She never wanted to speak about Auschwitz. [...] I asked her once to tell me more, and she said, 'No, I will get crazy.' So we could speak around, or… - Chantal Akerman
" "She never wanted to speak about Auschwitz. [...] I asked her once to tell me more, and she said, 'No, I will get crazy.' So we could speak around, or after, or before, but the real moment, never. Not directly.
About Chantal Akerman
Chantal Anne Akerman (6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York. She is best known for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). In 2022, Jeanne Dielman came first in the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll of critics, and joint fourth in the directors survey. According to film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Akerman's influence on feminist and avant-garde cinema is substantial.
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Additional quotes by Chantal Akerman
[On the isms ("feminism, minimalism, structuralism") present in analysis of Jeanne Dielman.] I don’t think it’s minimalist, [...] I think it’s maximalist. It’s big! And if I did the film now I don’t know that it would be called feminist. It could have been done about a man, too. All those labels are a bit annoying [...] To name something is a way to possess it. I think it makes the film smaller. And O.K., maybe they are right, but they are never right enough.
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Previously, I had felt a kind of energy in life, with moments of depression of course – but I read constantly, took notes, was curious about everything. Then it was gone … The breakdown knocked me out. Before, I walked barefoot in the street, I brought poor people home, I wanted to save the world. Imagine, I telephoned Amnesty International to try to get them to dig a hole to the other side of the earth, to Siberia, so they’d get out all the people imprisoned in the camps! I wanted them to have 10,000 Socialist Jews brought to Israel to change the government and make peace … But I wasn’t living there, and it’s for the Israelis to know what’s to be done. Not for us who live here, for the time being, securely.
I want the days to end early. I go to bed at 5pm, at 8pm, with sleeping pills. Without complaining. That’s how it is. I cope with my illness. It’s an illness like any other.