Chantal Akerman https://www.artnews.com The Leading Source for Art News & Art Event Coverage Fri, 01 Mar 2024 01:55:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.3 https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/app/icons/favicon.png Chantal Akerman https://www.artnews.com 32 32 Sad Oompa Loompa from Viral Wonka Experience Draws Comparisons to Manet Painting https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/sad-oompa-loompa-wonka-experience-edouard-manet-folies-bergere-jeanne-dielman-1234698292/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:15:56 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234698292 Ooompa, Loompa, doompa-dee-do: Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère has gone viral for you.

The reason this 1882 painting has become a hit on the social media app X has nothing to do with Manet’s radically cold touch, or even the fact that the work is famous at all. Instead, it has to do with similarities between its disaffected bartender and a sad-looking Oompa Loompa from a catastrophically bad Willy Wonka chocolate factory experience that was recently staged in Glasgow.

That experience was put on by House of Illuminati, and has become the subject of much gawking on social media because of its AI-generated scripts, the paltry amount of sugary treats on offer for kids who attended, and the generally bizarre characters who appeared in it, among them a masked figure known as the Unknown.

But it is the female Oompa Loompa that appears to have made the greatest mark on onlookers. Vulture described the viral picture of her as portraying “the Shein equivalent of an Oompa Loompa costume and looking slightly dead in the eyes as she stands in a smoky room behind a table covered in so much scientific equipment that countless people online compared it to a ‘meth lab.'”

Perhaps not so surprisingly, some saw parallels in Manet’s barmaid, who stares blankly at the viewer, her hands on a table lined with champagne and oranges. In the mirror behind, we can see a lot of drunken revelers who are clearly having more fun than she is. Also in that mirror is the reflection of a male customer seeking a drink.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which is now owned by the Courtauld Institute in London, is a disturbing painting, not because of what it represents, but because Manet parts ways with traditional means of depicting space. The mirror is slightly tilted, so that the barmaid’s back is shown not right behind her but to her right. This awkward doubling of her image distances viewers from the picture. No surprise, then, that viewers at the 1882 Paris Salon were bothered by it, since it so clearly departed from what was expected of painting at the time.

But the reason the painting has gone viral, with one such post gaining more than 100,000 likes, is less because of its formal qualities than its subject matter: an alienated woman at work. In the Manet painting’s case, the barmaid, based on a real person named Suzon, is so striking because she seems totally nonplussed, despite the fact that she is in a venue intended to provide a good time for its patrons. Manet reminds us that this is labor for her, not play.

The Oompa Loompa, in the same way, is merely doing a gig—something that the actress playing her, Kirsty Paterson, even described to Vulture, saying, “They were offering £500 for two days of work, so I decided to go.”

Some paid tribute to Paterson in a much more generous way, portraying her as the Mona Lisa, while others seemed to push her perceived sense of detachment even further, comparing the picture to Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, the Chantal Akerman film recently voted the best movie of all time by critics. In that 200-minute 1975 film, now regarded as a landmark of feminist cinema, a housewife goes about her daily duties, and does little else. Perhaps Akerman would not have been proud of the comparison, but other X users appear to have been: multiple Jeanne Dielman tweets about the Oompa Loompa have gained thousands of likes.

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Being There: Chantal Akerman’s Memoir, ‘My Mother Laughs,’ Reckons with Death https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/chantal-akerman-my-mother-laughs-review-12908/ Wed, 03 Jul 2019 16:04:13 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/chantal-akerman-my-mother-laughs-review-12908/

Chantal Akerman (left) with her mother (right).

COURTESY THE SONG CAVE

Chantal Akerman’s films and videos had a habit of dealing with the daunting subject of death not through visions of people expiring but instead through stark images of emptiness and sparsity. In her 1999 documentary South, Akerman pondered the killing of an African-American man in Texas by letting her camera linger over the road where he was dragged to his death by racist attackers behind a truck. Never once do we see a body, yet the image—unaestheticized, understated, raw—is disturbing for its profound sense of absence. Sometimes, in the right context, carnage and loss can be communicated through a six-minute shot of a winding country road.

