Profile: Acclaimed Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, dead at 65

Chantal Akerman, a Belgian icon of feminist and avant-garde filmmaking, has died at the age of 65. In an article published in 2012, The Bulletin looked back at her pioneering 40-year career to coincide with a museum retrospective of her work.

"There are two Chantal Akermans," explains Dieter Roelstraete, curator of a major retrospective of her work at Muhka, Antwerp’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“There is Chantal Akerman the celebrated movie director, a monument of the European art-house circuit who is also very well-regarded as a director in the United States. Then there is Chantal Akerman the video artist, whose work in the mid-1990s was quite prescient about later developments that saw the boundaries between art and film dissolve.”

Both Chantal Akermans are invited to the Muhka party. “The exhibition is conceived as an attempt to present as complete a picture as possible of those two personalities, which are obviously one and the same artist,” says Roelstraete. “It’s a survey of her work in video and film installation, but alongside are shown some of her experimental films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rather than consider those films as the prelude to her later work in feature films, we are looking at them as the precursors of her work in video installation art.”

The connections are surprisingly strong. In Hotel Monterey (1972), Akerman uses long, static shots to explore the corridors, rooms and finally the rooftop of a New York hotel. More than 30 years on she presents a similar account of a Tel Aviv apartment in Là-bas (2006). In the same way, the New York street scenes in News from Home (1977) are echoed in D’Est (1993), a wordless account of a journey through central and eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

D’Est marked the point at which Akerman crossed over into the visual arts. The film was conceived as an experimental documentary, but she was also invited to think about bringing it into a gallery space. The result was D’Est: au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction), a massive installation in which her images unfold on 25 video monitors. The work was shown in 1995 at what is now Bozar, and it is the centrepiece of the Muhka exhibition.

“The experience of D’Est as an installation piece is radically different from the experience one has of the film,” says Roelstraete. “In her installations she wants to create a sense of immersion that opens up the possibility for the viewer to walk in and out of the work.” When she took this step in the 1990s, Akerman was ahead of her time. “That has become a defining feature of much film art that has migrated to the gallery. It is experiential and immersive rather than narrative.”

The other theme that runs through Akerman’s work is the inclusion of elements from her family and personal history. Her parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland, who settled in Brussels after the war. Born in 1950, Akerman was inspired to take up filmmaking as a teenager when she saw Jean-Luc Godard’s anarchic Pierrot Le Fou. In 1968 she enrolled in one of the city’s film schools but quit after a few months to make the self-financed (and equally anarchic) short film Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town).

In the early 1970s she moved to New York, where she was exposed to the work of American filmmakers experimenting with the structure of film. She adopted some of their methods, exploring the way filmed images can express the passing of time and the sensation of space.

The inclusion of personal detail, often in a playful way, prevents her films from becoming dry exercises in theory. In La Chambre (1972), for example, the camera slowly pans a one-room apartment, exploring the space in exemplary structuralist fashion until the bed comes into view, with the director still tucked up under the covers. On the camera’s second turn around the room, Akerman is seen raised up on one elbow munching an apple.

When she returned to Europe in the mid-1970s, she used these experimental techniques in works that explore sexual identity and the place of women in society. Her most famous film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) is from this period. A painstaking account of three days in the life of a widow with a young son, it quickly became a landmark in feminist cinema. Akerman insisted that Jeanne Dielman and several other films be excluded from the exhibition, and Roelstraete can see why. “They are events that you have to experience as cinema, seen in a darkened space, from beginning to end.”

At the end of the 1970s Akerman decided that she would begin repeating herself if she did not change direction, and started to embrace mainstream forms. While she continued to experiment she also made musicals, comedies and literary adaptations. Her latest film takes its inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly.

Preparations for the Muhka exhibition coincided with the final stages of La Folie Almayer, so Roelstraete was able to see the director working in both contexts. “I think that the art world is something that she looks to in order to relax a little, or to regain the freedom that she had as a young filmmaker,” he says.

But she remains a filmmaker at heart. “The references in her work, even when she makes an installation, still come from cinema,” he explains. “Her attachment to art is an emotional one and has to do with the sense of freedom that she is looking for, but she is not deeply rooted in the art establishment as such. And this between-ness, this commute between the two spheres, is also what makes the work so strong.”

Photo: Chantal Akerman poses during a photocall of her film La Folie Almayer at the 68th Venice Film Festival (Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters)