Talk:Chantal Akerman

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 5 March 2021 and 7 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mireillejoumessi.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

First thread
Can someone who actually knows how to write please edit this page? It's so bad that I don't even wanna bother.

I think the second paragraph is a machine translation. Pitiful entry. << so fix it dear Liza dear Liza dear Liza

Financing Saute ma ville
The article's phrasing: "She partially subsidized Saute ma ville by selling shares on the Antwerp diamond exchange, procuring its remaining budget through her clerical work", is unclear. It makes it sound as if she owned securities, and sold some of them to raise money for the film.

What the cited Criterion source actually says is, "[she] worked selling diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange to raise money to make Saute ma ville." That makes it sound like she was a broker, or more likely, since she was an 18-year-old drop-out, some kind of clerk for a broker.

The only other source I've found for this is: Smith writes, "To finance her first film she sold shares for $3 each on the Antwerp diamond exchange, raising $300." That doesn't quite mesh with Criterion, it implies that she sold shares of the short film.

Can anyone supply a clearer reliable reference on this point, perhaps from closer to 1971? Worldbruce (talk) 08:33, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Discussion about categories
I used a case in this article to ask a general question at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  20:03, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

ParadiseFilms.be
Citation number 18 links to Paradisefilms.be, but all the links on the site itself are broken. Does anyone know of another good source to confirm the English title of Toute Une Nuit? Jlcolbert (talk) 22:38, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Worldbruce fixed it! Thanks! Jlcolbert (talk) 05:42, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm sure there are more scholarly sources, but for now I've repaired the dead link. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is your friend. See Link rot for more options. --Worldbruce (talk) 05:45, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Irrelevant categories: 'Belgian film editors', Belgian cinematographers and Belgian women cinematographers
Hello to all,

there seems to be an inflation of categories linked to this article (24 at the time of writing!), some of which, in my opinion, are clearly irrelevant to Chantal Akerman. That's why I removed "Belgian film editors" on the 3rd of April 2016, only to be reverted by Icarus of old the day after. I did some more research and wrote a very friendly and detailed explanation on the Icarus' talk page. A short summary would be: Akerman only edited two short films right at the beginning of her career: La chambre (1972), and Le 15/8 (1973) – which are films she directed or co-directed. That does not make her someone you would expect to find (or want to find) in a category called "Belgian film editors". I stated similar doubts about the relevance of the categories Belgian cinematographers and Belgian women cinematographers, but left that for others to research and decide.

I received no answer from Icarus, so I removed the category again on 23rd of April. But on the 11th of May, he re-inserted the category here and deleted my whole post on his talk page, commenting (irony alert): "it's one f*cking category; some people need more SUBSTANTIAL projects on Wikipedia, like actually creating articles".

Now, I may be a newcomer in these parts, having worked mainly on the german Wikipedia, but I'm pretty sure such behavior is considered inappropriate anywhere in the WP. I don't want to dwell on that though.

All I'm looking for is some reasonable and friendly discourse on whether it is useful to put people in categories for which they would not meet the relevance criteria, if that had been their only artistic achievement. That seems to me to defeat the purpose of a category, which should be to find people who significantly contributed to that group. And it dilutes the importance of other categories, that are very relevant to that person. I've seen the confusion that can lead to on Wikidata, were people suddenly are called actors in their short description, because of one or two appearances in tiny roles, and their main line of work doesn't get mentioned!

My suggestion for Chantal Akerman is: There is a filmography-table in this article, with a space for "Notes" next to each film. So the fact that she also edited the two short films, or did some camera work on other films, can be inserted there. But I would only keep the categories of significant relevance for Akerman, which would still be plenty! With kind regards from--Sprachraum (talk) 10:01, 25 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Support removal of Ackerman from Category: Belgian film editors, Category: Belgian cinematographers, and Category: Belgian women cinematographers. The point is not whether she ever edited a film, but whether being a film editor was a defining characteristic - a profession that reliable sources commonly and consistently define the subject as having; the reason she is notable. Reliable sources consistently define her as a director or a film-maker. Wikipedia's editing guidelines on the matter are WP:CATDEF and WP:COPDEF. --Worldbruce (talk) 03:12, 27 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Seeing that nearly a year has gone by with no naysayers – and your support Worldbruce (thanks!) – I have now finally proceeded as discussed. Greetings from --Sprachraum (talk) 12:53, 16 April 2017 (UTC)

New "additions"
The recent additions really belong on new and separate pages, much like the rest of her films. To put them on this page is overbearing and clunky. Icarus of old (talk) 14:01, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Philosophy section
I removed the philosophy section a few reasons and I wanted to make sure I explained them here. First, it may very well be true that Akerman was influenced by Deleuze, but the only source cited here is the 1996 Margulies book. In that book, Margulies uses Deleuze and Guattari to interpret Akerman rather than Akerman expressing some claim about her own influences:


 * "Indeed the term "minor" can be applied to [Akerman's] aesthetic in the same way as it is to Kafka's (and Beckett's) in Deleuze and Guattari's book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Akerman recognizes some of her own formal preoccupations in the qualities Deleuze and Guattari locate in Kafka: the dryness of language, the lack of metaphoric association, the composition in a series of discontinuous blocks, the interest in putting a poor, withered syntax and a reduced vocabulary at the service of a new intensity. She too is interested in deterritorializing culture, in a minor use of a major language, in the collective aspect any minority expression attains." (p.15)

There's only one line in the book where Margulies suggests Akerman herself was influenced by Deleuze: "Akerman has several times quoted Deleuze and Guattari on how, in a minor literature, the characters assume an immediate, nonhierarchical relation between small individual matters and economic, commercial, juridical, and political ones.54" (p.16) However, the citation reads: "See Akerman, quoted in Michel Grodent, "Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna de Chantal Akerman; un film sur l'histoire," Le Soir, 23 February 1978, 20. See also Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16-27."

Further, articles that address Akerman and Deleuze directly, such as | Intervals of inner flight: Chantal Akerman's News from Home by Maria Walsh, do not have any direct citations and explicitly frame Deleuze's work as an interpretive lens rather than an influence on Akerman herself.

Lastly, the other academic literature on Akerman does not reference this influence; see | Chantal Akerman: Afterlives where Deleuze is mentioned at all.

Sorry to go on so long, but if I'm going to delete a whole section, I wanted to be crystal clear about why. Infocidal (talk) 09:34, 15 January 2023 (UTC)