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72-466: Chantal Anne Akerman ( French: [ʃɑ̃tal akɛʁman] ; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director , screenwriter , artist , and film professor at the City College of New York . She is best known for her films Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), News from Home (1976), and Je Tu Il Elle (1974); the first of these was ranked

144-473: A film school to get a bachelor's degree studying film or cinema. Film students generally study the basic skills used in making a film. This includes, for example, preparation, shot lists and storyboards, blocking, communicating with professional actors, communicating with the crew, and reading scripts. Some film schools are equipped with sound stages and post-production facilities. Besides basic technical and logistical skills, students also receive education on

216-670: A Married Woman ) (The Room 1) (The Room 2) (The Man With the Suitcase) (I'm Hungry, I'm Cold) (Sloth) (The Hammer) (Moving In) ( For Febe Elisabeth Velásquez, El Salvador ) ( Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels ) (All the Boys and Girls of their Time...) (The Eighties) Film director The film director gives direction to the cast and crew and creates an overall vision through which

288-467: A backdrop to the dramas of daily life. The kitchens, alongside other domestic spaces, act as self-confining prisons under patriarchal conditions. In Akerman's work, the kitchen often acts as a domestic theatre. Akerman is usually grouped within feminist and queer thinking, but she articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism. Akerman resisted labels relating to her identity like "female", "Jewish" and "lesbian", choosing instead to immerse herself in

360-400: A cinema of waiting, of passages, of resolutions deferred". Many of Akerman's films portray the movement of people across distances or their absorption with claustrophobic spaces. Curator Jon Davies writes that her domestic interiors "conceal gendered labour and violence, secrecy and shame, where traumas both large and small unfold with few if any witnesses". Akerman addresses the voyeurism that

432-405: A doorway and after much anguished indecision, instructs Bruno to take the tram to a stop nearby and wait. Antonio circles the unattended bicycle and jumps on it. Instantly, the hue and cry is raised and Bruno – who has missed the tram – is stunned to see his father pursued, surrounded and pulled from the bicycle. As Antonio is being muscled toward the police station,

504-405: A film eventually becomes realized or noticed. Directors need to be able to mediate differences in creative visions and stay within the budget . There are many pathways to becoming a film director. Some film directors started as screenwriters , cinematographers , producers , film editors or actors. Other film directors have attended film school. Directors use different approaches. Some outline

576-525: A fit for which the crowd blames Antonio. Bruno fetches a policeman, who searches the thief's apartment without success. The policeman tells Antonio the case is weak‍—‌Antonio has no witnesses and the neighbors are certain to provide the thief with an alibi. Antonio and Bruno leave in despair amid jeers and threats from the crowd. Their way home takes them to the Stadio Nazionale PNF football stadium. Antonio sees an unattended bicycle near

648-485: A flat fee for the project, as a weekly salary, or as a daily rate. A handful of top Hollywood directors made from $ 133.3 million to $ 257.95 million in 2011, such as James Cameron and Steven Spielberg , but the average United States film directors and producers made $ 89,840 in 2018. A new Hollywood director typically gets paid around $ 400,000 for directing their first studio film. The average annual salary in England

720-400: A general plotline and let the actors improvise dialogue, while others control every aspect and demand that the actors and crew follow instructions precisely. Some directors also write their own screenplays or collaborate on screenplays with long-standing writing partners. Other directors edit or appear in their films or compose music score for their films. A film director's task is to envisage

792-482: A miniature man. They bring a grave dignity to De Sica's unblinking view of post-war Italy. The wheel of life turns and grinds people down; the man who was riding high in the morning is brought low by nightfall. It is impossible to imagine this story in any other form than De Sica's. The new black-and-white print has an extraordinary range of grey tones that get darker as life closes in". In 1999, Chicago Sun-Times film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote that " The Bicycle Thief

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864-441: A new degree of realism. De Sica had just made Shoeshine (1946), but was unable to get financial backing from any major studio for the film, so he raised the money himself from friends. Wanting to portray the poverty and unemployment of post-war Italy, he co-wrote a script with Cesare Zavattini and others using only the title and few plot devices of a little-known novel of the time by poet and artist Luigi Bartolini . Following

936-454: A professional actor to dub over Lamberto Maggiorani's dialogue. Luigi Bartolini, the author of the novel from which de Sica drew his title, was highly critical of the film, feeling that the spirit of his book had been thoroughly betrayed because his protagonist was a middle-class intellectual and his theme was the breakdown of civil order. Contemporary reviews elsewhere were positive. Bosley Crowther, film critic for The New York Times , lauded

1008-551: A recent trend of more attention to women directors in India, brought on partly by Amazon and Netflix moving into the industry. Of the movies produced in Nollywood , women direct only 2%. There are many different awards for film directing, run by various academies , critics associations , film festivals , and guilds . The Academy Award for Best Director and Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director are considered among

1080-464: A reciprocal relationship between image and viewer. Akerman cites Michael Snow as a structuralist inspiration, especially his film Wavelength , which is composed of a single shot of a photograph of a sea on a loft wall, with the camera slowly zooming in. Akerman was drawn to the perceived dullness of structuralism because it rejected the dominant cinema's concern for plot. As a teenager in Brussels, Akerman skipped school to see movies, including films from

1152-437: A theme which would appear again in several of her films. Feminist and queer film scholar B. Ruby Rich believed that Je Tu Il Elle can be seen as a "cinematic Rosetta Stone of female sexuality ". Akerman's most critically-acclaimed film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles , was released in 1975, and presents a largely real-time study of a middle-aged widow's routine of domestic chores and prostitution. Upon

1224-468: A transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality. Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances. Akerman engages with realist representations, a form historically grounded to act as a feminist gesture and simultaneously as an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman". Akerman's later films experimented with differing genres and tempos, including

1296-482: A tribute to Akerman. Akerman had an extremely close relationship with her mother, which was captured in several of her films. In News from Home (1976), Akerman's mother's letters outlining mundane family activities play throughout the film. Her 2015 film No Home Movie centers on mother-daughter relationships, is largely situated in her mother's kitchen, and was filmed in the final months before her mother's death in 2014. The film explores issues of metempsychosis ,

1368-403: A way to translate a screenplay into a fully formed film, and then to realize this vision. To do this, they oversee the artistic and technical elements of film production. This entails organizing the film crew in such a way to achieve their vision of the film and communicating with the actors. This requires skills of group leadership, as well as the ability to maintain a singular focus even in

1440-520: A yearly salary from ¥4 million to ¥10 million, and the Directors Guild of Japan requires a minimum payment of ¥3.5 million. Korean directors make 300 million to 500 million won for a film, and beginning directors start out making around 50 million won. A Korean director who breaks into the Chinese market might make 1 billion won for a single film. According to a 2018 report from UNESCO ,

1512-563: A young age, Akerman and her mother were exceptionally close, and her mother encouraged her to pursue a career rather than marry young. At age 18, Akerman entered the Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion , a Belgian film school. She dropped out during her first term to make the short film Saute ma ville , funding it by trading diamond shares on the Antwerp stock exchange. At

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1584-740: Is a film criticism concept that holds that a film director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur" (the French word for "author"). In spite of—and sometimes even because of—the production of the film as part of an industrial process, the auteur's creative voice is distinct enough to shine through studio interference and the collective process. Some film directors started as screenwriters , film editors , producers , actors , or film critics , as well as directing for similar media like television and commercials. Several American cinematographers have become directors, including Barry Sonnenfeld , originally

1656-407: Is always present within cinematic discourse by often playing a character within her films, placing herself on both sides of the camera simultaneously. She used the boredom of structuralism to generate a bodily feeling in the viewer, accentuating the passage of time. Akerman was influenced by European art cinema as well as structuralist film. Structuralist film used formalist experimentation to propose

1728-405: Is in response to the rigidity of cinema's earlier essentialist realism and "indicates an awareness of the project of a transhistorical and transcultural feminist aesthetics of the cinema". Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public. In Jeanne Dielman , the protagonist does not supply

1800-535: Is ironically blessed with institutions to comfort and protect mankind". Pierre Leprohon wrote in Cinéma D'Aujourd'hui that "what must not be ignored on the social level is that the character is shown not at the beginning of a crisis but at its outcome. One need only to look at his face, his uncertain gait, his hesitant or fearful attitudes to understand that Ricci is already a victim, a diminished man who has lost his confidence." Then Paris-based Lotte H. Eisner called it

1872-476: Is little they can do. Advised that stolen goods often surface at the Piazza Vittorio market, Antonio goes there with several friends and Bruno. They find a bicycle frame that might be Antonio's, but the vendors refuse to allow them to examine the serial number. They call over a carabiniere , who orders the vendors to allow him to read the serial number. It does not match that of the missing bicycle, but

1944-403: Is so well-entrenched as an official masterpiece that it is a little startling to visit it again after many years and realize that it is still alive and has strength and freshness. Given an honorary Oscar in 1949, routinely voted one of the greatest films of all time, revered as one of the foundation stones of Italian neorealism, it is a simple, powerful film about a man who needs a job". Ebert added

2016-738: Is £50,440, in Canada is $ 62,408, and in Western Australia it can range from $ 75,230 to $ 97,119. In France, the average salary is €4000 per month, paid per project. Luc Besson was the highest paid French director in 2017, making €4.44 million for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets . That same year, the top ten French directors' salaries in total represented 42% of the total directors' salaries in France. Film directors in Japan average

2088-661: The Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival  [ fr ] . Art historian Terrie Sultan writes that Akerman's "narrative is marked by an almost Proustian attention to detail and visual grace". Similarly, Akerman's visual language resists easy categorization and summarization: she creates narrative through filmic syntax instead of plot development. Many directors have cited Akerman's directorial style as an influence on their work. Kelly Reichardt , Gus Van Sant , and Sofia Coppola have noted their exploration of filming in real time as

2160-694: The Venice Biennale (2001). In 2011, a film retrospective of Akerman's work was shown at the Austrian Film Museum. The 2015 Venice Biennale included her final video installation, Now , an installation of interspersed parallel screens displaying the landscape-in-motion footage that would appear in No Home Movie . In 2018, the Manhattan Jewish Museum presented the installation in the exhibition Scenes from

2232-1123: The Berlin/Brandenburg TV station RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting) and ARTE . In recent decades American directors have primarily been coming out of USC , UCLA , AFI , Columbia University , and NYU , each of which is known for cultivating a certain style of filmmaking. Notable film schools outside of the United States include Beijing Film Academy , Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City, Dongseo University in South Korea, FAMU in Prague, Film and Television Institute of India , HFF Munich , La Fémis in Paris, Tel Aviv University , and Vancouver Film School . Film directors usually are self-employed and hired per project based on recommendations and industry reputation. Compensation might be arranged as

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2304-528: The Coen brothers' Director of Photography; Wally Pfister , cinematographer on Christopher Nolan 's three Batman films made his directorial debut with Transcendence (2014). Despite the misnomer, assistant director has become a completely separate career path and is not typically a position for aspiring directors, but there are exceptions in some countries such as India where assistant directors are indeed directors-in-training. Many film directors have attended

2376-532: The Collection , and acquired her work for the collection. Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featured From the Other Side (2002) and Je tu il elle, l'installation (2007) in early 2022. Akerman's filming style relies on capturing ordinary life. By encouraging viewers to have patience with a slow pace, her films emphasize the humanity of the everyday. Art curator Kathy Halbreich writes that Akerman "creates

2448-568: The age of 15, Akerman's viewing of Jean-Luc Godard 's Pierrot le fou (1965) inspired her to become a filmmaker. Akerman's first short film, Saute ma ville (1968), premiered at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1971. That year, she moved to New York City , where she would stay until 1972. She considered her time there to be a formative experience, becoming exposed to the works of Andy Warhol , Jonas Mekas , and Michael Snow , with

2520-567: The best Italian film since World War II, and UK critic Robert Winnington called it "the most successful record of any foreign film in British cinema." When the film was re-released in the late 1990s Bob Graham, staff film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle , gave the drama a positive review: "The roles are played by non-actors, Lamberto Maggiorani as the father and Enzo Staiola as the solemn boy, who sometimes appears to be

2592-409: The bicycle's owner notices Bruno in tears and, in a moment of compassion, tells the others to release Antonio. Antonio and Bruno then walk off slowly amid a buffeting crowd. Antonio fights back tears and Bruno takes his hand. Bicycle Thieves is the best-known work of Italian neorealism , the movement that formally began with Roberto Rossellini 's Rome, Open City (1945) and aimed to give cinema

2664-678: The comedy Golden Eighties (1986), and several documentaries. Her final film, No Home Movie , was released in 2015. In 1991, Akerman was a member of the jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival . In 2011, she joined the full-time faculty of the MFA Program in Media Arts Production at the City College of New York as a distinguished lecturer and the first Michael & Irene Ross Visiting Professor of Film/Video & Jewish Studies. Akerman

2736-422: The director ensures that all individuals involved in the film production are working towards an identical vision for the completed film. The set of varying challenges they have to tackle has been described as "a multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with egos and weather thrown in for good measure". It adds to the pressure that the success of a film can influence when and how they will work again, if at all. Generally,

2808-435: The director works with the editor to edit the material into the director's cut . Well-established directors have the " final cut privilege ", meaning that they have the final say on which edit of the film is released. For other directors, the studio can order further edits without the director's permission. The director is one of the few positions that requires intimate involvement during every stage of film production . Thus,

2880-451: The film The Icicle Thief (1989). The film features in the 1992 Robert Altman film The Player . In this film Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins ), a Hollywood studio executive, tracks screenwriter David Kahane (played by Vincent D'Onofrio ) to a screening of Bicycle Thieves , and stages what he represents as a chance meeting with Kahane. Norman Loftis 's film Messenger (1994)

2952-622: The film and its message in his review. He wrote, "Again the Italians have sent us a brilliant and devastating film in Vittorio De Sica's rueful drama of modern city life, The Bicycle Thief. Widely and fervently heralded by those who had seen it abroad (where it already has won several prizes at various film festivals), this heart-tearing picture of frustration, which came to [the World Theater] yesterday, bids fair to fulfill all

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3024-588: The film as a major influence including Satyajit Ray , Ken Loach , Giorgio Mangiamele , Bimal Roy , Anurag Kashyap , Balu Mahendra , Vetrimaaran and Basu Chatterjee . The film was noteworthy for film directors of the Iranian New Wave , such as Jafar Panahi and Dariush Mehrjui . The film was one of 39 foreign films recommended by Martin Scorsese to Colin Levy . It was parodied in

3096-478: The film industry throughout the world has a disproportionately higher number of male directors compared to female directors, and they provide as an example the fact that only 20% of films in Europe are directed by women. 44% of graduates from a sample of European films schools are women, and yet women are only 24% of working film directors in Europe. However only a fraction of film school graduates aspire to direct with

3168-478: The film to his " The Great Movies " list. In 2020, A. O. Scott praised the film in an essay entitled "Why You Should Still Care About 'Bicycle Thieves'." Bicycle Thieves is a fixture on the British Film Institute 's Sight & Sound critics' and directors' polls of the greatest films ever made. The film ranked 1st and 7th on critics' poll in 1952 and 1962 respectively. It ranked 11th on

3240-617: The film was re-released in the late-1990s, San Francisco Chronicle film critic Bob Graham said that he preferred that version, stating, "Purists have criticized the English title of the film as a poor translation of the Italian ladri , which is plural. What blindness! The Bicycle Thief is one of those wonderful titles whose power does not sink in until the film is over". The 2007 Criterion Collection release in North America uses

3312-570: The film's release, Le Monde called Jeanne Dielman the "first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema". Scholar Ivonne Margulies says the picture is a filmic paradigm for uniting feminism and anti-illusionism. The film was named the 19th greatest film of the 20th century by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice . In December 2022, Jeanne Dielman was awarded first place by Sight & Sound magazine's "Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time" list, as voted by critics, becoming

3384-420: The forecasts of its absolute triumph over here. For once more the talented De Sica, who gave us the shattering Shoeshine , that desperately tragic demonstration of juvenile corruption in post-war Rome, has laid hold upon and sharply imaged in simple and realistic terms a major—indeed, a fundamental and universal—dramatic theme. It is the isolation and loneliness of the little man in this complex social world that

3456-504: The fourth film to do so after Bicycle Thieves , Citizen Kane , and Vertigo . Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles thus became the first film directed by a woman to top the list and, together with Beau Travail , one of the first two such films to appear in the top 10. Akerman has used the setting of a kitchen to explore the intersection between femininity and domesticity. The kitchens in her work provide intimate spaces for connection and conversation, functioning as

