The filmmaker Chantal Akerman died – Le Point

bold and eclectic filmmaker, figure of modern cinema in the 70s, the Belgian director Chantal Akerman died Monday in Paris at the age of 65, leaving nearly 50 films, including Jeanne Dielman and The Captive . Achievement of bipolar disorder for many years, she ended her days, according to his entourage.

“It was a great filmmaker that by its singularity, has revolutionized few sections of international cinema “said its producer Patrick Quinet. “This is someone extraordinary in its path as it made documentary, fiction, musicals, comedies or most austere film,” he added. The director of the French Cinematheque Serge Toubiana hailed “a woman of passion”, which “explored all facets of cinema – not just the vanguard – with energy, fearless manner with bulimia and candor” and “with incredible courage, a little to the point of leaving his skin. “

Audace

Born in Brussels June 6, 1950, from a family of Jews came from Poland moving to Belgium in the 30s, Chantal Akerman began his career in the late 60s At the age of 17, this pretty brunette with blue eyes and sparkling eyes directed his first short film, Saute my city , in which a young woman detonated her apartment by committing suicide.

Marked to debut by the experimental American cinema, it is then known in the 70′s with I, you, he, she (1974), a story of wandering of a young woman in which she plays the lead role, and especially with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels (1975) with Delphine Seyrig. The film, which tells the life of a prostitute that Brussels is a description of contemporary alienation, “a spatial confinement and mental history,” a “film about space and time and how to organize his life to have no free time, not to get overwhelmed by anxiety and obsession with death, “explained the filmmaker.

Very bold formally including his work on the body, Jeanne Dielman will mark many filmmakers, including American directors Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes. Chantal Akerman has “broken including traditional codes of storytelling,” said Minister of Culture Fleur Pellerin, paying tribute to “a brilliant figure of cinema and contemporary art.”

“button -to-all “

Changing register completely, Chantal Akerman then tries in the 80 and 90 including the musical with Golden Eighties . It also explores a more mainstream cinema with the comedy A Couch in New York with Juliette Binoche and William Hurt, in which a New York exchange psychoanalyst’s apartment with a French before misunderstandings s’ linked together.

Sailing regularly between documentary and fiction, the Belgian filmmaker realized in the 2000s The Captive (2000), loosely based on The Prisoner Marcel Proust, with Stanislas Merhar and Sylvie Testud or Tomorrow We Move again with Sylvie Testud and Aurore Clément.

After La Folie Almayer (2012), adapted from a novel by Joseph Conrad, his latest film, the documentary No Movi Home , dedicated to his mother, who had survived the concentration camps, was presented this summer at the Festival Locarno (Switzerland). His intimate family history, but also the memory, exile, the withdrawal, his Jewish identity and a certain melancholy origins were among the favorite themes of Chantal Akerman, who freely spoke of his mental disorders.

Also visual artist, Chantal Akerman, one of the latest facilities, Now , was presented in May at the Venice Biennale, was “a jack-of-all,” a “profusion culture and invention “according to its producer. She recently worked on an adaptation of The Idiot Dostoevsky for cinema.