Chantal Ackerman … the cinematography of women in all conditions

Five years after the suicide of Chantal Ackerman (1950-2015). The radical and moderate woman. Hades and Professional. Realism and personality that persistently, meticulously, decisively and firmly refused to give in to the wrong image or embellish life in cinema and art in general. At the age of fifteen, the cinema discovered its little history with the Jean-Luc Godard film “Crazy Piarot” (1965), which became a legend: “I did not know who Godard was, I did not know that a film could be a work of art. This movie was completely different. I felt like he was talking to me. As if it were poetry. I left the room thinking: I also want to make movies.

Grimly, Ackerman repeated that she was overwhelmed by not knowing how to do a better job, even after three decades; He wondered if he had made it. He has always hesitated to frame his career. He walked a varied path, impossible to classify in any pattern or shape; “I’m a woman, I’m Jewish, I’m a filmmaker and writer, and I’m gay, so you can’t put me in a box.” However, he rejected these identity labels and liked to surrender to the identity of the daughter.
Ackerman gave it his all; From private documentary to experimental to fiction. She retained common features in all her works, including: formal rigor, tragic sense of existence, life as an art object or art as a way of life, and a vision of a world that places limits on women and, on occasions, criticizes them. Her films are a resource for evoking memories and a politically engaged feminist passion. Ackerman’s cinema invades everyday reality, not revealing but creating something. Cinema is like a balm for a generation that wants to dream of the impossible, for the victims of the interwar period, for those who live on the margins.

The movement in his films is in the frame and in the character that inhabits it

Ackerman’s talent is not only in his films, but also in listening to people and uniquely portraying their lives on screen. Your movies can be slow, long, and without much camera movement; Because movement resides in the frame and in the personality that inhabits it. This is a greater film talent, this is sympathy. In Ackerman’s cinema we feel time; We have the possibility to contemplate while on the screen a woman is eating panela with a spoon in an empty room. His films are of revenge, with a bellicose tone towards the traditional vision of women. Nevertheless; She says that she is not a feminist filmmaker, “When people ask me if I am a feminist filmmaker, I answer that I am a woman and I also make films.” Her cinema puts the hidden, everyday and ordinary work of women on the same level as murder, as she herself put it. He created a cinema with a non-voyeuristic vision; It revealed the oppression of women in the everyday environment. It aimed to show the isolation of women living in a society that restricts their freedom and dictates roles.
Ackerman refused to study cinematographic techniques, believing they create pseudo-barriers of expression that restrict creative freedom. It was against cinema as a mystery, that cinema that seeks to subjugate the viewer to a certain idea and immerse it in the imagination. I have always sought to connect the scenes with another person, with the director who built something for them. Therefore, he used to put the viewer in front of the film for long periods, to feel that he was living a time when the film reconfigured and rebuilt it.

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