I thought often of South while reading Akerman’s My Mother Laughs, a memoir in the form of a poetic musing on the inevitability of death and the difficulty of letting loved ones go. The filmmaker’s final piece of writing—first published in France in 2013, two years before her death, and shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, the country’s highest award for literature—is a meditation on trying to hold tight to a presence that is slipping away. In Akerman’s case, that presence was her mother Nelly, who, due to a terminal illness, declines in health gradually over the course of a non-linear remembrance in which the author reckons with an unavoidable fate.

THE SONG CAVE

Nelly was the subject of two of Akerman’s best works: her 1977 film News from Home (in which Akerman reads her mother’s letters in voiceover) and 2015’s No Home Movie (which features footage of Akerman conversing with her mom during her final months). Both films are tender, serene, and slow in ways similar to My Mother Laughs, but the book is more emotional thanks to Akerman’s tender—if occasionally clinical—way of recounting her mother’s weakening physical state through in-depth descriptions of hospital trips, caretaking, and home visits.

Akerman’s writing is decidedly unflowery and terse, detached and even steely, in clipped sentences and lines that drop commas and other kinds of punctuation. She favors small words to evoke big feelings. To wit, from a section drawing on one of Akerman’s many trips to see her mother: “I bought some flowers for my mother. It’s so gray out. / Perhaps with the flowers we’ll feel it less. / We try. It’s not going very well.” Akerman “always considered herself a writer,” according to an afterword written by translator Corina Copp in the new version of the book released by the Brooklyn-based publisher Song Cave—and it shows in strange poetry derived from the odd, awkward, and sometimes confusing phrases that are often more illuminating than they might appear.

Threaded through memories of Nelly are aspects of Akerman’s own past. For the whole book, it’s clear that she’s closer with Nelly than she was with her father, but only once, in an especially memorable passage, does she touch on why. Akerman ascribes her differences with her father to his suggestion that she herself was of “another gender” than the women around her. Those well-acquainted with Akerman may recognize the true meaning of her words—in her films, she used her gender to explore female sexuality and, sometimes, her identity as a lesbian. (One of her first feature-length works, 1974’s Je Tu Il Elle, is a watershed work of queer cinema for its explicit—and, for its time, largely unprecedented—depiction of a relationship between two women.) “There had been other girls of another gender and that was that,” Akerman writes. “And we loved each other, that’s it.”

Chantal Akerman, 'D'Est' (still), 1993.

Chantal Akerman, D’Est (still), 1993.

COURTESY THE SONG CAVE

Indeed, that is pretty much it. Even though the book hints at the opposition she faced for her sexuality (“It made him unhappy,” she writes of her father), the text never again touches on the subject. But a lot of My Mother Laughs does focus on a former female partner referred to only as C. Akerman meets C. through Facebook, and the two go on to move in together in New York. For the most part, C. comes across as detached, unwilling to help Akerman deal with her mother’s ailing health. “C. knew about mothers dying,” Akerman writes. “But when pressed for details, she said no comment.”

In one of the book’s most wrenching passages, Akerman details how C. began physically abusing her. Akerman describes fighting back but remaining unable to “imagine what I should have done, or could have.” She describes herself as a victim, and she sees a pattern playing out across several generations of family—first with her mother, a Holocaust survivor, and then with herself and other female relatives. She writes of a visit to a supermarket with C. during which they purchased sugar cubes of a kind that Akerman liked to place between her teeth when drinking coffee, to sweeten the bitterness. “I think my three aunts had to do it in their time as well,” Akerman writes. For her, grief and trauma play out again and again, across continents and centuries.

