Daniella Shreir at the LRB:
At the age of fifteen, Chantal Akerman sneaked into a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou. She was in the habit of skipping school with her friends and the cinema was one of their preferred hangout spots. But until that moment, Akerman had thought of it as a place for flirting and kissing, which were ‘the same thing as dancing’. She hadn’t heard of Godard but liked the film’s title. She discovered something more enticing than flirting: ‘I knew there was someone there in front of me and I had to be present, too. [The film] required me to exist.’ The experience was unrepeatable. Every film to come would be ‘less good than Pierrot le fou’. This is the story Akerman repeated, and was often asked to repeat, throughout her life, as if it might provide the key to understanding how a high school and film school dropout, whose parents had no interest in cinema, might at the age of 24 make Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).
Until recently, most people had their first encounter with Akerman in the classroom. The rise of the women’s movement coincided with that of film studies and Akerman’s films were disseminated and dissected by women film professors.
more here.
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