On this day in movie history - Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

 

Inside Llewyn Davis

directed and written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen,

was released at the Cannes Film Festival in France on May 19, 2013.

Music by T Bone Burnett, Todd Kasow, Jen Monnar,

Marcus Mumford, Mike Piersante, Chris Robertson, Ivy Skoff.

 

Cast:

Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, Max Casella, Jerry Grayson, Jeanine Serralles, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, Alex Karpovsky, Helen Hong, Bradley Mott, Michael Rosner, Bonnie Rose, Jack O'Connell, Ricardo Cordero, Sylvia Kauders, Ian Jarvis, Diane J. Findlay, Ian Blackman, Steve Routman, Susan Blommaert, Amelia McClain, James Colby, Charlotte Booker, Mike Houston, Sam Haft, F. Murray Abraham, Jason Shelton, Frank Ridley, John Ahlin, Jake Ryan, Declan Bennett, Erik Hayden, Daniel Everidge, Jeff Takacs, Nancy Blake, Stephen Payne, Roberto Lopez, Ben Pike, Genevieve Adams, Paul Rocco Amato, Ricardo Bailey, Logan Bennett, David Boston, Jonny Brennan, Kristoffe Brodeur, Caitlin Brodnick, Joel Brody, Laura Butler, Stan Carp, Jason Cicardo, Jason Daunno, Nick Diamantis, Jared Evan, Melanie Hearn, Danny Hoch, Rosemary Howard, George Katt, Samantha Kelly, Phillip X Levine, Lerubi Lopez, Ellery McKinney, Antonio E. Moreno, Marcus Mumford, Etienne Navarre, Tara Steinberg, Matt Strickland, Bill Weeden, Steven Weisz, Brittany White.

On this day in movie and book history - Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

 

Jeanne Dielman

23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,

directed and written by Chantal Akerman,

was released at the Cannes Film Festival in France on May 14, 1975.

 
Cast:
Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical, Chantal Akerman.

Recommended reading: 

Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday

by Ivone Margulies.

Published by Duke University Press Books.

Published 1996.

ISBN-10: 0822317230

ISBN-13: 9780822317234

Description:

Through films that alternate between containment, order, and symmetry on the one hand, and obsession, explosiveness, and a lack of control on the other, Chantal Akerman has gained a reputation as one of the most significant filmmakers working today. Her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is widely regarded as the most important feminist film of that decade. In Nothing Happens, Ivone Margulies presents the first comprehensive study of this influential avant-garde Belgian filmmaker.

Margulies grounds her critical analysis in detailed discussions of Akerman’s work – from Saute ma ville, a 13-minute black-and-white film made in 1968, through Jeanne Dielman and Je tu il elle to the present. Focusing on the real-time representation of a woman’s everyday experience in Jeanne Dielman, Margulies brings the history of social and progressive realism and the filmmaker’s work into perspective. Pursuing two different but related lines of inquiry, she investigates an interest in the everyday that stretches from postwar neorealist cinema to the feminist rewriting of women’s history in the seventies. She then shows how Akerman’s “corporeal cinema” is informed by both American experiments with performance and duration and the layering present in works by European modernists Bresson, Rohmer, and Dreyer. This analysis revises the tired opposition between realism and modernism in the cinema, defines Akerman’s minimal-hyperrealist aesthetics in contrast to Godard’s anti-illusionism, and reveals the inadequacies of popular characterizations of Akerman’s films as either simply modernist or feminist.

An essential book for students of Chantal Akerman’s work, Nothing Happens will also interest international film critics and scholars, filmmakers, art historians, and all readers concerned with feminist film theory.