That sugar cubes show up in one of the book’s darkest segments may not be incidental. There is sweetness amid the sadness in My Mother Laughs, but the sweetness is fleeting—and the sadness more permanent. That there are good moments that can coexist with bad ones seems to perplex Akerman. “I was living again,” she writes of a time with C. when she was briefly able to set her sights on something other than her ailing mother. Two sentences later, she puts a finer point on it: “I stopped not living.”

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9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/9-art-events-attend-new-york-city-week-31-10827/ Mon, 20 Aug 2018 16:49:24 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/9-art-events-attend-new-york-city-week-31-10827/

A previous edition of Afropunk, which runs this weekend in Brooklyn.

MEL D. COLE

MONDAY, AUGUST 20

Screening: Sud at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Chantal Akerman’s film Sud (1999) focuses on the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas. The film, which considers the extent to which the legacy of violence is reflected in the natural landscape of the American South, includes scenes from Byrd’s funeral and interviews with locals. This screening of Sud is part of the gallery’s “35 Days of Film” series, which concludes at the end of August.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, screenings at 10:30 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 1 p.m., 2:15 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 4:45 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22

Talk: “The Future Is Feminine” at Rubin Museum of Art
For the final installment of its astrological programming series, hosted by artist, architect, and author A. T. Mann, the Rubin will present a conversation with communications consultant Schuyler Brown. The two mystics will discuss the ancient roots of symbols related to women and the role that feminine energy plays in relationships and systems. Audience members will have the opportunity to participate in the dialogue, which will consider the impact of femininity on individuals and societies alike.
Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, 7–8:30 p.m. Tickets $25

Concert: Aïsha Devi feat. Asian Dope Boys at Pioneer Works
The Swiss-born, Nepalese-Tibetan musician Aïsha Devi, who often combines electronic sound with unconventional, meditative vocal work, will give a concert with Asian Dope Boys, a performance art collective led by artist Tianzhuo Chen. Their Pioneer Works show will comprise a “visual and sonic performance” that will combine the sounds of Devi with imagery produced by Chen.
Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, 7–10 p.m. Tickets $15

Lucy’s Flower Shop.

SHELISSA AQUINO/COURTESY BRONX MUSEUM

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22

Talk: “The Bronx Speaks: DREAMers Uprooted Fates & Fortunes” at Lucy’s Flower Shop
The Bronx Museum of the Arts will presents this talk about immigration, which takes place inside a flower shop near the institution. Local DREAMers Harriet Appiah, Azeez A, and Diana Eusebio—who, as immigrants who arrived in the country as minors, would gain U.S. citizenship through the passage of the DREAM Act—will be in conversation with their artist-mentor Jason Lalor and Lucila Saavedra, the owner of Lucy’s Flower Shop. The night is part of a larger Bronx Museum program dedicated to community-building and immigration rights.
Lucy’s Flower Shop, 2655 Jerome Avenue, Bronx, 7 p.m. Free with RSVP

THURSDAY, AUGUST 23

Party: “Night at the Museum” at MoMA PS1
In celebration of the final weeks of various shows currently on view at the museum, including surveys of work by Reza Abdoh, Julia Phillips, and Fernando Palma Rodríguez, PS1 is throwing a one-night-only party. The galleries will be open until midnight, and DJ br0nz3_g0dd3ss will perform a set in the museum’s outdoor atrium area. Alongside all this will be performances by the group Dynamic Diplomats of Double Dutch, frozen cocktails, and food courtesy of M. Wells, La Newyorkina, and Van Leeuwen.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 8 p.m. Tickets $15

FRIDAY, AUGUST 24

Screening: Alberto Giacometti at Guggenheim Museum
Part of its events series surrounding its current Alberto Giacometti retrospective, the Guggenheim will screen this short documentary from 1966, which takes a look at the artist in his studio. Ernst Scheidegger, who directed the film with Peter Munger, had a longstanding relationship with Giacometti. Over the course of the artist’s career, he produced a formidable group of photographs and films documenting the artist’s life. This film features exclusive footage culled from that body of work.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, screenings at 3, 3:30, and 4 p.m.

