25 Facts About Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland.

Chantal Akerman was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling.

At age 18, Chantal Akerman entered the, a Belgian film school.

Chantal Akerman dropped out during her first term to make the short film, funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange.

At age 15, Chantal Akerman's viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou inspired her to become a filmmaker.

Chantal Akerman has used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity.

Chantal Akerman is usually grouped within feminist and queer thinking, but she articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism.

Chantal Akerman 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 Chantal Akerman, there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals.

Chantal 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".

In 1991, Chantal Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.

Chantal Akerman was Professor of Film at The European Graduate School.

Solo exhibitions of Chantal Akerman's work have been held at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium, MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel ; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ ; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Chantal Akerman participated in Documenta XI and the Venice Biennale.

In 2011, a film retrospective of Chantal Akerman's work was shown at the Austrian Film Museum.

Art curator Kathy Halbreich writes that Chantal Akerman "creates a cinema of waiting, of passages, of resolutions deferred".

Many of Chantal Akerman's films portray the movement of people across distances or their absorption with claustrophobic spaces.

Chantal Akerman used the boredom of structuralism to generate a bodily feeling in the viewer, accentuating the passage of time.

Chantal Akerman was influenced by European art cinema as well as structuralist film.

Chantal Akerman cites Michael Snow as a structuralist inspiration, especially his film Wavelength, which is composed of a single shot of a photograph of a sea on a loft wall, with the camera slowly zooming in.

Chantal Akerman was drawn to the perceived dullness of structuralism because it rejected the dominant cinema's concern for plot.

Art historian Terrie Sultan writes that Chantal Akerman's "narrative is marked by an almost Proustian attention to detail and visual grace".

Chantal Akerman had an extremely close relationship with her mother, which was captured in several of her films.

Chantal Akerman acknowledged that her mother was at the center of her work and admitted to feeling directionless after her death.

Chantal Akerman died by suicide on 5 October 2015 in Paris, at the age of 65.