Each year Sight & Sound updates their list of ‘The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time’. The huge jury of critics, programmers and academics came to the grand total of 846 while the number of films by female directors they chose was… 1.
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE 1080 BRUXELLES (1975) directed by Chantal Akerman –
Chantal Akerman was only 25 when she made this film (the same age that Welles made CITIZEN KANE in fact).
Chantal Akerman, at the 1982 Venice Film Festival, where she presented her romantic and choreographic masterwork “Toute une Nuit.”
Directors like Todd Haynes, Sally Potter and Michael Haneke have credited Ms. Akerman as a major influence. J. Hoberman, a former film critic for The Village Voice, likened her to Mr. Godard and to the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, once calling her “arguably the most important European director of her generation.”
Mr. Mazzanti recalled asking Ms. Akerman how she had edited “Hotel Monterey,” a silent film about a Lower Manhattan hotel that she had made in 1972. “She said, ‘I was breathing, and then at one point I understood it was the time to cut. It was my breathing that decided the length of my shots,’ ” he said. “That’s Chantal Akerman. She breathed through the films,” he said. “She was cinema.”
One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman takes a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion.
Jeanne Dielman understands what all the best works of cinema do: implication and occurrence are two different things. Where so many mediocre films deal in visual shorthand that merely suggests to us that certain events have happened, this one has its events actually take place. That this builds their importance far beyond any quick-cut battle for the very future of humanity might point toward an answer to the feminist question: these are domestic duties we’re watching, and the film treats them with a gravity that somehow goes beyond aesthetics. You could call its story tragic, but just by existing it demonstrates an artistic fact that’s sadder than anything going on in its content. By letting its content dictate its form — or rather, by letting its content and form exist in symbiosis — the film achieves what most films could if they did the same. But almost no film does.
From the Other Side is an unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants as they attempt the dangerous crossing from Agua Prieta in Sonora, Mexico, to Douglas, Ariz. (Via)
Last month Marian Goodman gallery (New York) exhibited Chantal Akerman’s photographs. (Chantal’s main audience is from museums, galleries and film societies.)
The first time I was introduced to Chantal Akerman’a work was her documenatary film on Pina Bausch.
(An Italian version of this film is cut awkwardly in 6 parts, now provided on youtube).
A Couch in New York – trailer (Chantal’s most accessible film starring Juliet Binoche and William Hurt)
A week ago I decided to see “La Captive” starring my favorite actress Sylvie Testud.
Here was a review by Hoberman (scroll down)
Chantal Akerman’s La Captive is another sort of psycho-epistemological inquiry that asks: How can we know another?
Visual as La Captive is in its rigorously formal compositions, the filmmaker is straightforwardly concerned with language. She filters her Proust through the old nouveau roman of Duras or Robbe-Grillet to fixate on recurring phrases: “au contraire,” “if you like,” “you think so?” Similarly, Akerman takes situations from Proust and elaborately defamiliarizes them.