 

Screening: Germaine Dulac at Film Society of Lincoln Center
This screening kicks off the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Germaine Dulac retrospective. Included will be showings of of Dulac’s films Étude cinématographique sur une arabesque (1929), Thèmes et variations (1929), Disque 957 (1929), La Folie des vaillants (1925), and, perhaps most notably, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), which many consider one of the first Surrealist motion pictures. Leila Bredrueil, Brooklyn-based French cellist and composer, will provide a live scoring of The Seashell and the Clergyman.
Film Society of Lincoln Center, 144 West 65th Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $12/$15

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25

Festival: Afropunk Festival at Commodore Barry Park
A pointed and purposeful annual gathering most recently held in a park near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Afropunk Festival takes a wide and wizened look at all that “Afropunk” might mean. The “punk” part counts more as a general sensibility than as a musical style, but style (sartorial and otherwise) attends all the different kinds of music in any case, from soul and R&B to hip-hop and house, among many other varieties. Headliners this year include Erykah Badu, Kaytranada, Miguel, Janelle Monae, Pusha T, and, in a seasoned DJ program, big names like Just Blaze and Theo Parrish, a mastermind of deep, delirium-making house and techno from Detroit. Programming continues on Sunday, August 26.
Commodore Barry Park, Brooklyn, consult website for ticket pricing and performance times

Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny in Larry Clark’s Kids (1995).

SHINING EXCALIBUR FILMS

Screening: Kids at the Metrograph
As part of its Larry Clark series, Metrograph will screen Kids (1995), the director and photographer’s cult classic about disillusioned teenagers in 1990s New York. Written by Harmony Korine, the film generated controversy during its release for its graphic depictions of underage drinking and sexuality. In in the intervening years, however, the film, which features early performances from Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, has been considered an important document of the struggles of a certain generation of young Manhattanites. Clark himself will be present for Q&A following the screening.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, 6 p.m. Tickets $25

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9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/9-art-events-to-attend-in-new-york-city-this-week-56-6066/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/9-art-events-to-attend-in-new-york-city-this-week-56-6066/#respond Mon, 28 Mar 2016 15:08:25 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/9-art-events-to-attend-in-new-york-city-this-week-56-6066/
Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent, 2016, still from six-channel video projection with sound. COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNER

Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent (still), 2016, six-channel video projection with sound.

COURTESY DAVID ZWIRNER

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30

COURTESY 56 HENRY

COURTESY 56 HENRY

Opening: Hanna Liden at 56 Henry
The inspiration behind this exhibition, titled “No Weather Data Available,” is curbside detritus and abandoned urban material—specifically umbrellas. Two cast-concrete umbrella sculptures, colored in charcoal and orange, dangle at varying heights from the ceiling, while a third is hung from a noose attached to the ceiling. According to a press release, “Her objects are tragicomic follies, slapstick approximations of quotidian objects, or possibly fossils from an extinct civilization.”
56 Henry, 56 Henry Street, 12–6 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 31

Opening: Michael E. Smith at Andrew Kreps Gallery
After a memorable and totally weird show at SculptureCenter last year, Michael E. Smith gets his first show at Andrew Kreps this week. It’s sure to feature more of his creepy-strange sculptures, which feature used objects like nail guns and soda bottles that the New Hampshire–based artist finds on the street or on eBay. Understated yet also moving, Smith’s work is evocative of Detroit, the economically strained city where he was born. And, though his largely monochromatic work is mournful, Smith’s sculptures are also beautiful—they seem to have organic matter growing on them sometimes, which might mean that, in the wake of extreme tragedy and failure, it’s always possible to start over.
Andrew Kreps Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

SOPHIE MSMSMSM, PRODUCT, 2015. COURTESY NEW MUSEUM

SOPHIE MSMSMSM, Product, 2015.

