Chantal Akerman, Pioneer Of Feminist Filmmaking, Dies At 65

She made more than 40 films during her lifetime, and in recent years explored her Jewish identity, according to the Times.

Playing October 7, 8 and 11 at various times and venues. The movie, which is a video essay about her mother, Natalia, an Auschwitz survivor who died previous year, is set to screen at the New York Film Festival this week.

Though her legacy is inextricably linked to “Jeanne Dielman”, perhaps one of the three or four most important feminist texts ever produced in the medium, it was Akerman’s versatility that seems most impressive in retrospect.

Akerman, a Brussels native, was the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland.

“It’s about the looks and sounds of ordinary things and people, which it records with such precise, unsettling clarity that it has the effect of finding threats in mundane objects and doom in commonplace characters”, film critic Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times.

Her death has been confirmed by her sister, Sylviane Akerman, as well as Nicola Mazzanti, the director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive, with whom Akerman had worked closely.

Leading Belgian filmmaker and theorist Chantal Akerman has died, The New York Times reports.

Akerman has said that after watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) when she was fifteen, she decided on the spot that she would become a filmmaker.

I’ve posted below the video of her short Saute Massachusetts ville, and I hope readers unfamiliar with her work will seek it out. “Nothing is simple”, she told one interviewer who tried to pin down her message.

Her other films include 1996’s A Couch in New York, starring William Hurt and Juliette Binoche, News from Home, and I, You, He, She.

The film, shot in 1975 and released in 1976: “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”.

Often haunting, sometimes haunted, Akerman’s best films derive their power from how they clue the viewer into what is being left unexpressed or unsaid; she could turn a long take of a person going about their kitchen into a portrait of the world they inhabited. In addition to her filmmaking, Akerman also taught, including a lengthy stint at Harvard, where she was Andrew Bujalski’s thesis advisor. In her 40-plus films, she often repeated themes of alienation with echoes of the trauma of the Holocaust.