Akerman constructs a wryly funny, vividly colourful musical-microcosm one that succeeds in being effervescent and wildly entertaining at the same time as sharply critical in its depiction of love and desire in an era of unbridled consumerism. Carefully assembled window displays, neon salon signs, artificial plants and elegantly posed mannequins become the backdrop against which the film’s brightly clothed cast gossip, flirt, laugh, cry, sing and dance. In Golden Eighties (1986), Chantal Akerman draws her viewer into the immaculate, fluorescently lit, meticulously constructed and glimmering world of a Parisian shopping mall. Her work is about the burdens of humanity, of liminal existence, and the exilic ‘outsiderness’ of much of the world’s population, existing in a permanent state of exile from their homelands, which they can never truly leave in their heart and imagination. In Senses of Cinema’s Great Directors series, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster summed up an insightful essay with this paragraph “Akerman worked on the borders of cinema and video, often in an unsettling manner, occasionally turning to conventional narratives in the hope of funding other projects with a substantial commercial success, but always returning to studies of isolation, alienation, and loss, her true terrain as an artist.
Her most notable film is Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was born in Brussels to Holocaust survivors. At age 18, she entered the Belgian national film school but dropped out during her first term and embarked on making a short film Saute ma ville she funded the film’s costs by trading diamond shares.ĭuring her career she made forty-two films of varying lengths.
0 kommentar(er)