3528-577: The greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 "Greatest Films of All Time" critics poll, making her the first woman to top the poll. The latter two films also appeared in the same poll. Akerman was born in Brussels , Belgium , to Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland. She was the older sister of Sylviane Akerman, her only sibling. Her mother, Natalia (Nelly), survived for years at Auschwitz , where her own parents were murdered. From

3600-447: The identity of being a daughter; she said she saw film as a "generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity". She advocated for multiplicity of expression, explaining, "when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves". For Akerman, there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals. Margulies argues that Akerman's resistance to categorization

3672-466: The job requires a bicycle. Maria resolutely strips the bed of her dowry bedsheets‍—‌prized possessions for a poor family‍—‌and takes them to the pawn shop , where they bring enough to redeem Antonio's pawned bicycle. On his first day of work, Antonio is at the top of a ladder when a young man steals his bicycle. Antonio runs after him but is thrown off the trail by the thief's confederates. The police file Antonio's complaint but say that there

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3744-523: The job which was to be the salvation of his young family. Adapted for the screen by Cesare Zavattini from the 1946 novel by Luigi Bartolini , and starring Lamberto Maggiorani as the desperate father and Enzo Staiola as his plucky young son, Bicycle Thieves received an Academy Honorary Award (most outstanding foreign language film) in 1950, and in 1952 was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmakers and critics; fifty years later another poll organized by

3816-418: The last shot of the film acting as a memento mori of the mother's apartment. Akerman acknowledged that her mother was at the center of her work and admitted to feeling directionless after her death. The maternal imagery can be found throughout all of Akerman's films as an homage and an attempt to reconstitute the image and voice of the mother. In her autobiographical book Family in Brussels , Akerman narrates

3888-630: The latter's film La région centrale leading to her view of "time as the most important thing in film." Also during this period, she would begin her long collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte . Her first feature film, the documentary Hotel Monterey (1972), along with the short films La Chambre 1 and La Chambre 2, use long takes and structuralist techniques that would become trademarks of her style. Akerman then returned to Belgium, and in 1974 received critical recognition for her first fiction feature Je, Tu, Il, Elle (I, You, He, She) , notable for its depiction of women's sexuality,

3960-466: The magazine's 1992 Critics' poll, 45th in 2002 Critics' Poll and 6th on the 2002 Directors' Top Ten Poll . It was slightly lower in the 2012 directors' poll, 10th and 33rd on the 2012 critics' poll. The Village Voice ranked the film at number 37 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. The film was voted at No. 99 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by

4032-472: The majority entering the industry in other roles. In Hollywood, women make up only 12.6 percent of film directors, as reported by a UCLA study of the 200 top theatrical films of 2017, but that number is a significant increase from 6.9% in 2016. As of 2014, there were only 20 women in the Directors Guild of Japan out of the 550 total members. Indian film directors are also greatly underrepresented by women, even compared to other countries, but there has been

4104-554: The most prestigious awards for directing, and there is even an award for worst directing given out during the Golden Raspberry Awards . Bicycle Thieves Bicycle Thieves ( Italian : Ladri di biciclette ), also known as The Bicycle Thief , is a 1948 Italian neorealist drama film directed by Vittorio De Sica . It follows the story of a poor father searching in post- World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle , without which he will lose

4176-548: The nature of professional relationships that occur during film production. A full degree course can be designed for up to five years of studying. Future directors usually complete short films during their enrollment. The National Film School of Denmark has the student's final projects presented on national TV. Some film schools retain the rights for their students' works. Many directors successfully prepared for making feature films by working in television. The German Film and Television Academy Berlin consequently cooperates with

4248-493: The officer won't allow them to examine it for themselves. At the Porta Portese market, Antonio and Bruno spot the thief with an old man. The thief eludes them and the old man feigns ignorance. They follow him into a church where he too slips away from them. Antonio pursues the thief into a brothel, whose denizens eject them. In the street, hostile neighbors gather as Antonio accuses the thief, who conveniently falls into

4320-415: The position of film director is widely considered to be a highly stressful and demanding one. It has been said that "20-hour days are not unusual". Some directors also take on additional roles, such as producing, writing or editing. Under European Union law, the film director is considered the "author" or one of the authors of a film, largely as a result of the influence of auteur theory . Auteur theory

