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Editor’s note: Filmmaker Chantal Akerman passed away on this date in 2015. To commemorate her life and work, we are revisiting this essay by Arun Chaudhary that speaks to Akerman’s wide-ranging impact. When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going…
Do you bring your own thermos to work, or do you borrow coffee mugs from the kitchen? I — ahem — have just purchased a new thermos, and let me tell you: There is no greater thrill than wandering your office with your head held high, knowing you’re better than the plebeians who lack the…
In the opening shots of Chantal Akerman’s 1980 film “Dis Moi” (or “Tell Me”), the director shows herself unhurriedly traversing the streets of Paris. Set against these disarmingly low-key images, we hear a conversation between the director and her mother, Natalia, or Nelly, who lost her own mother – Chantal’s grandmother – in the Holocaust….
Sometime over last weekend, Chantal Akerman, the Belgian-French-Jewish filmmaker, committed suicide. Her body was found Monday. Her latest film, “No Home Movie,” a verité account of her mother’s decline and death, received its local premiere at the New York Film Festival this week in the immediate aftermath of Chantal’s own death. At the end of…
When I met Chantal Akerman, the famed film director whose alleged suicide was reported on October 6, I told her I was going to steal her shit. I didn’t blurt it out exactly like that, but having just seen her film “D’est” projected on a big beautiful screen at Cornell Cinema in 1995, I was…
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, a daughter of Holocaust survivors known for her experimental films that closely examined women’s lives, has died in Paris. She was 65. French media reported that Akerman committed suicide. The date and cause are not yet known, according to the New York Times. Her parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, and her…
For certain film buffs, Chantal Akerman is famous as the director of one of the screen’s most legendary endurance tests. Akerman’s masterpiece, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), as the precise title might indicate, is a remarkably focused three-and-a-half-hour study of the mundane routine of a Brussels housewife — the ultimate realist…
