Camera Obscura and Chantal Akerman

This introduction to the hundredth issue of Camera Obscura, on filmmaker, writer, and installation artist Chantal Akerman, establishes the importance of Akerman’s work to the history and perspective of the journal, as well as the journal’s central role in the history and concerns of the transnational feminist film culture that Akerman’s work in many ways epitomized. Acknowledging several of the publications, conferences, and curatorial efforts that memorialized Akerman after her death in 2015, the piece underscores collaboration as a feminist practice while introducing contributions to the special issue by such Akerman scholars as Janet Bergstrom, Kelley Conway, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Ute Holl, Eva Kuhn, Brenda Longfellow, Ivone Margulies, and Maureen Turim; interviews with Akerman’s collaborators, editor Claire Atherton, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and cellist and composer Sonia Wieder-Atherton; and pieces by curators Michael Mazière and Sandra Percival.