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Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman Books

Film director

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“I never thought of myself as an odd one or different in any way…I just had a way, a way that was mine and mine alone. A way that was maybe a bit peculiar, but I liked that. I liked the fact that other people weren’t odd in the same way… I felt that being odd suited me… My oddness had a certain something, I thought. A style. A style that belonged to me. Then it became a habit and I no longer thought about my odd style, that was how I was and that was that.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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