Chantal Akerman è un'attrice belga, regista, produttrice, sceneggiatrice, fotografa, montatrice, è nata il 6 giugno 1950 a Bruxelles (Belgio) ed è morta il 5 ottobre 2015 all'età di 65 anni a Parigi (Francia).
È figlia di genitori ebrei, operai. Frequenta, per un breve periodo, la scuola di cinema di Bruxelles. Poi gira un cortometraggio, Saute, ma ville (Salta, città mia), che rivela già alcune caratteristiche del suo stile e delle sue tematiche, come la quotidianità quale molla di eventi drammatici ed eccezionali. Nel 1971 gira a Hyères, nel sud della Francia, un secondo cortometraggio L'enfant aimé (Il bambino adorato), confessione di una prostituta in cui si affacciano le tematiche femministe. Poi, a New York, entra in contatto con il new american cinema. Dopo due cortometraggi sperimentali, realizza il suo primo lungometraggio, Hotel Monterey (1972), sulla vita di uno squallido albergo della 94 Strada. Inizia le riprese di Yonkers 73 (1973), che non porta a termine, e rientra in Europa. Nel 1974 dirige Je, tu, il, elle (Io, tu, lui, lei), dove la protagonista Chantal nell'arco di una giornata ha vari incontri più o meno liberatori e riusciti dal punto di vista della comunicazione. Del 1975 è il film che la rivela al Festival di Cannes: Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles descrizione della vita quotidiana di una casalinga, saltuariamente dedita alla prostituzione, in sequenze che sottolineano l'ossessionante ripetitività e automaticità dei gesti della protagonista. Del 1977 è News from Home (Notizie da casa), un film girato a New York. Sulle immagini (che rivelano volti diversi della città) l'autrice legge le lettere della madre, dando un addio all'adolescenza. Con Les rendez-vous d'Anna (Gli appuntamenti di Anna, 1978) ripropone nel percorso della protagonista (una regista, interpretata da Lea Massari) i suoi temi più tipici: il rapporto con la madre, i legami con la cultura ebraica, la capacità di comunicazione tra donne. Negli anni '80 gira Dix mais (Dieci mesi, 1980), Toute une nuit (Tutta una notte, 1982), Les années 80 (Gli anni '80, 1983), e il documentario sulla danzatrice Pina Bausch: Un jour Pina a demandé (Un giorno Pina ha chiesto, 1983). J'ai faim, j'ai froid (Ho fame, ho freddo , 1984), un cortometraggio, Family Business (Un affare di famiglia, 1985) il video New York, New York bis, lettre d'un cinéaste (New York, New York bis, lettera di un cineasta , 1984), Golden Eighties (I dorati anni '80, 1985), Seven Women Seven Sins (Sette donne sette peccati, 1988), Histoires d'Amerique (Storie d'America, 1988). Il suo cinema tende alla sdrammatizzazione e rifiuta le tradizionali convenzioni narrative, a favore di una destrutturazione del racconto attraverso l'uso del piano sequenza e del tempo reale. Sono procedimenti linguistici e tecnici che consentono al regista di cogliere la realtà nel suo farsi, con una insistenza minuziosa sui particolari, una volontà sperimentale e inquisitiva che hanno poche rispondenze nello stesso cinema di avanguardia o in quello ispirato dalla rivoluzione della nouvelle vague. Accettando parzialmente le convenzioni generali del racconto, ma frantumandole negli sviluppi dell'azione fra i personaggi, realizza nel 1991 Nuit et jour (Notte e giorno) con G. Londez e T. Langman, storia di un triangolo amoroso in cui è la donna a condurre il gioco (il film è presentato alla Mostra di Venezia). Nel 1993 espone al fiorentino Festival dei Popoli D'Est, un documentario romanzato che narra un lungo viaggio dalla ex Germania orientale a Mosca. Nel 1995 torna in Usa, come fa regolarmente alternando il soggiorno americano con i viaggi in Europa, e gira un film rigorosamente strutturato - Un divano a New York - con Juliette Binoche e William Hurt. Non si comprende se questo ondeggiare nevrotico da un tema all'altro, da un racconto a una sperimentazione, da un tentativo di normale fiction a una totale dissoluzione del tessuto narrativo, nasca da incertezze psichiche e culturali profonde oppure dalla riaffermazione continua di una libertà - di vita, di espressione - cui un cineasta ha diritto. Come se la regista si muovesse sul crinale di una doppia vita. Questo connotato si trova anche in La Captive - La prigioniera (2000) liberamente tratto dal romanzo di Marcel Proust La prisonnièree in De l'autre côté (2002), storia di povertà e degrado degli immigrati messicani negli USA.
I suoi lavori più recenti sono Demain, on déménage (2004) e Là-bas (2006). Da Nuovo dizionario universale del cinema - Gli autori, Editori Riuniti 1996
THE Belgian director Chantal Akerman fills her movies with patterns and textures of ordinary life, the stuff other films never even notice. The most extreme and best-known incarnation of her cinema of the everyday remains her second feature, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), a three-hour-15-minute drama that manages to extract dread and suspense from the monotonous daily routine of a Brussels housewife.