COURTESY NEW MUSEUM

Panel: SOPHIE at New Museum
Enigmatic artist and producer SOPHIE will host Pupture, an evening exploring synthesis in art. Joined by multi-hyphenate artists including Gerry Bibby, Travis Boyer, Hayden Dunham, FlucT, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, and Henrik Oleson, the discussion will be punctuated by live performances and original music. The group—which offers experience in areas of dance, sound, music, video, photography, painting, and performance—will discuss the role synthesis plays in the creation, structure, and meaning of a work.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $20/15

Talk: William Wegman at the Strand
To celebrate the release of William Wegman: Paintings—a book that takes postcard images and constructs bizarre and humorous worlds around them—the artist will be present to discuss his career with Robert Krulwich, a Peabody Award–winning Radiolab cohost, NPR science correspondent, and general fan of Wegman’s.
The Strand, Rare Book Room, 828 Broadway, 7–8 p.m. Attendees must buy a copy of William Wegman: Paintings or a $20 gift card to attend

Opening: Stan Douglas at David Zwirner
For his 13th solo show in New York, Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas will present a new film titled The Secret Agent. Douglas has been making work about specific locations and past events since the late 1980s, and often uses both new and antiquated technologies as well as the frameworks of existing Hollywood genres such as film noir and the Western. Accompanying the exhibition on West 19th Street, the gallery’s West 20th Street location will present an overview of Douglas’s photographic career from the late 1980s to the present.
David Zwirner, 519 West 19th Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, APRIL 1

Still from Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015). COURTESY ICARUS FILMS

Still from Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).

COURTESY ICARUS FILMS

Screening: No Home Movie at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Last year, one day before No Home Movie had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, Chantal Akerman died at age 65. She was one of film’s greatest feminist voices, and also one of its most underrated, and now BAM and Film Forum have gotten together to give the Belgian director the massive retrospective she deserved. BAM’s retrospective kicks off with a two-week theatrical run for No Home Movie, a documentary about Akerman’s mother that relies on a Blackberry camera and other devices for its cinematography. Formally ambitious and somewhat confounding, the film was booed when it premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival and received gentle praise in America, but it’s a can’t-miss film for fans of Akerman, who once called No Home Movie “the center of my oeuvre.” —Alex Greenberger
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 2 p.m. (also screens 4:30 p.m., 7 p.m., and 9:30 p.m.). Tickets $14/$10/$7

SATURDAY, APRIL 2

Opening: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts
At this point in her career, Maggie Lee is still known mainly for just one work—Mommy, her 2015 feature film that parallels the loss of her mother with the discovery of herself as an artist. That kind of subject matter can be treacly, but, in Lee’s hands, it’s a very stylized, smart affair. Partially a visual essay about how the Internet constructs memory, and partially a very moving documentary, Mommy has understandably been shown in a number of settings, and was even screened theatrically in New York in December. Now, Lee follows her film a solo show at Real Fine Arts. Titled “Fufu’s Dreamhouse,” the show will feature a series of vitrines that act as homes for Japanese Barbie-like dolls. Each vitrine will act as a different personality and is, in a way, a self-portrait for Lee. “Think a teenage girl’s bedroom crossed with hamster cage, if you will,” a gallery spokesperson said in an email. —Alex Greenberger
Real Fine Arts, 673 Meeker Avenue, Brooklyn, 7–10 p.m.

SUNDAY, APRIL 3

A work from Brad Troemel's "New and Handmade by Me." COURTESY FEUER/MESLER AND THE ARTIST

A work from Brad Troemel’s “New and Handmade by Me.”

