I feel a little guilty about writing about Chantal Akerman for Pride. You see, she didn’t want to be lumped into the category of “lesbian filmmakers.” It’s been a complicated Pride for us in that way—look at last Sunday’s article, after all. But the fact is, because I try to deal exclusively in established fact and not prurient gossip, this is the category that’s hardest for me to fill every year. And whatever else Akerman was—and we’ll get to that—she was, indisputably, a lesbian who was a filmmaker.

She considered herself first a daughter. Obviously, she was—in fact, she was the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor. Her feelings about and for her mother suffuse her work, and indeed she did more than one movie that was simply about her mother, including her final work, 2015’s No Home Movie. It is a reflection of her mother’s life and death; Akerman would commit suicide shortly after. She said her feelings about kitchens stemmed in great part from her mother’s place in the kitchen.

Indeed, many of Akerman’s movies use the kitchen as a place for women to develop. This was a commentary on the place that society was putting women into; there is an expectation on women to the point that simply enjoying being in the kitchen has its own cultural weight. Akerman looked at this and used her films to comment on it—though she hated being labeled a feminist filmmaker as well. Again, she just wanted to be a daughter.

Akerman suffered from depression. Her suicide was possibly, though not definitely, tied to her mother’s death. But it’s known that the children of Holocaust survivors have a long line of possible mental health conditions, and it seems not unlikely that she had some of those. Further, it’s always possible she had a family history of mental illness—I don’t know how much of her family history managed to survive the war. Some Jewish families had more luck with that than others. Whatever caused her hospitalization, it seems clear that she did not get the help she needed, or that her belief that she wanted to die was stronger than the treatment.

I’ll be honest, here—I’ve only seen one movie of hers, and I didn’t like it. I finished Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles because it was the Great Library Project, there are not a lot of movies starting with “J,” and I was trapped under a cat. So I couldn’t get up and turn it off. (This wouldn’t be as likely an issue today, as I have a remote that can switch to streaming, but this was a long time ago now.) But I also know that Akerman spoke to a lot of people and continues to do so, and qualifying for this column is not exclusively a factor of whether I like them or not. If that were true, I wouldn’t do horror all October.

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