Structuring Strategies Antigoni Kapaka
Final Paper BFA1 - Film & Video

Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman was born in Brussels, Belgium in the 6th of June 1950. She was the daughter of Polish Jews parents who survived the Holocaust. Cantal’s first ambition was to become a writer. Her passion for filmmaking begun at the age of 15 when she went at the screening Jean-Luc Godard’s film Pierrot le fou, that made her he settled down the way in which she would express her concerns, questions, and even confrontation of the reality she lived in. Her revolutionary and free spirit became evident from her early teens, when at the age of 14 she dropped out of school because she couldn’t bear being trapped in the four rooms of a classroom. At the age of 18, Chantal enters the Belgian film school Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion and after spending some months there, she dropped out to make her first film Saute ma ville. The …show more content…
As she personally stated, "I happens to be a woman and I know these problems, but this is not my only concern when I make movies ... I do not make films for women. I make the movies of Chantal Ackerman”. Famous for her close ups on her heroines and the long lasting shots that were established as a feature of her own personal style, Chantal Ackerman did not believe in the division of documentary and fiction. She wanted to devote as much time as needed for the audience to understand the characters of her movies and she never succumbed to the calls of the times, insisting in a cinema so personal that eventually involved the human condition more than she could