Chantal Akerman

In 2022, the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine published its once-a-decade poll of film critics, and the film at the top of the list was not Citizen Kane or Vertigo. It was Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour film made in 1975 by the Belgian director Chantal Akerman, then twenty-five. The film follows a widowed housewife through three days of meticulous domestic routine, peeling potatoes, making beds, polishing shoes, until the routine breaks. It was the first time a film by a woman had topped the poll.

She was born on June 6, 1950, in Etterbeek, a district of Brussels, at 7:15 a.m., as her birth record states. Her parents were Polish Jewish immigrants, and her mother had survived Auschwitz. Cancer is her rising sign, the sign of home, the mother and domestic life. Akerman's work returned again and again to home and to her mother: Jeanne Dielman is about a woman trapped in household routine, and her last film, No Home Movie, made in 2015, was an intimate portrait of her mother in the final months of her life.

Mars in Virgo sits in her fourth house, which governs the household. Virgo is meticulous and devoted to routine, and Mars there describes energy directed into household tasks. The placement could hardly be more fitting for a filmmaker whose masterpiece consists largely of a woman performing chores with exacting precision.

Her Sun is in Gemini in the twelfth house, along with Uranus in Cancer. The twelfth house concerns solitude, hidden suffering and inner worlds. Gemini is restless, and Akerman's films often observed lonely figures in empty rooms, hotel corridors and city streets. She herself struggled for many years with depression.

Her Moon, at the very start of Pisces, and Jupiter, also in Pisces, sit in her ninth house of travel and faraway places. At fifteen, she saw Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou and decided to make films. In the early 1970s she moved to New York, where she worked with the cinematographer Babette Mangolte and made films including News from Home, in which her mother's letters are read over long shots of Manhattan streets.

Mercury and Venus, in Taurus, fall in her eleventh house of artistic communities, and Saturn in Virgo, in her third house, describes a rigorous approach to film language. Akerman's style, with long, static shots and real-time duration, influenced generations of filmmakers.

She died by suicide in Paris on October 5, 2015, at sixty-five, shortly after completing No Home Movie. The Cancer Ascendant kept her returning to home and to her mother; the Virgo Mars in her fourth house turned household routine into one of the great works of cinema.

Help is available in the United States for anyone thinking about suicide or worried about someone who is: call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.