Biography

Resides in New York.

Graduated from L'Ecole Nationale de la Photographie et de la Cinematographie,in 1966.

Professor at University of California, San Diego.

After moving to New York in 1970 she began documenting the performance works of notable choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer.

[on shooting Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)] Chantal [Chantal Akerman] was very clear about the character and the character had nothing to do with who Delphine Seyrig was, who plays Jeanne Dielman. Really the opposite of Bresson [Robert Bresson] who cast somebody who looked the part in order to shape that person as if they were clay so he could do with them what he wished. In a film you need to have the stylization of a certain distance, Chantal knew that. Film is not realism. It's not neorealism. Delphine was perfect for the role: first she was a great actress and she had the intelligence of knowing how you communicated the drama, the unfolding and break down of a woman. It's not melodrama, it's a woman who is unsettled and falling apart.

[on actress Delphine Seyrig] Delphine had lived with her husband, an abstract expressionist painter, in New York. She had her first film role in Pull My Daisy (1959), the Robert Frank movie. It is in Nancy that Delphine befriended Chantal [Chantal Akerman] and two years later, she agreed to do Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Really, without her, the film does not exist. You see, she's key to the imagination of the film and why the stylisation of the character works. Delphine was an actress able to make an interpretation and not be the real thing. The key to the film "Jeanne Dielman", is making Jeanne Dielman a character embodying a certain archetype, which at the time had not been expressed in film.

I met Chantal Akerman through the filmmaker Marcel Hanoun in New York in October 1971; she was twenty-one and I was twenty-nine. Akerman was looking for a cinematographer. When she was eighteen, she had shot her first film with film students, and now she wanted to work with somebody who was trained; she had had problems with the cameraman on her second film, L'enfant aimé ou je joue à être une femme mariée (The Beloved, or I Play at Being a Married Woman, 1971), and deemed it a failure. Akerman didn't have to explain why that relationship had not worked out - I had my own stories of feeling excluded and ignored by men in the film industry. The two of us had a common goal to make films that would reflect the world in which we lived. We shared a sense of being ignored, and realized that if we worked together, we might communicate experiences that had not yet been told. We discussed what we could and should do, and articulated the need to invent our own language devoid of references to a world dominated by men - all while immersing ourselves in New York's creative ebullience. The two years that Akerman spent in the city were important in shaping her tastes and aesthetics, and it was a place to which she always loved to return. [Artforum, Jan. 2016]