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.
Chantal AkermanI'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.
Chantal AkermanDelphine 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 Hรดtel Monterey. No one.
Chantal AkermanI 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.
Chantal AkermanI 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.
Chantal AkermanYou 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.
Chantal Akerman