Daniella Shreir is an editor, translator and programmer for film festivals.
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...
Le Festival de Cannes was inaugurated in 1939 to coincide with – and compete with – the Venice Film Festival. The previous year, Leni Riefenstahl had been awarded the Mussolini Cup for Olympia, leading the American representative on the jury to leave the ceremony in protest. Cannes was chosen in the hope that the festival would revive its appeal as a luxury destination, which...
Chantal Akerman’s films don’t have conventional plots with a beginning, middle and end. Yet nearly all the obituaries, following her death at the age of 65 this month, described how Akerman was inspired to make her first film at the age of 18 after watching Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, and said that Gus Van Sant cited Akerman as one of his major inspirations. Over and over, we were given her genesis as a filmmaker and the promise of her reincarnation, bookended by two credible male auteurs.
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