerman is also considered an important influence on directors and filmmakers such as Gus van Sant, Todd Haynes and Michael Haneke.
