Groundbreaking Filmmaker Chantal Akerman Has Died

She produced her groundbreaking movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in 1975, when she was just 25. In her 40-plus films, she often repeated themes of alienation with echoes of the trauma of the Holocaust.

Akerman grew up in an observant Jewish family.

Frequently imitated and referenced, but never equaled, Akerman’s breakthrough remains the big screen’s definitive study of how the everyday mundane can mount into a sense of doom, and one of its most original exercises in space and time. An actress and a theorist, Akerman cast herself as the star of her first feature Je Tu Illinois Elle, which she made before Jeanne Dielman, but which saw release after it.

Other notable titles in her filmography include “I, You, He, She” (1976), “News from Home” (1976), “Les Rendez-vous d’Anna” (1979), “Nuit et jour” (1991) and “D’est” (1993). It featured several of the long, still takes she became known for, seeing a middle-aged widow going about domestic tasks in a claustrophobic Brussels flat. While confirming Akerman’s death for The New York Times, Mazzanti indicated that the director “had been in a dark place of late”.

Akerman’s work influenced directors, including Todd Haynes, Sally Potter and Michael Haneke. In a career spanning almost 50 years-she made her first 16mm short, “Blow Up My Town”, in 1968; her final film, “No Home Movie“, received positive notices at this year’s Locarno global Film Festival-Akerman won the fervent admiration of critics and cinephiles worldwide for her bold uses of narrative and film form, in fiction and nonfiction alike.