On September 6th of this year Chrysanne and I sent a letter to Chantal Akerman asking if she would do an interview with MOMMY. We sent the letter to her email address at City College. I was not aware that she had the semester off. Just this past Sunday, I remarked to Chrysanne that I hadn’t received any word back, but that her new film No Home Movie was being screened at the New York Film Festival and perhaps she was too busy to respond, still hoping that she might agree to an interview.
It was with great sadness that we heard on Tuesday that she had died the day before. We have posted below a few of the remembrances that have appeared in the press in the last twenty-four hours, along with links to a few of her films.
We understand that there will be a remembrance of her at the New York Film Festival when her film screens there this evening. We would like to pay tribute to her in this modest way. She touched and influenced many artists, perhaps most especially by her insistence on who she was both in her work and in her life.
senses of cinema
Speech read out during the funeral ceremony for Chantal Ackerman at the Pére Lachaise cemetery, Tuesday, 13 October, 2015 by Delphine Horvilleur (France’s third female rabbi).
Vulture.com
Chantal Akerman: Films on How to Be a Woman Alone by Lindsay Zoladz
New Yorker.com
Postscript: Chantal Akerman by Richard Brody
VillageVoice.com
Read J. Hoberman’s 1983 Cover Story on Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman”
by Danny King
Saute ma ville, 1968
Hotel Moneterey, 1972
News From Home, 1977
Chantal Akerman on Jeanne Dielman, 2009
A conversation with Chantal Akerman, Venice 2011
Thank you so much for remembering Chantal Ackerman in this way, even though you weren’t able to do your own interview with her. She will be a little more widely remembered because of it. Cathy