4392-406: The precepts of neorealism, De Sica shot only on location (that is, no studio sets) and cast only untrained actors. (Lamberto Maggiorani, for example, was a factory worker.) That some actors' roles paralleled their lives off screen added realism to the film. De Sica cast Maggiorani when he had brought his young son to an audition for the film. He later cast the 8-year-old Enzo Staiola when he noticed

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4464-739: The prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films. The film was included by the Vatican in a list of important films compiled in 1995, under the category of "Values". Bicycle Thieves has continued to gain very high praise from contemporary critics, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reporting 99% of 70 reviews as of April 2022 as positive, with an average rating of 9.20/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "An Italian neorealism exemplar, Bicycle Thieves thrives on its non-flashy performances and searing emotion." Many directors have cited

4536-407: The restrictions of the film's budget and the demands of the producer and studio (such as the need to get a particular age rating ). Directors also play an important role in post-production . While the film is still in production, the director sends " dailies " to the film editor and explains their overall vision for the film, allowing the editor to assemble an editor's cut . In post-production,

4608-558: The same magazine ranked it sixth among the greatest-ever films. In the 2012 version of the list the film ranked 33rd among critics and 10th among directors. The film was also cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the most influential films in cinema history, and it is considered part of the canon of classic cinema. The film was voted number 3 on the prestigious Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo, and number 4 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. It

4680-403: The sole superiors of the director are the producers and the studio that is financing the film, although sometimes the director can also be a producer of the same film. The role of a director differs from producers in that producers typically manage the logistics and business operations of the production, whereas the director is tasked with making creative decisions. The director must work within

4752-998: The story, interchanging her own voice with her mother's. Akerman died on 5 October 2015 in Paris; Le Monde reported that she died by suicide . Her last film was the documentary No Home Movie , a series of conversations with her mother shortly before her mother's death. Of the film, she said, "I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn't have dared to do it." According to Akerman's sister, she had been hospitalized for depression and then returned home to Paris ten days before her death. (I, You, He, She) ( Meetings with Anna ) ( All Night Long ) ( American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy ) 39th Berlin International Film Festival 48th Venice International Film Festival (A Couch in New York) (Tomorrow We Move) (Almayer's Folly) (Blow Up My Town) ( The Beloved Child, or I Play at Being

4824-477: The stressful, fast-paced environment of a film set. Moreover, it is necessary to have an artistic eye to frame shots and to give precise feedback to cast and crew, thus, excellent communication skills are a must. Because the film director depends on the successful cooperation of many different creative individuals with possibly strongly contradicting artistic ideals and visions, they also need to possess conflict-resolution skills to mediate whenever necessary. Thus

4896-458: The title Bicycle Thieves . When Bicycle Thieves was released in Italy, it was viewed with hostility and as portraying Italians in a negative way. Italian critic Guido Aristarco praised it, but also complained that "sentimentality might at times take the place of artistic emotion." Fellow Italian neorealist film director Luchino Visconti criticized the film, saying that it was a mistake to use

4968-466: The title referred to a post-war culture of rampant thievery and disrespect for civil order, countered only by an inept police force and indifferent allied occupiers. When the film was screened in the United States in 1949, Bosley Crowther referred to it as The Bicycle Thief in his review in The New York Times , and this came to be the title by which the film was known in English. When

5040-537: The young boy watching the film's production on a street while helping his father sell flowers. The film's final shot of Antonio and Bruno walking away from the camera into the distance is an homage to many of the films of Charlie Chaplin , who was De Sica's favourite filmmaker. Uncovering the drama in everyday life, the wonderful in the daily news. The original Italian title is Ladri di biciclette . It literally translates into English as "thieves of bicycles"; both ladri and biciclette are plural. In Bartolini's novel,

5112-663: Was also Professor of Film at The European Graduate School . Solo exhibitions of Akerman's work have been held at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium (2012), MIT, Cambridge Massachusetts (2008), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2006); Princeton University Art Museum , Princeton, NJ (2006); and the Centre Georges Pompidou , Paris (2003). Akerman participated in Documenta XI (2002) and

5184-482: Was also included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ’s 100 Italian films to be saved , a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978." In post-World War II Rome , Antonio Ricci desperately needs work to support his wife Maria, his son Bruno and his small baby. He is offered a job posting advertising bills but tells Maria he cannot accept because

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