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Horam Natural Therapy Centre - Chantal Prince shunyata.co.uk | Chantal Jolly - An Accredited Music Therapist, Sound Healer and Holistic saskworld.com | Chantal Comeau osteo-medsport.com |
Chantal Anne Akerman[1] (born June 6, 1950) is a Belgian film director and artist. Renowned for a hyperrealist style, Akerman's work seeks to inscribe the "images between the images."[2][dead link] Akerman's most famous film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) exemplifies a dedication to the "ellipses of conventional narrative cinema."[2]
[edit] Early lifeAkerman was born in Brussels, Belgium. Her grandparents and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, but only her mother came back. This is a very important factor in her personal experience and her mother's anxiety is a recurrent theme in her filmography. Akerman claims that after viewing Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) at 15 she "decided to make movies the same night."[2][dead link] At 18 she entered the Institute Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et Technique de Diffusion, a Belgian film school. During her first term, however, Akerman chose to leave and make Saute ma ville, a thirteen-minute black-and-white picture in 35mm. Akerman partially subsidized Saute ma ville from shares she sold on the Antwerp diamond exchange, procuring its remaining budget through clerical work. In 1971 Saute ma ville premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival. This same year Akerman moved to New York and remained there until 1972.[2][dead link] At Anthology Film Archives in New York Akerman became impressed by the work of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow and Andy Warhol. She states that Snow's La Région Centrale introduced her to the "relationship between film, time and energy."¹ Her 1972 feature Hotel Monterey and shorts La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2 reveal structural filmmaking's influence through their usage of extended duration takes. These protracted shots serve to oscillate the films' images between abstraction and figuration. Akerman's films from this period also signify the start of her collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte. In 1973, Akerman returned to Belgium and in 1974 received critical recognition for her feature Je tu il elle. [edit] FilmsAt 201 minutes, Jeanne Dielman examines a single mother's regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning and mothering over three days. The mother, Jeanne Dielman (whose name is only derived from the title), also prostitutes herself to a male client daily for her and her son's subsistence. Like her other activities Jeanne's prostitution is rote and uneventful. The picture's third day witnesses Jeanne's routine benignly unravel with events like dropping a newly washed spoon and appearing at businesses before opening. These alterations to Jeanne's existence climax when she unexpectedly orgasms with her day's client. Following this coitus Jeanne stabs the male customer in the neck with scissors.[2] Upon its release the New York Times called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema."³ Chantal Akerman scholar Ivone Margulies asserts the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting "feminism and anti-illusionism."[2][dead link] Jeanne Dielman's static framing, extended duration takes and lack of reversal shots force the viewer to objectively experience its protagonist and her social role's oppression. Through exposure to "images between the images" Akerman forges new content that, resultantly, requires new form. Though the filmmaker's static frame and extended duration shots stem from structural cinema, their unique application to women's domestic work position Jeanne Dielman outside dominant patriarchal film languages and into one specifically "feminist." The picture inverts normal filmic expectations by removing drama from emotional intensity and attaching it to extended duration takes - takes, that is, connotative of boredom. Jeanne Dielman's temporal dilation equalizes its exposition and drama to transform "knowledge of an object" - Jeanne's oppression - into a "vision" of it.[2][dead link] [edit] Filmography
[edit] Further reading
[edit] References[edit] External links
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