Chantal Akerman has died. Cause of death was suicide. She was 65 years old. I wrote about Akerman’s News From Home a few years ago here on Dangerous Minds. As a tribute to her fine work as a director, cinematographer and writer, I am sharing it again. 
 

 
The films of Chantal Akerman are meditations on space, interior and exterior, and the emptiness within the clutter of both. There is a sense of alienation and distance in her films that can be chilly and desolate. The camera moored to the urbanscapes and architecture she sets her eye upon. Her art records the simple drama that exists in the day to day rhythm of life as lived, rarely pumped up by any narrative or cinematic gimmickry. Under the steady gaze of the camera the ordinary can be quite magical. 
 

 
In Akerman’s News From Home , the main character is New York in the rough and tumble ‘70s. Akerman, a young woman alone in the city during perilous times, uses the camera as a means of dealing with a new and alien reality.  As Akerman reads from letters sent from Belgium written by her concerned mother, we watch Manhattan in constant movement, a living, breathing thing. Among the people, buildings, automobiles and streets of the city, there is the quiet, lonely soul who observes and feels apart from it all - watching detached, without engagement but great curiosity. The letters create an intimacy that contrasts profoundly with the coolness of the imagery.
 

 
Shot in 1977, News From Home, captures New York at a time when many artists, like Akerman, were coming to the city to tap into the energy and to be challenged by the prospects of living in the belly of the beast. It was a wonderful time, but it was also a dark time. In these images, you see a city on the cusp of transformation…for the good and the bad. From a purely historical point of view, to see 90 uninterrupted minutes of Manhattan in the mid-70s is a treat for my eyes. Rich with memories. This is the New York that informed revolutions in popular arts and spawned the arrival of punk culture.
 

 
Click the option to watch it in high definition, the clarity is stunning.
 

 
Director Chantal Akerman’s most famous for her feminist masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, wherein the seemingly unremarkable protagonist sells sex to provide for her son and herself. The prostitution is portrayed as just another part of her banal daily routine (the 201 minute long film really emphasizes routine), until an anomaly disrupts her life’s pattern, and her entire world is thrown into chaos.

Akerman was only 24 at the time of the film’s release, but her short, Saute ma Ville, or Blow up My Town, is in many ways the prelude to Jeanne Dielman, and she made that at the age of 18. Akerman actually dropped out of film school before completing a single term to work on it, selling stocks and working in an office to fund the twelve and a half minutes that eventually paved the way for her three hour plus opus.

As with Jeanne Dielman, intense, oppressive boredom and domestic isolation are the context for our heroine. Akerman herself stars as the principle, frenetically humming her way through a kind of manic episode. What starts as a routine evening at home descends into a frenzy; she tapes up the door to her cramped apartment, she smears and flings cleaning products with wild abandon, and she goes from shining her shoes to scrubbing her actual leg with the stiff-bristled brush.

Akerman credits her artistic awakening to a viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou at the age of 15, and the French New Wave influence is obvious—themes of torturous, lonely bourgeois life told with intimacy and informality. Akerman however, adds a horrifying dimension of psychosis that both discomfits and fascinates.
 

 
Via Network Awesome