Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [ʃɑ̃tal akɛʁman]; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian filmmaker, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York (2011–2015).
Akerman is best known for her films Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and News from Home (1976). The second of these was ranked the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 "Greatest Films of All Time" critics poll, making her the first woman to top the poll. The other two films also appeared in the same poll.
Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Polish-Jewish parents and émigres, both of whom were Holocaust survivors from Nazi Germany. She was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling. Her mother, Natalia (Nelly), survived for years at Auschwitz, where her own parents were murdered. From a young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and her mother encouraged her to pursue a career rather than marry young.
At age 18, Akerman entered the Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion, a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville, funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.
At age 15, Akerman's viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) inspired her to become a filmmaker. Akerman's first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1971. That year, she moved to New York City, where she would stay until 1972. She considered her time there to be a formative experience, becoming exposed to the works of Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Michael Snow, with the latter's film La région centrale leading to her view of "time as the most important thing in film." Also during this period, she would begin her long collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte.
Her first feature film, the documentary Hotel Monterey (1972), along with the short films La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2, use long takes and structuralist techniques that would become trademarks of her style.
Akerman then returned to Belgium, and in 1974 received critical recognition for her first fiction feature Je, Tu, Il, Elle (I, You, He, She), notable for its depiction of women's sexuality, a theme which would appear again in several of her films. Feminist and queer film scholar B. Ruby Rich believed that Je Tu Il Elle can be seen as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality".
Akerman's most critically-acclaimed film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, was released in 1975, and presents a largely real-time study of a middle-aged widow's routine of domestic chores and prostitution. Upon the film's release, Le Monde called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema". Scholar Ivonne Margulies says the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting feminism and anti-illusionism. The film was named the 19th greatest film of the 20th century by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice. In December 2022, Jeanne Dielman was awarded first place by Sight & Sound magazine's "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time" list, as voted by critics, becoming the fourth film to do so after Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles thus became the first film directed by a woman to top the list and, together with Beau Travail, one of the first two such films to appear in the top 10.
Akerman has used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity. The kitchens in her work provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation, functioning as a backdrop to the dramas of daily life. The kitchens, alongside other domestic spaces, act as self-confining prisons under patriarchal conditions. In Akerman's work, the kitchen often acts as a domestic theatre.
Akerman is usually grouped within feminist and queer thinking, but she articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism. Akerman resisted labels relating to her identity like "female", "Jewish" and "lesbian", choosing instead to immerse herself in the identity of being a daughter; she said she saw film as a "generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity". She advocated for multiplicity of expression, explaining, "when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves". For Akerman, there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals.
Margulies argues that Akerman's resistance to categorization is in response to the rigidity of cinema's earlier essentialist realism and "indicates an awareness of the project of a transhistorical and transcultural feminist aesthetics of the cinema".
Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public. In Jeanne Dielman, the protagonist does not supply a transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality. Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances.
Akerman engages with realist representations, a form historically grounded to act as a feminist gesture and simultaneously as an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman".
Akerman's later films experimented with differing genres and tempos, including the comedy Golden Eighties (1986), and several documentaries. In 2013, she published Ma mère rit ("My Mother Laughs"), a memoir about the last years of her mother's life. It was published in English, translated by Daniella Shreir, in 2019. Her final film, No Home Movie, was released in 2015.
In 1991, Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival. In 2011, she joined the full-time faculty of the MFA Program in Media Arts Production at the City College of New York as a distinguished lecturer and the first Michael & Irene Ross Visiting Professor of Film/Video & Jewish Studies. Akerman was also Professor of Film at The European Graduate School.
Solo exhibitions of Akerman's work have been held at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium (2012), MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts (2008), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2006); Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ (2006); and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2003). Akerman participated in Documenta XI (2002) and the Venice Biennale (2001).
In 2011, a film retrospective of Akerman's work was shown at the Austrian Film Museum.
The 2015 Venice Biennale included her final video installation, Now, an installation of interspersed parallel screens displaying the landscape-in-motion footage that would appear in No Home Movie. In 2018, the Manhattan Jewish Museum presented the installation in the exhibition Scenes from the Collection, and acquired her work for the collection. Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featured From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l'installation (2007) in early 2022.