The methodical deadpan of the film's title mirrors its approach. Using static, head-on compositions and unblinking blocks of real time, it details three days in the repetitive existence of a 40ish middle-class widow (the French art-film goddess Delphine Seyrig, dowdier than in “Last Year at Marienbad” but no less enigmatic). Jeanne, who lives with her teenage son, proceeds through her endless checklist of chores with automaton efficiency. She cooks, she cleans, she shops, and every afternoon, in the window of time it takes for the dinner potatoes to boil, she has sex for money with a gentleman caller.
A portrait of female domesticity coming undone, of a woman who is both mother and whore, “Jeanne Dielman” became an instant landmark in academic circles, especially for feminist film theorists. It is no one's idea of a commercial movie; it did not receive a New York theatrical run until 1983, at Film Forum (where it is being revived in a new print starting Friday), and it has never been released on home video in this country.
But it has long enjoyed canonical status among cinephiles and regularly turns up on critics' polls of all-time great films. With “Jeanne Dielman,” Ms. Akerman forged a link between the high modernism of golden-age European cinema and the emerging trend of postmodernist deconstruction. Today the film's observational strategies — its long takes and scrupulous framing — practically amount to a lingua franca of international art film, discernible in the works of artists from Portugal's Pedro Costa to Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul to China's Jia Zhangke. Among American independents, its descendants include Todd Haynes's “Safe,” Lodge Kerrigan's “Claire Dolan” and Gus Van Sant's “Last Days.”
It only burnishes the legend that Ms. Akerman was all of 25 when she made the film. “It's not very modest of me, but I'm still so proud I did it at that age,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Paris.
“A lot of it came unconsciously,” added Ms. Akerman, who is now 58. “When I wrote it, it ran like a river.” What she produced was less a script than “a nouveau roman book,” she said, a fastidious account of her heroine's every action. “Delphine Seyrig complained that there was so much detail she didn't have to invent anything.”
It was a few days into the shoot — she worked with an almost all-female crew, including the cinematographer Babette Mangolte — before she realized that the film would exceed three hours. While some movies have no greater aim than to make the time fly, “Jeanne Dielman” means to convey the full weight of duration. The audience is required to experience just how long it takes to make the bed, do the dishes, set the table, scrub the tub, brew a pot of coffee, prepare a meatloaf, eat a bowl of soup and so on. Ms. Akerman's extended takes go so far as to alter the viewer's physical relationship with the movie. Adapting to the pace of “Jeanne Dielman” can seem like a matter of recalibrating one's biorhythms.
While Ms. Akerman acknowledges that the rise of women's studies lifted the film's reputation in the United States, she has little patience for the various “isms” — feminism, minimalism, structuralism — that have framed the discussion around it. “I don't think it's minimalist,” she said. “I think it's maximalist. It's big! And if I did the film now I don't know that it would be called feminist. It could have been done about a man, too.
“All those labels are a bit annoying,” she continued. “To name something is a way to possess it. I think it makes the film smaller. And O.K., maybe they are right, but they are never right enough.”
The labels are inadequate, but they fall away in the face of this severe yet majestic movie. Nothing can quite prepare the first-time viewer for the force of Ms. Akerman's concentration, for the film's overwhelming concreteness or the horrifying logic of its ending. “In most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life,” she said. “This film is about his own life.”
More specifically, it is about a defensive, anesthetized kind of life, and the perilously thin line between sanity and madness — themes that resonate beyond the context of domestic drudgery. “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won't be depressed or anxious,” Ms. Akerman said. “She didn't want to have one free hour because she didn't know how to fill that hour.”
Ms. Akerman has explored self-portraiture throughout her career, starring in her sexually polymorphous first feature, “Je Tu Il Elle” (1974), and juxtaposing the Manhattan cityscapes in “News From Home” (1977) with letters from her mother. “Jeanne Dielman,” she stressed, is no less personal. “It came from what I saw as a kid — all those gestures of my mother,” she said. “That's why the film is so precise.”
She connected Jeanne's obsessiveness to her own memories of growing up in a devout Jewish household in Brussels, where “life was organized by rituals,” she said. “I'm not religious, but making a film is so important to me that there is something sacred about it.”
Ms. Akerman has gone on to a rich and varied career, earning critical praise for the Soviet-bloc travelogue “From the East” (1993) and the Proust adaptation “La Captive” (2000), as well as for her video installations. (Her next film will be based on the Joseph Conrad novel “Almayer's Folly,” about a Dutch trader in the jungles of Borneo.) But like Orson Welles, who also made his debut, “Citizen Kane,” at 25, she has never escaped the outsize shadow of an early masterpiece.
“I sometimes think I should have made it after many other films, at the end of my career,” she said. “I remember saying to myself, how can I make a better film? But it was also exactly the film I had to make then. It says something about a woman, about a way of living a life, about life after the war. It was the first thing I had to pour out of myself.”
She added, “I would have changed nothing about it.”
Da The New York Times, 18 gennaio, 2009