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FEUER/MESLER

Opening: Brad Troemel at Feuer/Mesler
The phrase “network of production” is thrown around a lot in press releases, but rarely ever is it as literal as when used to describe Brad Troemel’s work. Troemel has become famous for his Internet-based art about how objects get produced and consumed—he cocreated a Tumblr called the Jogging, in which Troemel and others photographed quickly made works, destroyed the objects, and left the images online to get re-blogged by others. (The rapper Gucci Mane used one the Jogging’s images as an album cover.) He continues his interest in how the Internet spurs production with this new show, titled “New and Handmade By Me,” for which Troemel used Pinterest to find techniques that interested him and learned how to make works using glycerin soap, bath bombs, handmade gingerbread houses, and other things. In a very endearing release, Troemel writes, “The idealistic hope for making a healthier world together and the nihilistic paranoia that the world will end at any second once again arrive at the same practical conclusion: doing it yourself. And for this exhibition, ‘New and Handmade by Me,’ that’s just what I’ve done!” —Alex Greenberger
Feuer/Mesler, 319 Grand Street, 2nd Floor, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Sara Greenberger Rafferty at Rachel Uffner 
Sara Greenberger Rafferty turns her attention to external interiority in the form of plastic consumer works, specifically those which fall in the realm of shopping. Images of books, diaries, online clothes shopping, and designer dresses and underwear all serve to represent the notion of “global capitalism and so-called individuality that are worn on the body until stained, frayed, or otherwise worn-out,” according to a release.
Rachel Uffner Gallery, 170 Suffolk Street, 6—8 p.m.

Update, March 30: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the opening date for Stan Douglas’s show at David Zwirner, “The Secret Agent,” as March 30. It is on March 31.

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Chantal Akerman, Revolutionary Feminist Filmmaker and Video Artist, Dies at 65 https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/chantal-akerman-revolutionary-feminist-filmmaker-and-video-artist-dies-at-65-5084/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/chantal-akerman-revolutionary-feminist-filmmaker-and-video-artist-dies-at-65-5084/#respond Tue, 06 Oct 2015 16:14:28 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/artnews/news/chantal-akerman-revolutionary-feminist-filmmaker-and-video-artist-dies-at-65-5084/
Akerman. COURTESY EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL

Chantal Akerman.

COURTESY EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL

Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker who introduced a previously unseen female perspective on domesticity to cinema, and whose video installations dealt with personal histories, died sometime during the past few days. She was 65. Her cause of death has not yet been announced.

Akerman’s most important work is widely considered to be Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which she made when she was just 25 years old. Indulging a neorealist impulse, the film depicts a real-life story in which very little happens—Akerman shows the daily activities of a titular middle-class Belgian housewife, who also works as a prostitute, over the course of three and a half hours. As played by Delphine Seyrig, Jeanne peels potatoes, sits in chairs, and wanders around her home as the film builds toward a more dramatic climax. The camera, mounted on a tripod at a low height, remains trained on Seyrig at all times.

Akerman loosely based Jeanne Dielman on a short, experimental film that she had made in 1968 called Saute Ma Ville, in which the filmmaker is shown blowing up her kitchen. Jeanne Dielman is a lengthier metaphor for this, turning the confined space of the household into a prison, out of which Jeanne wants to break. Taking cues from Andy Warhol’s durational experiments and structuralist filmmaking, Akerman lets everything play out in what feels like real time, and places the camera so that we often see Jeanne’s entire body. Akerman once said she didn’t want to cut “this woman in pieces.”

The film came out in the same year as Laura Mulvey’s feminist essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which first introduced the idea that most films took the perspective of the male gaze. Akerman’s gaze was decidedly female, and she continued to use similar techniques to explore women who live in metaphorical prisons in such films as La Captive (2000), an adaptation of the Marcel Proust novel of the same name. Her interest in women in claustrophobic spaces may have come from her mother, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and told Akerman about her experiences living in a concentration camp. (Akerman’s grandmother was also sent to the camps but did not survive.)

Born in 1950 to a poor Jewish family in Brussels, Akerman, though intelligent and driven, didn’t do well in school. By the time she was a teenager, she was learning Latin and Greek, yet received low grades due to a perceived lack of politeness in class. She was more interested in reading and writing—experiencing literature other than what was required for class, that is—than studying for school.

Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, 1975, still from film. PARADISE FILMS

Film still from Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975, directed by Chantal Akerman.

