Chantal Anne Akerman. Women Empowerment (1938-03-12)

Chantal Akerman. Copyright D.R.

Talk & Film with Irmi Horn.

Chantal Anne Akerman (b. June 1950 in Brussels; † 5. October 2015 in Paris) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter and actress.

Chantal Akerman was the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland, about whom she also reflected on film. Akerman dropped out of her studies at the Belgian Film Academy in 1967 after a few months. In 1968 she studied theater studies in Paris and appeared in public with short and experimental films. Her subsequent films were predominantly portraits of women or had feminist themes as their subject. At first, Akerman radically distanced himself from the usual entertaining narrative cinema in terms of visual language and technology.

She gained international recognition in 1975 with the film Jeanne Dielman.

In her later films, she gave up this radicalism more and more in favor of a more conventional structure and narrative. Her entire oeuvre amounts to over forty short and feature films, in which documentary and fiction, comic and tragic, self-experience and external exploration are treated with a peculiarly gentle rigor.

At the Documenta11, her film installation From the other side (2002) was shown. In 2011, a film retrospective dedicated to Chantal Akerman took place at the Austrian Film Museum. The Museum van Contemporary Art Antwerp also presented a retrospective in 2012.

Homosexuality is a recurring element in Akerman’s work, even if she resisted the reduction to partial aspects of her identity. Akerman had a long-standing relationship with cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton.

Chantal Akerman died on the 5th. October 2015 at the age of 65 in Paris by suicide.