LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Chantal Akerman
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Chantal Akerman's A Family in Brussels is an audio record of a performance of the artist reading. The "stream of consciousness" text contains autobiographical references to family, belonging and distance. The text encompasses multiple subjectivities, shifting between first and third person as Akerman tells the story of her mother's life, and consequently, of herself as well.
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The films of Chantal Akerman have had a profound impact on both feminist filmmaking discourse and avant-garde cinema. In works such as JU TU IL ELLE (1974), JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DE COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975), LES RENDEZ-VOUS D'ANNA (1978), HISTOIRES D'AMERIQUE (1989) and D'EST (1993), Akerman has continued to create new and unexpected films which explore ideas about the image, the gaze, space, performance and narration, and shown herself to be an uncompromising and dedicated practitioner of the cinema.
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The titular grammaticism of Chantal Akerman's first feature film refers to the structure, with three roughly 30-minute blocks progressing through modern-day Brussels. Je is 24-year-old Akerman trying to write a letter in a bare room, musing sparsely on the soundtrack, wolfing down spoonful after spoonful of sugar right out of a bag, and lounging naked in front of a glass door. Il is handsomely scruffy truck driver Niels Arestrup, with whom she hitches a ride, shares a pit-stop beer, gives a below-the-frame handjob to, and listens to his monologue about his wife, kids, and on-the-road screws. Elle is the estranged lover (Claire Wauthion) Akerman suddenly drops by on; sandwiches and explicit girl-on-girl action soon follow, before she silently packs up in the morning and marches out. The audience, of course, is the Tu, watching from the other side of the screen yet included into it by the auteur's Warholian inclusive use of the viewer's own perceptions into shaping what transpires in front of the cameras. Warhol's shadow is ... in the static, real-time fascination with eating a meal or shaving a beard, yet the film is fully Akerman's.
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Chantal Akerman is giving a retrospective at Montreal's 'Cinematheque Quebecoise'. From September 28 to October 15, 2006. On September 28 she personally introduced the following screenings: 'Saute ma ville' the first movie she made when she was 18 (1968). It's about an individual which she interprets herself. It is a very spontaneous movie where adolescence can be felt. Her most recent movie was screened as well: 'Là-bas (2006)'.
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Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1950, into a family that had been victim to the Holocaust. It was after having seen Pierrot le Fou, by Jean-Luc Godard, that she decided to devote herself to filmmaking, at 15 years of age. In 1967, she attended the Belgium Film School for three months and then went to the International University of Theatre in Paris. Between 1971 and 1974, she lived New York's '70s avant-garde scene, where she came to know Jonas Mekas', Stan Brakhage's and Michael Snow's work. In 1974 she shot her first feature film, Je tu il elle, in which certain constant motifs of her work already appear, such as uprootedness, isolation and solitude, migration, desire and sexuality.
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Chantal Akerman was born to Polish Holocaust survivors in Brussels in 1950. At the age of 15, she decided to make films after watching Jean-Luc Godard's landmark film Pierrot le fou (1965). In 1967, she enrolled in the Belgian film school INSAS, after which she attended the Université Internationale du Théâtre in Paris. She soon left school because she was more interested in making films than in sitting in a classroom.
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Chantal Akerman