Chantal Akerman Quotes

You have to understand that I'm a child of the second generation, which means my mother was in Auschwitz, and the aunt of my mother was in Auschwitz with her; my grandmother and grandfather died there. So yes. All of those gestures they work for you, or for them, to fill their time or not feel their anxiety. But the child feels everything. It doesn't make the child secure. You put the child in a jail.

I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

Look at Charlotte Gainsbourg, in the Lars von Trier film Antichrist. She's unbelievable. She doesn't act; she's there. She's great. And you love her for that, because it's so daring, what she has to do. And she does it as if it is nothing. I think she's brave. I fell in love with her when I saw that film. She is a revelation. Total revelation.

The jail thing is very, very present in all of my work... Sometimes not very frontally. The jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.

Delphine Seyrig is a very proper woman, from high society. She's from the Ferdinand de Saussure family, the structuralist. Old money. Swiss. Protestant. They were that type of well-educated people who could recognize a good artist before others, and she was like that. Even if it was against something inside her. Tell me one actress in 1972 in France, except Delphine, at her level, who would love Hôtel Monterey. No one.

I went at 4:30 in the morning to a café 500 meters from my place. And it was another city... Totally different than where I go every day. And I said, "God, I will do that again." That's another subject I want to do. It's my street, suddenly different at 5:00 in the morning. I can shoot for one week. That's enough to make a movie.

When I'm in my neighborhood, I don't see anything anymore, because I'm so used to it. When I go somewhere else, suddenly, I'm alive. I'm on alert, and I can be fresh.

First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, "What are you talking about, what's that?" It's not my world. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible.

Have you seen the film Histoires D'Amérique? It's also a mixture of humor and monologue, and it shows how the Jewish humor comes from drama and tragedy.

Paris is not so square. I'm not good at the geography of the city in Paris, so I'm always lost. Here, in New York, you can never be lost. In Paris, even when I walk to my gallery or whatever, I always take another route, because Paris is not built that way.

What I think is dreadful about art is the way it's related to the money afterward. Not when you do it... But after that, it's like 5,000 rich people have access to it. A movie, even though it can be a bad movie or a good movie, it is more democratic. The people who buy my films, the people who buy my installations it's sometimes a foundation or a museum. When it's a foundation, it's related to very, very, very rich people - who are your enemies! Your enemies are feeding you. But you're not meeting them. So it's a very strange thing.

I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

My father said, "Okay, enough with the Jewish school." He put me into a public school and he said, "If you are the first one in your class, that means the school is bad." That was his humor.

Lars von Trier is very, very, very clever about women. He gives the woman a space that I don't know any filmmaker does. Because in Breaking The Waves, protagonist Emily Watson is the Christ. Which man is doing that? I don't know any man giving that space to a woman. No one.

I had an awful joke about Auschwitz I drove everybody crazy with that joke. But that joke makes me feel good. You know what "cuit" means? When something is cooked. It's a joke like that: "What are the birds doing when they fly over Auschwitz? 'Cuit! Cuit!'" It's awful, but it's desacralizing. For me, it's good.

What I hate in movies is all those people you need. And then I realize I do better when I shoot by myself.

She who seeks shall find, find all to well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.