PARADISE FILMS

Akerman started making films because she saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) when she was a teenager living in Brussels. This film, she said, was different from other mainstream works because it didn’t have a clear narrative, and she knew instantly that it was art. She promptly gave up her dreams of becoming a writer, deciding she wanted to direct films instead. (In 2010, Akerman, known for being opinionated, said in response to a question about Pierrot le Fou, “And I am so angry with Godard that I don’t even want to think about it. Because he is getting to be such an asshole now, and he is anti-Semitic.”)

Much of Akerman’s oeuvre could be considered experimental, though she also made movies that had mainstream appeal. A Couch in New York (1996) starred William Hurt as a psychiatrist living in New York who finds his practice taken over by French woman played by Juliette Binoche. Though less avant-garde than Jeanne Dielman, the film still retains the feminist subtext of many of Akerman’s experimental works and, like many of Akerman’s films, was critically panned. (In interviews, Akerman brushed off her films’ negative reception.)

Akerman’s films still tend to confuse viewers and critics alike. No Home Movie (2014), an autobiographical documentary about Akerman’s mother, Nelly, premiered earlier this year at the Locarno International Film Festival to boos from the audience. (The film premieres in the United States tomorrow night at the New York Film Festival.) Nevertheless, Akerman’s extensive filmography has earned many defenders, most notably the film critic J. Hoberman, who said she is “arguably the most important European director of her generation.” Akerman recently received a two-year retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art London, which wraps up this month with a screening of No Home Movie.

With its embrace of new filmmaking techniques such as the use of a Blackberry camera, and its emphasis on travel and personal histories, No Home Movie comes closer to Akerman’s video installations than any other film she made. In a 2010 interview, Akerman said that she hadn’t thought of making a video installation until Kathy Halbreich, a curator at MoMA, approached her with the idea in 1990. Akerman said yes without really knowing what she wanted to do at first, then ultimately traveling to Eastern Europe to make D’Est (“From the East”) in 1992. The installation toured the world in 1995, stopping at such museums as Paris’s Jeu de Paume and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

That year, D’Est also came to New York, where it was shown at the Jewish Museum over the course of three floors. Akerman’s two-hour film was played on loop, while, on the floor above it, D’Est was broken into fragments and shown on 24 monitors. Then, on the floor above that, Akerman projected a night scene of a city while a soundtrack featuring Akerman reading from the Bible in Hebrew was played in tandem.

Chantal Akerman, NOW, 2015, video installation. ANDREW RUSSETH/ARTNEWS

Chantal Akerman, NOW, 2015, video installation.

ANDREW RUSSETH/ARTNEWS

Eighteen years later, in 2013, Akerman brought another major video work to New York—Maniac Shadows, which she showed at the Kitchen. Like D’Est, Maniac Shadows made use of multiple screens and featured a wide array of images, among them shots of Akerman placing boxes in shopping bags, an image of a hamper in front of a toilet, and appropriated footage of President Obama shaking hands on election night. At the opening of the installation, Akerman read from her long text My Mother Laughs, which later became the soundtrack for the installation.

Akerman also brought two video installations to the Venice Biennale—one in 2001, the other in 2015. Currently featured in Okwui Enwezor’s “All the World’s Futures,” which focuses on politicized art, NOW (2015) is another multi-screen work that was filmed in foreign locales. Footage of the desert is played with deafening sounds of engines, shouts, and pops. The installation is slated to travel to Ambika P3 Gallery, in London, later this month. Other video installations by Akerman showed at Marian Goodman Gallery, which represents her in London, Paris, and New York, and at Frith Street Gallery, which represents her in London.

If installations like NOW seem plain or boring, Akerman has achieved her goal—she always sought to use the everyday to make viewers realize ideas inherent in the world around them. As she said in 1982, “In general, people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday. If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it.” Later, in 2005, she would add, “Anyway, I don’t really believe in the difference between documentary and fiction.”

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