A feminist, lesbian and female filmmaker. That was Chantal Akerman, although she publicly refused such classification. Not that she would disagree with it, she just considered it too vague. She preferred to refer to herself as a daughter, or more accurately, a daughter of a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust; and now she’s been laughing even though she’s crying. Their lifelong, mutually beneficial daughter-mother relationship was intensely interwoven into two of Akerman’s films: the epistolary News from Home (1976) and her final documentary No Home Movie (2015) about her mother’s last days.
Instead of typification, Akerman adopted authenticity and a sense of descriptive, yet evocative detail. The widowed housewife from her famous chef-d’oeuvre lived at a specific address: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975). Other times, she chose to be surprisingly universal, like in the title of her feature debut I, You, He, She (1974). But this was only to reflect her multilayered personality and to draw attention to how these pronouns can converge and intertwine in one singular point instead of dividing, fragmenting and separating.
However, meeting Chantal Akerman means more than an encounter with a unique creative artist. Her constant pendling between New York and Brussels gave birth to a unique fusion of American avant-garde and European art film where modernism merges with realism, fiction with documentary, alienating detachment with hypnotising rhythm of everyday life. Who else than an uprooted cosmopolitan author with no home could settle so widely and variedly in their work?