The French daily Libération and Le Monde , and the Belgian public television, RTBF, reported about the death of Chantal Akerman, at age 65. The Le Monde is the one to advance a cause, ensuring that the director committed suicide on Monday.
The death of Akerman was confirmed to AFP in the early afternoon by the producer, Patrick Quinet, who declined to talk about the causes. The French news agency adds, however, that he suffered from “manic-depressive disorders.”
“It was a great director who, for their uniqueness, revolutionized some segments of international cinema,” said Quinet.
Chantal Akerman was in fact one of the great contemporary filmmakers, a singular interpreter, and often sublime, an idea of cinematic modernity. Was “daughter” of marriage between the New Wave – as sometimes hundreds said, the vocation awoke to him, she had 15 years when he saw the Pierrot le Fou Godard – and the American avant-garde, the Warhols, Mekas, Brakhages and etc. he met up close when, still young, in the early 1970s, was catching the tail of the then bustling New York art scene.
Your film is born of this desire for freedom and constant experimentation, but always-formed a rigorous, tough design and sometimes very austere, the mise en scène as a structural exercise – as in the case of one of his most famous films, made in the 70′s (was Chantal 25, was an example of precocity), Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , haunting repetition of exercise routine gradually degraded and eroded.
Largely because of this movie – that evoked the condition “captive” of a woman of Belgian middle class – glued to him the filmmaker label “feminist”. What if Chantal refused the labels and “ghettização” (not made, for example, that his films pass at festivals defined by some kind of sexual orientation) it is clear that the female figures dominate his work, including “double” of her own sometimes played by herself, thus confusing the self-representation borders (Case sublime Je Tu Il Elle , which is even a ousadíssimo work of self-figuration, comparable only to things that César Monteiro would years later), and the evocation of maternal figures – his mother, to whom she dedicated the last film left, At Home Movie , premiered at the Locarno Film Festival this year, was a survivor of Auschwitz and the shadow of that family background is a concern that runs through the anguish of many of his films.
Chantal, extremely prolific filmmaker (though somewhat less in recent years), did a bit of everything. The experimental tests (such as Hotel Monterey ) to documentaries: D’Est , in the early 90s, remains one of the essential films about the landscape of the former Eastern Bloc in post-Soviet period.
It was the world of the meeting, filmed Israel ( La-Bas ) and returned several times to the United States, motivated by emotional and cultural proximity to America ( Sud , also in the 90s, is an attempt to plunge into the sociological complexity of the southern United States).
But it was also a director of fiction, in countless movies that prolonged dialogue between modernity and classicism of forms – such as Une Chambre à New York , under the aegis of romantic comedies of old Hollywood, or The Captive , beautiful “reinvention” of Vertigo Hitchcock in light of Proust, or vice versa.
In 2012, DocLisboa and Cinematheque presented a full retrospective of his work, excellent opportunity to seize the wonderful density authentic constellation that is his filmography. There was still a lot to expect from it, it is a great and unexpected loss. The 2015 edition of Doc will screen out of competition At Home Movie .
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